Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended. George Bernard Shaw.
I don’t write much about cricket these days. This is a one-off. There are several sound reasons for my growing disaffection. For starters I have gone clean off the game. I don’t watch it like I used to. There is just too much of it on television, and for the most part, T20 internationals, ODIs, IPL or franchise fixtures and even Test cricket, played by Kipling’s ‘flannelled fools’ appear to coalesce into each other all over the world, all round the year. Women’s cricket has caught on and makes for a refreshing change, but even the fair damsels are being overexposed: an absolute cinch for the advertising industry. Not forgetting the Under 19 tourneys that groom our future champs. The Bard may have exhorted one of his characters in Twelfth Night to say, referring to music, ‘Give me excess of it.’ As always, the great playwright nailed it. ‘Others abide our question but thou art free,’ about sums it up. That may have been kosher where music was concerned, but the plethora of cricket being hurled at us is truly beginning to pall. It has been gradually creeping up on us over the years. Of course, I speak for myself, and not for the teeming millions who flock to the grounds to watch Virat Kohli in his red and gold RCB outfit literally flexing his tattooed muscles, or the ageless Methuselah of Indian cricket, M.S. Dhoni striding in, all in yellow to face two balls and hit one of them, fingers crossed, out of the park all the way into the Bay of Bengal.
It was not always that way. When Test cricket first took hold of my imagination, and when I first went to watch this long-format, 5-day affair live at Chepauk in Madras or at the Eden Gardens in Calcutta, I could not sleep for days before the coin toss had even taken place. The frenzied air of expectancy and the rush of adrenaline led to my state of wide-eyed insomnia. As for rushing around the city in the hope of bagging a season ticket – begging, cajoling influential elders and standing in interminable queues in vain hopes of wrapping one’s hands around that precious piece of paper representing the keys to the kingdom, it was pretty much a lost cause. Then some angel in human shape would ring my father and say that he has one spare ticket and would he like to have it, face value mind, not at extortionate black-market rates. It was all a simple matter of economics. Demand exceeded supply by a considerable distance and the city went mad.
Live telecast was yet to establish itself in the 70s and early 80s and such broadcasts as did come our way were in grainy black and white when you were not sure if you were watching Gavaskar or Viswanath (they were of the same height and girth), essaying an elegant late cut. Or for that matter, that text book forward defensive block, bat and pad locked together, so valued by that Bible of cricket, the MCC Cricket Coaching Manual, an art form now one with the dodo. When I tell you that in that golden summer of 1983, while Kapil Dev and his underrated champions were slipping it across the mighty West Indians at Lord’s at the Prudential World Cup final, the telecast was interrupted at a vital moment of the game for Doordarshan’s news readers to bring us up to date on how India’s wheat procurement programme was coming along. When they took us back to the cricket, we had missed another three West Indian wickets that had fallen to the deceptive slow medium pace of the unsung Binny, Madan Lal and Amarnath! To say nothing of that monumental running catch by Kapil Dev to dismiss the legendary Viv Richards. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued, thanks to Doordarshan’s misplaced obsession with wheat procurement, but to no avail. Such was the involvement and passion we youngsters and many oldsters, whose knowledge of the game went way back to Bradman, Hutton and Larwood, brought to bear on the game.
Nowadays, one learns that even the boundary ropes have been brought in a tad to make the grounds that much smaller so that even a mishit will clear the ropes on a regular basis. One’s heart goes out to the bowlers who toil tirelessly in what has basically become a batsman’s game. Sorry, I ought to have said batter’s game in keeping with the revised, gender-neutral vocab. Then again, old habits die hard. What is more, and it’s nothing to do with chauvinism, I just cannot abide by the term batter. A word I associate with the stuff used for making batter puddings, cakes, dosas and other such tasty comestibles. Not to mention, a battering ram. What is more, unless someone tells me otherwise, there is some inconsistency here. For instance, when commenting on the distaff side of cricket, the term batter was introduced to replace the earlier universally employed term, batsman. Understood. However, as far as I am aware, Smriti Mandhana, to take a name at random, would have pouched that excellent catch fielding at ‘third man’ and not ‘third person.’ No change of terminology indicated. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Apologies for slightly veering off course there, but I do believe that cricket being played all round the year to rake in the shekels while the going is good, is probably going to end up killing the goose that laid the golden egg. The masses will not agree with me playing Cassandra and the gate receipts might argue differently. That said, in India at any rate, Test match cricket survives at the behest of T20 cricket. Crowds do flock in for the longer format if around the third or fourth day, India are holding the upper hand and victory is drawing nigh. In recent years, even that is no more the case as we are being routinely thrashed black and blue by all and sundry in our own backyard. Ironically, when it comes to Test matches, Indian cricketers draw more crowds, thanks to our ubiquitous diaspora, in England and Australia.
Thus, for all the above reasons, I have become quite disenchanted with cricket. On the contrary, I cannot take my eyes off Grand Slam tennis. I am now officially a tennis buff. Bring on the brilliant young Turks, Alcaraz and Sinner and go breathless at their boundless energy, insane athleticism, shot making prowess and, above all, sportsmanship and charisma. When the two tykes are collectively given an affectionate portmanteau viz. Sincaraz, by the tennis cognoscenti, clearly you recognise something special. Lest I forget, how can I not talk about that other Methuselah, the age-defying wonder, Novak Djokovic? Even Sincaraz acknowledge their debt to this 39-year-old senior citizen from Serbia, who just keeps rolling along, like Ol’ Man River.
I have to conclude this ramble with a bit of humble pie to swallow. All that I said about my recently acquired aversion to the noble game of cricket holds true. However, earlier today, while surfing channels on my TV, I stopped at a live telecast of India taking on England in the final of the Under 19 World Cup being played in Harare. And there was this young genius, just shy of 15 summers, still wet behind the years, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi (remember the name), belting an astonishing 175 runs in 80 balls. He had already announced himself a couple of years ago at the IPL. Just my luck that I was able to watch only the last ten deliveries he faced, of which three of them sailed over the ropes and another couple raced serenely along the carpet for fours. The lad might be Sincaraz’s answer to cricket. In which case, I might have to selectively watch the game as and when he comes in to bat. Tell you what, if I were an Indian selector, I would blood him straight away into the senior Indian team. They did it with Tendulkar, didn’t they? You could accuse me of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. Then again, we none of us is perfect.
On top of everything else, if there is one thing that will set my face against cricket, it will have to be all the geo-political shenanigans surrounding the game. An IPL franchise is compelled to show a Bangladesh cricketer the door because of that country’s political stance against India. Bangladesh (BCB) responds by pulling out of the ongoing T20 World Cup. Pakistan (PCB), in sympatico with their erstwhile countrymen, refuses to play India (BCCI) in the same tourney. It was bad enough declining to shake hands after they played each other in recent matches, but this latest show of petulant protest is taking it up several notches. Estimable cricket writer Sharda Ugra puts it rather well in a recent article, ‘The stew is smelling bad as ingredients have been tossed in without care: ICC’s weak governance, politically-attuned signalling from the BCCI, reactive posturing from BCB and PCB. Social media outrage is an accelerant onto an already high flame. And everybody knows who started the fire.’
The all-important, rhetorical question is, ‘Who started the fire?’ We can only look collectively at those who control the game and say, ‘If the cap fits, wear it.’ Are you still surprised I am keeping cricket at arm’s length these days? One Vaibhav Sooryavanshi does not a summer make.
Suresh's Corner 