Sunday, January 25, 2004

Cricket in India - Or How to Limit the Runs

I expected thousands of Indians crowded around radios and TV sets. I expected every cabbie, doorman, wallah and beggar to regale me with tales of the Australian tour of 1969 or to be able to recite Allan Border's batting average to seven decimal points. I expected every street corner to be full of wanna-be Sachins belting tennis balls for imaginary 6s. My expectations have not been met, well, not entirely. Yes, my very first cabbie knew the entire Australian side from the tied test in Madras in 1986. Yes, my nationality triggered a hundred identical conversations (“Australia – very good team” followed by a list of all the players to have played for Australia since 1969). Yes, I received grateful unabashed thanks (though perhaps greed is closer to the mark) when giving tennis balls to street urchins. But it was so difficult to find out the score from Nagpur when I was riding a camel in the deserts of Rajasthan. And not one samosa salesman had the radio on, nor did any other street vendor in Delhi know who Nathan Hauritz or Cameron White was. Sure, they have a meagre living to scratch out from the grime of their barely sustainable existence, but you still think they’d be known about in India of all places.

No, to find the true essence of cricket in India one must watch TV. The cricket is on live, all cricket, everywhere, not just the current test series. Each of the sport channels (Star, National and ESPN) show live international cricket from anywhere in the world (and wasn’t NZ vs Bangladesh a snorter of a series), sports highlight shows, obscure replays (England vs Pakistan 1992 - now there was a series) and official and unofficial cricket related programs (including a weekly ICC cricket show which is always three weeks out of date). And while all the players (and Harsha Bogle) are massive, appearing in innumerable commercials and other sponsorship tie ins (though I can't work out why Harsha Bogle is always with a buxom Bollywood starlet), the undoubted megastar of the game is Roshni Chopra.

Roshni Chopra, Bollywood star and model, is the star of 'Fair and Lovely Fourth Umpire', which by no coincidence is also a skin whitening cream.Roshni Chopra supplies the glamour and the inane commentary while Kris Srikkanth and a couple of other one-test wonders debate aspects of each session's play. She's caused a lot of tension amongst the local populace (letters to the editor, editorials, burning of effigies – that sort of thing), who, while in awe of her radiance are as perplexed by her lack of knowledge of the game. The show randomly switches from English to Hindi and occasionally a pidgin variety of both, but it's Roshni that the public watch it for.

So armed with this background knowledge of all things Indian cricket I proceeded to Mumbai to watch the 4th test. Australia had already won the series, but the locals were keen to point out that they were robbed in Chennai and so for all intentions the series was ‘live’. Only an Indian could think this way. When they did win the match in only three days some of the spectators started proclaiming the Indian cricket team as ‘World Champions’ despite the fact that Australia are the One-Day World Champions, there is no Test World Championship and Australia had won the series. I tried pointing this out to them and was lucky to escape in one piece. The first day's rain and near-washout came as a welcome relief from the heat of Rajasthan.

Rajasthan has historically been different (indeed many different nations) to the rest of India and it is just as true with their cricket. Barely a match was seen in the streets nor a hotel TV tuned to the cricket. But my Gypsies cricket cap was enough to trigger a conversation with the vice-captain of the Jaisalmeer cricket team – the equivalent I imagine of first grade – so I politely refused his invitation to go to training that afternoon. Anyway – I didn’t have any gear and was severely weakened by whatever virus was going round at the time. I also didn’t feel up to taking the revenge of a nation just humiliated in Nagpur.

So I turned up on Day 2 of the Mumbai Test to battle the masses clamouring to see Sachin Tendulkar who was not out overnight. Tendulkar is massive all over India, selling everything from Pepsi to scooters and mobile phones, but being from Mumbai is even more massive there. I scrambled to the empty ticket window (empty because it sold the “expensive” tickets) to buy a discounted match pass in the luxury 'Guest' Stand for a bargain 550 rupees, or $17, for the remaining 4 days and was seated in time to watch Sachin add 3 to his overnight score before succumbing to Gillespie. For the only time in three days, the crowd went quiet. 6 hours later they were all gone and so were the Aussies. 18 wickets in one day. The crowd, especially those in the cheap seats which weren't seats at all but cement terraces baking in the sun, were going off, even when wickets weren't falling (and they were doing that about every 15 minutes).

The peculiar design of the Wankheyde Stadium amplified their noise. 5 large tin sheds in a circle propped up by varying degrees of concrete cancer, this has got to be the ugliest sporting stadium on the planet. The real tragedy is that the larger, more functional and certainly more atmospheric Bombay Cricket Club is just down the road. Test cricket was played here till the 1987 World Cup when the BCCI realised they could get more cash in brown paper bags if they threw together some large chicken sheds and called it a stadium rather than pay the snobs at the Cricket Club to use their superb facilities. Everything in India is political except the politics. That’s religious.

The Aussie players were eulogised or insulted to varying degrees each time they approached the boundary (and the Paki umpire was just threatened). Some of the chants were rudimentary and intense - "McGrath's a Homo", "Aussies Suck" and others in Hindi that were only translated to me with a standard incomprehensible Indian head wobble. I only found out later on than Indians never say “no” and when threatened with having to answer a question will just wobble their head, much as an Ostrich will bury its head in sand (another myth!). The chanting was interspersed with an Indian Wave, like a Mexican wave but without the technique - 5,4,3,2,1 and then the whole stand puts their hands up. They actually did get a Mexican wave going on Day 3 - it sped around the ground at less than six seconds per revolution, dizzying for me and for Dizzy Gillespie who at that stage was trying to win the match for the Aussies.

The truly frightening thing though is that you can’t get a beer (or a pie for that matter) and the whole stadium is alcohol free (except for the dressing rooms perhaps). Total insanity from the Indians and they’re all cold sober, though they’re caffeined off the dial. Pepsi comes by the bucket for only 60c.

On Day 3 of the test I went to do some sightseeing confident that I could watch a full day for my birthday on Day 4. Went to Elephanta Island - off the coast of Mumbai - to see some famous sculptures, but who cares, this is about cricket. Fortunately Sachin Tendulkar's Restaurant and merchandising extravaganza (unimaginatively named ‘Tendulkar’s’) was near the ferry quay, and I headed off there for lunch, though with prices higher than those of the great palace hotels of Rajasthan I just had a beer and chips. The cricket was showing on the big screen at Tendulkar’s, and as Michael Clarke ripped through the Indians the place emptied into taxis as everyone realised the match was heading for an early finish.

So I caught the last session; 3 hours, 12 wickets. It was just like watching my own team play. Part time trundlers deceiving wanna-be batsmen with nude deliveries and shocking umpiring decisions. Perhaps the umpires had given away their eyes. In Kolkata’s Eden Gardens a few weeks later and a few days after India had been thumped by Pakistan in a one-off Jubilee one-dayer, I couldn’t help but notice the fence banner advertising for peace between the nuclear neighbours and one that read ‘Donate your eyes’. Very Monty Pythonesque, my first thought was “But I’m still using them”.

The Aussies won the series, the Indians the match. 1000 Indian officials ran onto the ground for the presentation ceremony and for the first time in three days there was a ground announcement – that it was over. Up to that stage there was no ground announcer and only a scoreboard that was plus or minus two overs and three batsmen.

Oh, and for my birthday I went to Mahatma Gandhi's house. He's a great man, but not as great as Sachin Tendulkar.

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