tag:blogs.cricinfo.com,2007:/outsidelooking/127 2007-04-28T13:47:02Z Movable Type 3.34 tag:blogs.cricinfo.com,2007:/outsidelooking//127.4057 2007-04-28T12:22:26Z 2007-04-28T13:47:02Z

The evenings will seem empty because of there is no match; the days will because there is no match to look forward to in the evening.

Soumya Bhattacharya

Oh, when will this come around again? © Getty Images

This is the last piece I do here during the World Cup. I shan’t be writing something the day after the final. I’m off on holiday hours after the game ends. I timed this trip to perfection. It’s a terrible feeling (I’m sure many of you know it) the day after an event like this one ends. I’m glad I’m getting out. The end of a World Cup leaves me with a strange feeling at the pit of my stomach, a sense of intense discomfort as I go about the routine business of the day. Actually, there is no routine business. That’s part of the discomfort. The cricket will have left a void in the rhythm of the day, the days, and I’ll keep reaching for the remote at seven o’ clock in the evening my time and then realising that, well, there is no game to switch on to. (I know this from experience. I’m sure you do too.) The evenings will seem empty because of there is no match; the days will because there is no match to look forward to in the evening. So I’m escaping. I’m off to a place (Thailand, in case you’re curious) where cricket isn’t quite a national sport. And I shall take with me the new novel by Ian McEwan and the new book of essays by Susan Sontag to read and JM Coetzee’s Disgrace – for my money, the best book that Coetzee has ever written – to re-read. Besides, the beer will be pleasant, cold and plentiful; and the sea will be nice. ]]> But I’m not so sure that that will fill the World-Cup-shaped hole at the heart of my days. I shall leave you now, as the final approaches, with a short extract from my book, You Must Like Cricket?. The bit that follows talks about how, especially as we grow older, the game offers us a unique, otherworldly thrill. If you've enjoyed reading these pieces – and if you enjoy reading the extract – you could do worse than to buy the book. It’s available on the web (indeed at cricshop linked to this site) and, as my publishers keep saying, at all respectable bookstores. *** “Life, in its everyday accumulation of miseries and disappointments, its chaos and its agony, is more than we can bear. We, those of us who love the game, continue to love the game even as we grow old because we come to see how cricket offers us a parallel universe to inhabit in our living rooms. The thrills from there seem otherworldly; the disappointments do not have a bearing on my job or family. And I need only to switch on the remote to switch off from everything else. There is another, calculating, self-serving reason to feed this middle-aged obsession with the game. It is similar to one of the reasons why some people want to have children: so that our kids, once they grow up and we grow old, can take care of us. I have no such ambition for my daughter. But I do see cricket performing a somewhat similar, if surrogate, function. It’s like this. I imagine a situation (and the older I grow the less difficult it becomes to imagine it) in which my career is over; I have arthritis or some other illness which prevents me from travelling much or playing tennis or going swimming; my daughter has left home, my parents are dead, my wife no longer finds me an amusing or interesting companion; and my friends have all died or gone to live in other cities. What will I be left with then? What is it that I know will prevent me from going over the edge, a slobbering old man drooling into his bowl of soup or plate of boiled vegetables? I know for sure that should such an eventuality come to pass (and with life, you just never can tell — life does have a habit of coshing you over the head), cricket will be my most reliable ally. I will be able to, at the flick of a switch and the turning of a knob, with the riffle of a newspaper or the click of a mouse, be able to invite into my life those familiar images, those thrills, that construct of cricket being life. There would be nothing else. It would be, like many of the ways in which old age is, a second childhood. I can’t afford to, in spite of pragmatic compulsions, not nurture the friend who I think will help me preserve my sanity. It would be stupid of me, wouldn’t it? Even a cricket fan wouldn’t be that dumb.” tag:blogs.cricinfo.com,2007:/outsidelooking//127.4032 2007-04-25T11:33:19Z 2007-04-25T12:16:19Z

Why Mahela's hundred in the semi-final is one of the cleverest in the history of the World Cup

Soumya Bhattacharya

Mahela's innings must rank as one of the most intellegent ones in the history of the World Cup © Getty Images

Have you ever played book cricket? I don’t know if young people play it these days but when I was growing up in Calcutta in the 1970s, it was all we used to play in school between classes. In case you don’t know the rules, this is how it goes. The game demands that you open a book at random and look at the page number of the left-hand side page that has fallen open. (Why the left-hand side page? I don’t know. Well, why not?) The last digit of the page number (‘4’ if it is 224, ‘2’ if it is 82 and so on) gives you the number of runs you score. You go on doing this (and adding to your total) until a page falls open in which the last digit is 0 (say, 60; or whatever). Then you’re out. You could play in teams of four or six or one against the other. You could also, if you were on your own – as I frequently was at home – play it by yourself. I’d organize a fully-fledged game between two Test-playing nations and bat for both teams. Book cricket offers immense scope for cheating. If the page falls open at, say 40, just leave it there a second, look away, the pages will riffle and, in a second, would have turned to 44. Result: the batsman who ought to have been out would have added four to his score. In this devious and not entirely original manner, I managed to make my favourite batsmen score many more centuries than they ever did in their careers. Now the point of this long-winded story is that not even the most ardent Mahela Jayawardene fans, were he to be as big a cheater at book cricket as I used to be, would have dared give him the kind of innings in his make-believe game as Jayawardene played yesterday. There was about it something of the boys’ own adventure story, of perfect timing (not just in the shots he played during the innings but also in the moment when the innings arrived), of drama, suspense, joy, seeking and finding and fulfillment. It must be one of the cleverest, most intelligent innings in the history of the World Cup. There have been greater innings, like Tendulkar’s against Pakistan at Centurion four years ago. There have been innings with more swashbuckle and imperiousness, like Viv Richards’ 138 in the 1979 final. There have been grittier ones, like Steve Waugh’s 120 in the 1999. And there have been more brutal ones, like Matthew Hayden’s 66-ball hundred against South Africa in this tournament. ]]> But for sheer ingenuity and cleverness, in the wind-up to it – as much through the tournament as during the innings itself – Mahela’s innings was peerless. He had scored 41 runs in four innings against India just before the World Cup. He failed against both India and South Africa in this championship. Then came 82 against the West Indies and 56 against England. Yesterday, he had at one stage 6 from 30-odd balls. He had 22 from his first 50. And he ended with 115 not out from 109. It wasn’t so much that his strike-rate went above a hundred in the end. It was the manner in which it did, with the twirls and the steers and the immaculate way in which he threaded the field, the imperturbable, sublime intelligence of it all. Sitting on our living-room sofas, we fans talk so much about how innings should be paced, about the value of batting right through and having wickets in hand for the final charge. Mahela’s innings should make us all shut the hell up and just watch: if this sort of thing is so rare at that level of sport, imagine how difficult it must be. Given the way in which Mahela’s campaign – from before the World Cup and during it – has unfolded, yesterday’s big-game big innings was a fitting culmination. Now why on earth did I say something as silly as that? tag:blogs.cricinfo.com,2007:/outsidelooking//127.3958 2007-04-16T11:51:47Z 2007-04-16T13:09:40Z

Soumya Bhattacharya

Sri Lanka's game is charming, joy-filled and ebullient while the Australians believe in taking no prisoners © Getty Images

Preview. Sneak peak. Dress rehearsal. Call it what you will but tonight’s Australia-Sri Lanka game is, according to those who put their mouths where their money is, one of those things for the April 28 final. What makes it even better is that nothing really rides on it (nothing, that is, that can happen to upset the possibility of these two sides meeting each other again in the final). For a cricket fan, it will be a terrific contest not just because these have been the two best teams in the tournament so far (yes, I’d put Sri Lanka ahead of New Zealand because of its consistency and the quality of the opposition it has played from the group stage). It’s a mouth-watering prospect because the teams are exact opposites of each other. Nothing makes for a better showdown.]]> Australia is ruthless; it believes in taking no prisoners. It is clinical in its approach, gritty when fighting back and remorseless in its decapitation of opponents. Having been the best cricket side in the world for some years now (notwithstanding the ICC ratings prior to the World Cup), it brooks no failure. It is the champion side. It came to the Caribbean with the intention of defending the title. It believes in its invincibility. It is an epitome of many things: how merely talent, even a lot of it, isn't enough any more, and how it needs to be harnessed with discipline; how one's gifts can't be taken for granted; how far cricket has evolved; how competitive a game it is and how mentally tough you have to be to play the sport at this level. The metaphors I think of when I think of Australia nearly always have to do with surgery or with war. Sri Lanka is charming, joy-filled and ebullient. It is beguiling in its approach, seeming to as much enjoy having the upper hand in a game as coming from behind. Eleven years back, it won the World Cup. And, while always having been full of promise, it has never quite come close to the form and flourish of that dizzying 1996 tournament. Now, as this World Cup wears on, it seems to realize how precious and how important this campaign is: this time around, really, it can go the distance. It is an epitome of many things: how form comes and goes but class, true class, always endures in the end; how cricket is still at its most entertaining when played in their way – with flair and flourish and a sense of fun and goodwill – and that those seemingly old-fashioned things can be adapted to the modern template of the game. The metaphors I think of when I think of Sri Lanka nearly always have to do with the fine arts or joyousness. They have different means but the end, for both sides, is the same: they want to win. It's absorbing to watch how they go about that so differently. tag:blogs.cricinfo.com,2007:/outsidelooking//127.3921 2007-04-11T15:20:37Z 2007-04-12T14:48:23Z

So Brian Lara will be gone from the one-day stage. So will Glenn McGrath. Inzamam already is. So is Anil Kumble. It’s a pity. We shan’t see the likes of them any more

Soumya Bhattacharya

Another one departs © Getty Images

So Brian Lara will be gone from the one-day stage. So will Glenn McGrath. Inzamam already is. So is Anil Kumble. It’s a pity. We shan’t see the likes of them any more. One of the fascinating things about any team sport is the extent to which individual players within a team matter so much to the fan. They provide the rich subtext within the larger narrative of a game. Individual players become our heroes. And heroes provide fans with an extra intensity in the heart of a game they are already intense about. Heroes offer the repeating, repeatable motifs we pursue in anything we are passionate about – the moment when the bass line kicks in, the instant when the drink has begun to take hold, the moment when we are riding the high, floating, weightless. I’ve had many heroes in my 30-odd years of following cricket. Increasingly, they are younger, much younger, than I am. (Quite a realization, that, the first time one has it. Then one gets used to it; one knows that the sportsmen we’ll admire will be only younger than we are.) There have been times when they have gone and something has gone out of me. The passion for the game after such occasions hasn’t quite dwindled; it’s just as though there is a hole in my affections where the player ought to have been. It’s always been the case with any sport for me. I remember it happening with GR Viswanath in cricket, with John McEnroe in tennis, with Diego Maradona in football. Who has it happened to with you? Has it happened to you at all? Heroes we find while following a game in our childhoods are the best. (Viswanath, McEnroe and Maradona were mine.) We feel most intensely about them. And if we find players we admire later, the ones we find in childhood or adolescence are the true heroes. That’s because hero worship essentially belong to the experience of childhood. As we grow older and cynical, we treat with mistrust the notion of being so utterly in thrall to another human being. The late Alan Ross, poet, editor and writer, has the last word on this: ‘I believe that heroes are necessary to children and that as we grow up it becomes more difficult to establish them in the increasingly unresponsive soil of our individual mythology. Occasionally, the adult imagination is caught and sometimes it is held: but the image rarely takes root.’ ]]> tag:blogs.cricinfo.com,2007:/outsidelooking//127.3887 2007-04-07T12:45:32Z 2007-04-07T13:01:13Z

Soumya Bhattacharya

Australia seem to be functioning at the rarefied level other sides can merely hope to aspire to © Getty Images

Now that we are halfway into the second, compelling stage of the World Cup, it’s safe for me to come out and say (I’ve stopped predicting when it comes to cricket; it’s too much bother and I can do without giving friends another reason to laugh at me) which teams I’m hoping will reach the semi-finals: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Sri Lanka. Is that what you reckoned as well? Well, good, we agree about something at least. Here’s why I want them to go to the semis, why I am enjoying watching each of these teams in this World Cup. What are yours? Australia: There is no team more dangerous than an Australian side that is out to prove something. Remember the last Ashes series? Remember the last tour of India? There is something so thoroughly professional about the team. Notwithstanding its defeats before the World Cup, it sometimes seems to be functioning at the rarefied level other sides can merely hope to aspire to. It exemplifies how the toughest side in the world ought to play the tough game. Australia has been indisputably greatest cricket side of this century. Many of the members of this side are playing their last World Cup. It would be a pity to see them make a mess of their last grand campaign. South Africa: It’s a team that has made an enviable virtue of playing to its strengths. It doesn’t have much variety in terms of bowling but what it has it makes best use of. I love their athleticism, their dour, steely rearguard actions. Watching them, you understand how far the game has evolved; just how fit you need to be to play the sport at this level. New Zealand: Poor, perennial underachievers. It’s a very good team – that’s not new. It’s a very good team that’s delivering the goods, consistently – now that is new. They have the zeal, they have the experience and they have Shane Bond. There aren’t too many more exhilarating sights in the game than a genuinely fast bowler in full flight. (Except for… well, some other time.) Sri Lanka: The sheer joy the team exudes on the field is heartwarming. It’s a team that is brilliant in every department but it most brilliant in the celebratory manner of its play. Cricket isn’t all about having joy and fun and seasons in the sun. It never really was. But who can blame a fan for adoring a team that makes him believe that it is?]]> tag:blogs.cricinfo.com,2007:/outsidelooking//127.3858 2007-04-04T15:30:43Z 2007-04-04T16:47:49Z

Soumya Bhattacharya

'India’s culture of hero worship, of some players being bigger than the team, of not being able to contemplate dropping certain players ought to have seemed alien to Chappell' © Getty Images

As I write this, the news of Greg Chappell quitting is all over TV. It will dominate the front pages of India’s newspapers tomorrow (I can safely guess because I happen to work for one) and the frenzy – and the frenzied speculation – that has overwhelmed India over the last few weeks will continue relentless till... oh, the next coach, the next captain, the next World Cup. Things change, things remain the same, don’t they? I don’t report on cricket for a living. So I have never been witness to how Chappell deals with the players; I have no idea (I gather all this from newspaper reports) whether he is brusque, inflexible or high-handed; and how often and to what extent he really got the sort of team he wanted. I do know two things: that the ‘process’ Chappell kept talking about has become a much-derided word in India’s current lexicon; and that with Chappell gone, we shan’t be talking about the ‘process’ for a while. Coaching India, like captaining India, is one of the toughest jobs in the modern game. Chappell, I think (and this is all surmise as I have said earlier), knew that it was. He perhaps hadn’t bargained for the sheer scale of it. For him, it was a culture change – in more ways than one. Cricket has a tremendous allure in Australia, though there is hardly any hysteria surrounding it as there is in India. Chappell would have been aware of that. The real culture change was different. From where he came, there was one policy: if you didn’t play well, you were out of the side. Australia has been ruthless about this. The selectors have time and again proved that they are unafraid to drop anyone who isn’t performing. Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh, Glenn McGrath, Matthew Hayden: they have all been shown that a place in the side needs to be deserved. They have all realized that. There are no holy cows in Australian cricket. There is also phenomenal bench strength. (One is connected to the other.) Perhaps that could be one of the reasons why it is the best cricket side of modern times. India’s culture of hero worship, of some players being bigger than the team, of not being able to contemplate dropping certain players ought to have seemed alien to Chappell. (did it?) He was probably trying to extrapolate the culture he came from into the culture he came into. (Was he?) It simply didn’t work. (This we know for sure.) A coach must take responsibility for failure. In a way, Chappell has done that by saying that he won’t seek to renew his contract. I only hope that others complicit in the nightmare that was World Cup 2007 will also own up. ]]> tag:blogs.cricinfo.com,2007:/outsidelooking//127.3805 2007-03-30T12:16:17Z 2007-03-30T12:17:14Z

Now that India is out of the World Cup, watching the games has become a pleasurable, anxiety-free, almost aesthetic exercise. My nails are beginning to grow back; I have stopped giving the sofa a hammering every three minutes; and my...

Soumya Bhattacharya Now that India is out of the World Cup, watching the games has become a pleasurable, anxiety-free, almost aesthetic exercise. My nails are beginning to grow back; I have stopped giving the sofa a hammering every three minutes; and my daughter, I hope, will sooner rather than later begin to forget the swear words she picked up by being in my presence during the India games. It’s great fun, unadulterated fun, watching the cricket now. (In fact, it’s a little like the football World Cup: No India, great games.) And there is so much to watch, so much worth staying up for: Shane Bond’s bursts of pure speed and control (it must be one of the most beautiful sights in the world, a genuinely quick bowler in full throttle); Matthew Hayden’s successive hundreds (the first one reminded me of the choreographed carnage at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather. Hayden was ruthless and bloodied the opposition but there was such precision, such beauty in the violence); Malinga’s unforgettable four-ball devastation; and the brave manner in which South Africa began its (eventually unsuccessful) reply to the Australian total. It’s all riveting stuff, and there is so much of it around. But there is this thing: Is it ever possible to watch any sport without actually supporting one of the two sides? (Or players if it happens to be an individual sport.) I think not. The 2005 Ashes series was the greatest ever and I enjoyed watching it more than many, many series in which India played but I was supporting a team: England, in that case. (The reasons are complicated, and I shan’t go into them here.) While watching England play Australia (or X plays Y when neither is India) I am not as tortured as I would be if India plays, but I am very engaged with the fortunes of a particular side. The game itself gives great pleasure; but we need to identify with one of the two teams to give the experience of watching that extra frisson. So it is with this World Cup too. I always know which of the two teams on the day I support. But I am yet to decide which side I really want to go all the way. (In football, it’s always an easy choice. Ever since Diego Maradona arrived, I have been an Argentina supporter.) But I shall have to make up my mind soon. Have you made up yours? tag:blogs.cricinfo.com,2007:/outsidelooking//127.3760 2007-03-26T11:35:36Z 2007-03-26T11:37:30Z

“Cool first, write afterwards. Morality is hot but art is icy,” Henry James had once said. A pieces like this isn’t quite art and the response to India being walloped by Sri Lanka has little to do with morality...

Soumya Bhattacharya “Cool first, write afterwards. Morality is hot but art is icy,” Henry James had once said. A pieces like this isn’t quite art and the response to India being walloped by Sri Lanka has little to do with morality but I know what the master meant when he said that. Put another way, he meant take your time, and do not yield to the temptation of the knee-jerk reaction. Which is what I have been doing over the weekend. Taking my time and keeping both my knees tightly strapped lest they react. But there is no running away from the question: How exactly did India manage to come undone? How did a side that former cricketer Vic Marks (among others) was tipping as one of the favourites of the tournament manage to so comprehensively mess things up, ending their campaign before the stage when one had supposed it would begin in earnest? Various theories are floating around, not all of them to do with the quality of cricket the side played. In Monday’s edition of the Hindustan Times, Rahul Bhattacharya (an old cricinfo hand) writes about the “lack of chemistry” in this team. Things like chemistry are intangible, they are hard to communicate unless you have seen the team but one knows when it’s there – just as much as one knows when it’s not. (I remember watching the Indians play volleyball before the start of play every morning during the terrific tour of Australia in 2003-04 and remember thinking, “These guys have something special between them.” And they did. It showed in the results.) “There was no open rebellion,” Bhattacharya writes, “but the insecurity had seeped in too deep. The only hope for it galvanizing lay in the bonding that comes from special triumphs. It was not to be.” As much as 1966 is for English football fans, for followers of Indian cricket 1983 has acquired a status of mythic proportions, and its mythology grows and grows as every Indian World Cup team since that one tries to match that triumph and falls short. How was that victory achieved? I have wondered about this so many times over the past 24 years. And why has it never happened again? India was certainly not the most talented side in the 1983 tournament. (We’ve had several better teams since.) No one picked it as a dark horse. It did not have a decent track record. It had had far less practice in one-day cricket than teams like, say, England or Australia. So how did they do it? We had great players like Kapil and brave, committed ones like Amarnath. They were lucky. They were plucky. (Remember, India beat the defending world champions not once, but twice in the tournament.) But more than anything else, everything came together for India that summer in a way that things sometimes do in team sport: when all the units in a side weld together, when one player inspires the others, when the cliché of one for all and all for one becomes a demonstrable reality and the whole of the team become greater than a sum of its parts. You need that for success in sport. And in the West Indies at this World Cup, that was found sadly wanting. tag:blogs.cricinfo.com,2007:/outsidelooking//127.3732 2007-03-22T15:18:55Z 2007-03-22T15:20:20Z

Staying up all night watching and then dragging oneself to work the next day, bleary, bedraggled, hungover with lack of sleep: I really thought I wouldn’t have to do this before the Super 8 stage. But then, we all know...

Soumya Bhattacharya Staying up all night watching and then dragging oneself to work the next day, bleary, bedraggled, hungover with lack of sleep: I really thought I wouldn’t have to do this before the Super 8 stage. But then, we all know what happens if India loses tonight, don’t we? So here we go. My five tips on how to stay up late for the big game. Or rather – given my experience – how to try to stay up and then fall asleep on the sofa. I shall be watching in India. But if any of you (anywhere in the world) have more tips (How to skive off work and catch the cricket; how to lie in late and watch a game), please keep them coming in. Who knows who’ll need which ones when? Don’t go to a bar to watch the game: You’ll be too far away from the screen. The commentary will be drowned by the cries of angry waiters asking people to wait, they’re getting the next drink, and shrieks of inebriated laughter from people who find Lasith Malinga’s hairstyle funny. Besides, by the time you get in (or at least every time I have gone to a bar and got in), there will be a bloke twice as tall and four times as wide as you are right in front. Oh, and he’d be there just because some of his friends are and he couldn’t give two hoots about the game. Actually, stay off the booze altogether: Yes, even at home. I know it’s tempting, especially since you’ve already had dinner and will be giving your metabolism a good chance to work but really, you should know better. If I do it, I begin to nod off ten overs into the second innings. Worse, if you’re smoking along with your drink, you risk falling asleep with your hand curled around your glass and the cigarette burning dangerously down to a stub. I know it’s only me but I once came close to setting fire to the house doing this. Keep in touch with like-minded, fanatical friends: Text messages are the best. Try and not abbreviate but type the way you would on a computer screen. It keeps you occupied between overs. The witty response requires concentration. (That helps keep you awake.) It’s the only way to watch a match with friends who aren’t in the same city. Keep the ads on mute: Programme your TV in such a way that the ads, when they come on, go mute. If you can’t do that, press the mute button. Every time. It is acutely disconcerting to hear ‘Oooh, aaah, India, Rah-rah India’ when the team is 64 for 4. Or something. I can barely blink back my tears. Or wish away the sense of the absurd. Have your defence mechanism on default: We all have ours, don’t we? Being in denial won’t help (I am told that that is the first stage of depression), so have your defence mechanism ready. Here are mine: ‘There’s always next time.’ ‘It’s only a game.’ ‘They tried, you see.’ ‘It happens to the best of us.’ What works for you? tag:blogs.cricinfo.com,2007:/outsidelooking//127.3702 2007-03-19T09:30:24Z 2007-03-19T09:37:21Z

Oh, the agony of that game against Bangladesh. It’s now the day after the day after and I am still slapping my forehead and saying, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, just did we manage to get beaten?’ And the next game...

Soumya Bhattacharya did we manage to get beaten?’ And the next game against Bermuda is merely hours away. I shudder at the thought. The fact of the loss against Bangladesh isn’t the worst thing. Watching the pasting India got was a vile experience but even that isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is this: We’ll all stay up and watch the game against Bermuda tonight. We shan’t be able to bring ourselves to turn away. The pact between a fan and his team is sacrosanct. It cannot be broken. It is not like the colas or the cars or the credit cards the players endorse. Don’t like it? Sell it off. Flush it down the toilet. Get something better. All through Sunday, protests erupted all over India. Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s new house, still being built, was attacked. Effigies were burnt. Sound bites on TV and chat rooms on the web were incandescent with anger. It was the same in 2003 after India had squeezed through against the Netherlands in the opening game and got slaughtered by Australia in the next one. It is the same every time. Advertisers are getting worried. The reported on Monday that “40 per cent of the Rs 12,000 crore (estimated by senior officials across firms like Samsung, LG and Coca-Cola) that rides on the Men in Blue can get wiped out if they make an early exit. That is about Rs 5,000 crore at stake.” The fans’ anger with failure is genuine. (I can’t condone the ways in which it is expressed but I don’t for a moment doubt its genuineness.) As is their passion for the game and the hunger for success at it. But however disappointed we are, we simply cannot turn away when our players walk out on to the field. If we could, that Rs 12,000 crore would not have been at stake in the first place. The fact that it is – and will continue to be even if India go out before the next stage of the World Cup – suggests that there are millions out there like me: dejected, dispirited but waiting to reach for the remote before the first ball is bowled tonight. Sometimes, it feels like a brotherhood of misery. Every fan realizes this: feeling miserable is part of the deal. But riding the misery and sticking with it the deal. You can’t support another team. You can’t suddenly become just as passionate about another sport. It’s only this or nothing. And nothing is so much worse. ]]> tag:blogs.cricinfo.com,2007:/outsidelooking//127.3686 2007-03-17T10:54:15Z 2007-03-17T10:55:46Z

The World Cup, coming as it does every four years, offers an occasion for stock taking. I reference my life with each World Cup, reflect on how things were with me when the last one was played and reassess how...

Soumya Bhattacharya for the final, at the Eden Gardens as Border held aloft the trophy. In 1992… well, never mind. What I associate most with the World Cup final of 2003 is this: lying with my daughter on my chest, trying to get her to sleep after India got slaughtered by Ponting and Co. I remember the clink of ice in the glass of vodka by my side. I remember some fireworks going off; they sounded a little desultory, a little jaded. People had bought them just in case India won. They were letting them off anyway. No shame in losing to the best side in the world, I recall thinking. I remember thinking about the book I was then writing… about India and cricket and being a fan. This time around, my girl is five years old. She recognizes the Indian players. She can tell a Steely Dan song from its opening riff. And so boundless is her energy that it’s impossible to get her to sleep before very late. We live in Mumbai these days. My book has been published. (You can’t call yourself a writer because you’ve written a book. You have to have a of work to be able to do that. A writer is all I’ve ever wanted to be. Now I can at least say I have written a book. A start.) But the thing I most notice this time is the creeping up of middle age. This is the first World Cup that we in India will be able to watch only if we stay up all night for days on end. I find that I can’t do that any longer. (Coming up soon: Tips on how to stay up – or try to stay up and fall asleep on the sofa.) My eyes burn if I haven’t slept well. My legs feel heavy. The day job, all nine or ten hours of it, takes too much out of me. And the cricket, so central to life once (the rest of life was what happened between overs), is having to be accommodated into the rhythms of the soon-to-be-middle-aged, salaried, hardworking parent’s life. It’s quite a realization. Have you had that recently? And how has your life changed over the World Cups, since World Cup since everything in Indian cricket changed for ever, in 1983? I look forward to hearing that. Keep the comments coming in.]]>