I'd be lying if I say that I'm the biggest cricket fan in the world. Men and women greater and geekier than I exist who can probably give you ball-by-ball commentary of five-year old matches. Neither do I have cricketing equipment and accessories nor a book collection. Heck I don't even own a bat! But I was raised on a steady diet of our national pastime and it is hard for that mania to not permeate into my system. I might not now Sachin's average verbatim, but I still remember him tonking Warne all over Sharjah with crystal-clear clarity. I might not have been the staunchest Kumble supporter, but my heart soared with immense pride when I saw him come out to bowl in the West Indies with a broken jaw. And Dhoni! Oh Dhoni! That final emphatic helicopter shot will live with me forever. Ganguly and his shirt, Dravid and Laxman in Eden Gardens, Zaheer firing in yorkers on debut, Sehwag creaming South Africa to all corners of the park....and these are just the Indian memories. I'm an Indian after all. Please excuse the bias. But there are other moments too that live on in my memory. Shoaib Akhtar bowling Sachin first ball, Lance Klusener and that heartbreak of a semi-final, Brett Lee and Dale Steyn tearing into batsmen like rampant bulls, Brian Lara and the impossible 400, Javed Miandad and that improbable six...I'm not someone you'd look at and see great passion for the game. But I live it just the same.
And what about the greats, those yesteryear gladiators that weaved magic before the advent of television? What of the Don, Fred Trueman, Bodyline, the three Ws, Lillee-Thommo, Lindwall-Miller, Roberts-Garner-Holding-Marshall, Prasanna-Bedi-Venkataraghavan-Chandrashekhar, Kapil Dev, Ian Botham, Gary Sobers, Sunil Gavaskar, Viv Richards...too many names to count, too many feats to remember. But I try. I try my best. Only if you know the past can you live the present and look forward to the future. I just try and learn whatever, whenever.
It's a tough time to be an Indian cricket fan though. Nothing seems to be going right at any level whatsoever. BCCI boffins are running around like a coop of headless chicken, the national team looks like hungover adolescents and even my idol can't seem to shake off the shackles of another looming milestone. Glitzy auctions come, glitzy auctions go. Chock-a-block schedules, ad spots, TV shows, online coverage, webcasts, merchandise, franchise and advertise till your nose bleeds. Might as well drop money from those bigg-o blimps floating over the stadia and let it be the free-for-all it is supposed to be. Needless to say that I'm picking only on the negatives here. There are many positives also, biggest being the exposure and money that other unheralded Indian and foreign cricketers get. But that somehow gets lost in the gold frenzy surrounding Indian cricket.
I am not anti-IPL. I am not anti-BCCI either. I just want some answers. I want to feel my heart racing again when I see Sachin facing Brett Lee, instead of letting out a deep sigh and getting back to work. I want to believe again like I used to do in the nineties, even though we used to lose more often than not. And I definitely don't want to say "Oh no, not again!” We didn't kick bite and scratch all the way to the summit just to tumble down the slope. Time to dig in hard with that pick-axe and hold on for dear life. Time to see that fire again in Dhoni's eyes.
2 comments:
Its a transitional phase, and Indian selectors just cannot be Aussie selectors. We cannot be so clinical, because we are a nation ruled by emotions + by nature, we're more soft and tend to take these things to heart. Hence this phase will be more painful. But don't worry, we'd be back. Just wait for Che Pujara :)
Transitions by their very nature suck. I understand that. And I'm anyway an eternal romantic. That hundred is somewhere around the corner mate :P
Post a Comment