On the Road with Zaltzman

Yesterday night was a bad time to go far a quiet seaside stroll along Marine Drive, Mumbai. I had been told this was one of the more peaceful and relaxing things to do in this ludicrously massive city. Thousands and thousands of people had obviously been given the same advice. Only there was not much strolling, and it was not very quiet.

In scenes reminiscent of the bedlam on the streets of Essex after local hero Peter Such received his first call-up to the England team in 1993 (perhaps even a little more exuberant), India celebrated as long and hard as MS Dhoni had hit the final ball of the World Cup. A tournament which began with jubilation and pride in Bangladesh at the mere fact of hosting the World Cup ended with similar scenes and emotions after India won it. Perhaps there would have been equally boisterous revelry had the home team lost, in celebration of the fact that cricket exists. Perhaps not.

I spent most of India's innings sitting in the Wankhede stands amidst a crowd that was initially expectant and adulatory as Sachin Tendulkar began as if about to fulfil his unalterable destiny of scoring his 100th international hundred in front of his home-town worshippers to win a World Cup final. Some dextrously finessed twos through the infield, then two boundaries of eye-watering perfection, and the Mumbai Master was on the road to his crowning personal glory. Sadly for the crowd, traffic cop Lasith Malinga pulled him over and confiscated his licence. He pushed, edged, and walked. The crowd was left not merely agog, but severalgogs. A stunned hush clamped the Wankhede, as if the crowd at one of Jesus' miracles had just seen their hero turn a sickly child into a mahogany bookcase, and mumble "Oops", before scuttling off saying, "Same time next week?"

Final Day. Mumbai is excited. India is excited. Sri Lanka is excited. Cricket is excited. My breakfast dosa was excited. “Who’s going to win, Andy? Don’t eat me yet, don’t let me die before you tell me who’s going to win. Go India.”

I imagine you, the readers, are excited. About the final, more so than reading this blog. There is only one thing to do in such excitable circumstances: calm yourselves down by sitting an exam.

Please sit in silence and answer the following questions, without conferring.

The most-watched cricket match in the history of the known universe prompted probably the biggest single celebration of a victory in terms of the total number of people shouting “yippee” (or variants thereof) that sport has ever generated.

The cricket did not match up to the pre-match hype. This was inevitable. The only way it could have done so was if Virender Sehwag had scored a 25-ball century, Sachin Tendulkar had posted his 100th India 100 before being carried away into the skies in a flaming chariot, Kamran Akmal had taken a series of sensational one- and no-handed catches, Asad Shafiq had run into a phone-box, whizzed round at high speed and emerged as an at-his-peak Garfield Sobers in a superman outfit with a Pakistan passport in hand, hammered his team to the brink of victory, before Virat Kohli came steaming in like Dennis Lillee’s pet wildebeest and obliterated the Pakistan tail with a blood-curdling barrage of 100mph yorkers, bouncers and googlies, before with four needed off the last ball Saeed Ajmal danced down the wicket to Zaheer Khan and reverse-cover-drove him off one knee in the air towards a diving Ashish Nehra on the boundary who caught the ball in the tips of his fingers to prevent it going for 6 before a passing kestrel pecked it out of his hands and dropped it on the ground in front of Manmohan Singh and Yousuf Raza Gilani who then ceremonially tied their feet together and jointly kicked it over the boundary rope for the tying runs, before saying “No-one deserves to lose this match,” then holding hands and launching into a rousing rendition of ‘Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong’ while the Mohali crowd harmoniously crooned backing vocals and all cuddled effigies of Inzamam-ul-Haq.

Regrettably for cricket as a sport, the TV companies and above all the poor old sponsors, this did not happen. What did happen was a game that, for the neutral, was compelling for a long while, but ultimately a little unsatisfying.

Well, this is all very exciting. History will ultimately be the judge of whether today’s game is indeed the most important event in the six-billion-year history of Planet Earth, but, going by the press coverage alone, it has to be a contender. Ravichandran Ashwin against Mohammad Hafeez – it’s like Napoleon versus the Duke of Wellington all over again.

The heavens opened spectacularly in Mohali last night, the fearsome opening pair of Thunder and Lightning ably supported by first-change bowler Torrential Rain, but thankfully The Weather has now been ushered well away from the PCA after the ICC rescinded its press accreditation due to alleged violation of contractual agreements.

Many have said that this game will be decided as much, or more, by which team can control their emotions than by cricketing skill. As we saw in Colombo yesterday, 30,000 decibel-shatteringly passionate supporters can turn into a 30,000-person nervous gulp. When Sri Lanka momentarily appeared to be tanking a guaranteed winning position, and the normally granite-stomached Sangakkara, after an innings of supreme cool and craft, inexplicably sent a precision bloop directly into the hands of third man, I had not seen so many anxious faces since Gordon Brown threatened to belly dance at the 2008 Labour Party conference.

This week’s podcast features reviews of the quarter-finals and a look ahead to the semi-finals. And some contrived similes.

Thirty-six hours have passed since England were unceremoniously plonked in a box, wrapped in a ribbon and posted back home, first-class. After their dramatic roller-coaster ride through the group stage, many had thought that England were destined to go all the way to glory. Unfortunately, due to a contractual dispute over working conditions and image rights, Destiny walked out on a one-day strike in Colombo on Saturday.

Reality was called in as a temp to cover for Destiny, and England, after winning three and losing two of their group matches by the finest of margins, and tying the other one by no margin at all, were given the mother-in-law of all spankings. The roller-coaster derailed, flew off the tracks, and landed in a tree.

This had seemed to have all the makings of a close game. However, you can have all the makings of a succulent roast lamb for your Sunday lunch, but still end up with an undercooked doner kebab instead. Ultimately, their lack of boundary-clouters in both top- and middle-order proved costly. As did their inability to take the initiative against good-quality spin. As did injuries to, and loss of form by key players. As did their lack of bowling experience in the subcontinent – of the five bowlers in Colombo, Swann had played 10 ODIs in Asia before this World Cup, and the rest had mustered 7 between them.

At the end of another tumultuous quarter-final in Dhaka, the floodlights went out and fireworks blasted themselves across the Mirpur skies. The explosive din reached a crescendo, and then faded. Bangladesh’s role as World Cup co-hosts was at an end. Then, from the still-packed stands of the Shere Bangla, the supporters who had filled the stadium to watch South Africa and New Zealand struck up a chant: “Bangladesh, Bangladesh, Bangladesh, Bangladesh”.

So it continued for a minute or more, an outpouring of communal pride that touched the soul of cricket. Then a man took hold of the stadium public address system and started reeling off a thank-you list of the tournament sponsors, and normality reasserted itself.

But for that minute, watching and listening on the press box roof from where I had seen the tournament begin in glorious enthusiasm five weeks ago, it was an entrancing moment, moving and hopeful, for Bangladesh as a nation and for cricket as a sport. If the 2007 World Cup skated across the Caribbean leaving barely a trace of its passing, this one will surely leave a deep and lasting imprint on this country at least.

The first real quarter-final was a fantastic match, taut, poundingly tense and closely fought throughout, played with an enchanting cocktail of high-level skill and intermittent outbursts of cricketing crackpottery, and ultimately won by some glorious batting by Yuvraj and Raina. Every over seemed to shift the likelihood of victory slightly one way or the other, before 27 runs from the 40th and 41st overs of India’s innings catapulted the game decisively into the blue corner.

Under the pressure of the match and tournament situation, of an Ahmedabad crowd who seemed to be attempting to break the world record for the largest recorded simultaneous nervous gulp, and of a nation unlikely to respond to defeat by patting them on the back and saying, “Don’t worry, it’s the taking part that counts,” the two left-hand batsmen mixed sound defence with clinical aggression against bowling of pulsating pace.

Yuvraj is one of those few fascinating cricketers who combine majesty with vulnerability. As a Test player, he has mostly disappointed, the average of 35 that you see in the record book at odds with the left-hand Wally Hammond that you see at the crease. That GraemeFowleresque, ShivSunderDasian figure of 35 is often used by atheists, when set alongside Graeme Smith’s equivalent of 49, as an aesthetic argument that proves the non-existence of god.

The long-awaited quarter-final stage began with the kind of grotesque mismatch that was supposed to have been confined to the group phase. The Shere Bangla began this tournament being adorned by a trademark 175-run Sehwag powerblast. Since then, this apparent batting paradise has been scarred with three batting performances of stratospheric incompetence. Bangladesh’s 58 and 78 were joined in the 2011 World Cup Roll Call of Rubbish, in the Catalogue Of Crud, and in the Inventory Of Inept by a West Indian 112, a performance so poor it needed a whip-round in the ICC office just to be able to be able to afford a room for the night and a bowl of soup.

This was an excellent display by Afridi’s increasingly confident-looking Pakistan team. If you exclude New Zealand’s Pallekelle powerblast, off which Pakistan conceded 113 runs in 33 balls of unprecedented mayhem (two words that, contrary to popular belief, are not officially in the PCB’s corporate mission statement), Pakistan’s bowlers now average 19 in this tournament, with an economy rate of 3.6.

Battle-hardened by the rather tougher tests against the more creditable batting opposition provided by, for example, Canada and Kenya, the Pakistan attack was too much for the Caribbean team, who batted with all the steel of a spoonless grapefruit. Reports that the West Indies players were seen after the game throwing stones at their own bus remain unconfirmed.

Wandering through the streets of Mirpur on the way to the Shere Bangla, it was impossible not to sense that there was not quite as much excitement in the air as there might have been. Of course, had tomorrow’s game been Pakistan v Bangladesh instead of Pakistan v West Indies, as it so nearly was, the excitement levels would have been visible from the moon. It may well have been audible on the moon.