The end of imagination

My earliest memory of listening to cricket commentary is inseparable from my memory of a large but modest house in a backwater town in Bengal in which I spent a couple of years as a child. I remember sitting hunched forward on the edge of a cane chair in the living room with dusk falling swiftly outside and the large window framing a patch of darkening sky, a looping branch of a guava tree in the yard and a jagged formation of homeward bound crows. Inside, on the table in front, was a battered but powerful German transistor radio: my parents had received it as a wedding present. From it, intermittently interrupted by static, drifted the contradictorily clipped-yet-languorous, precise-yet-indolent voices of the commentators on the BBC's Test Match Special. Brian Johnston, Don Mosey, Christopher Martin Jenkins, Fred Trueman. I knew by heart the litany of their names and, from their voices, had my notions of what each looked like. I was too young to understand the reason for their occasional boisterous laughter, too inexperienced to catch the yeasty, leavening humour of their jokes. But their voices and the things they spoke about brought alive to me a land and a game about which I imagined more than I understood. I fleshed out what I grasped of their comments in my mind till I knew the exact tinge of the new ball, the precise shade of grass on the outfield, the texture of the steps leading up to the pavilion.

It was the summer of 1976. England was playing the West Indies at Lord's. I was seven years old and had never yet been to see a cricket match.

Sixteen years later, as a student in London, I went to Lord's with my tutor who was a member of MCC. I had a glass of cider in the members' bar and gazed raptly at the balcony from which Kapil Dev had held aloft the Prudential Cup in 1983. But the colour of the outfield did not correspond to my cherished notion of it; the slope at the Nursery End had a far less steep incline than what I'd imagined it to be. And the players seemed to be going about the game as though it were a day in office. Missing was the sense of veneration I'd thought a player would feel on setting foot in precincts as holy as that of Lord's. What I'd prepared myself for was a construct of my imagination, carefully built in the gathering gloom of a remote town in Bengal, 300 kilometres away from the nearest international cricket pitch. What I was confronted with on that grey morning in London was reality.

When my three-month-old daughter begins to watch the game, she will, at the flick of a switch on the remote control, be able to seamlessly shift between Brisbane and Bridgetown, Harare and Hyderabad. She'll see the players, the commentators, the grounds and their peculiarities, the spectators and their various cultures in far-flung lands. It will become - as it already has - far more immediate than what it was for me. It will also become far more matter of fact. It will mean the end of a certain kind of romance with the game. It will mean the end of imagination.

For the passionate follower of cricket who enjoys a lifelong affair with the game rather than a brief flirtation with the latest scores, imagination - that gift which still enables us to see Stan McCabe's shots by reading Neville Cardus's description of them - has become a casualty in these days of cricket overkill. Undoubtedly it's thrilling to watch every match - often more than one simultaneously - in every corner of the globe. Television has brought the game closer to the spectator but it has also, paradoxically, distanced the lover of the game from his beloved. Too much cricket has blunted the edge of our appreciation, has dulled the ache and intensity of our desire.

We are spoilt for choice these days. The international Test cricket calendar for 2001-2001 (there are no cricket seasons any more, one just melts into the other, defeating the purpose of a calendar) reads like a busy rock star's world tour schedule. Take India, for instance. We play England at home right on the heels of a tough away series against South Africa. This is followed by two Tests against Zimbabwe, five against the West Indies and a tour of England next summer. During roughly the same period, Australia play New Zealand, the West Indies face Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe take on Bangladesh and, in the real mega slugfest, Australia square off against South Africa in back-to-back series. One-day cricket, of course, has seen an even greater spurt in recent times. In the '70s, India played 13 one-day internationals. That went up to 155 in the '80s. And in the '90s, we played a staggering 257 limited-overs international matches.

This surfeit has killed the sharpness of our memory about particular perform­ances. I still remember India's tour of the West Indies in 1976 and the third Test at Port of Spain. I recall Dicky Rutnagar and Sushil Doshi on the radio and sitting up in the small hours with a mug of Bournvita as Brijesh Patel raced to his fifty after Gavaskar and Vishwanath had laid the foundations of that incredible chase to victory with their centuries. In contrast, when I try and recall the match from our last tour of the Caribbean in which India should have won, but collapsed and lost instead, I can't. Without looking up the scorebook, I can only say that Tendulkar was the captain. And yet every ball of that game was beamed live into my living room. I'd watched. And I've forgotten. It's become one among the hundreds of matches we watch every year now. The rarity has vanished.

Along with the rarity, the preciousness and worth of a great performance have also disappeared. Too many runs are scored these days, too many wickets taken, for even the most dedicated follower to keep track. Sample this. In the '80s, Indian batsmen scored 17 centuries in one-day internationals. In the '90s, that number shot up to well over 60. It's not just the numbers, though. Superlatives have been soiled because they have become the currency of daily use. For commentators now, every shot is magnificent, every catch is superb, every ball a beauty. Restraint and understate­ment, never easy to achieve, have been wantonly sacrificed in the pursuit of excitement. It's what a majority of the millions of people watching the game on television want: they want to be convinced that what they are watching is a jolly good thing. Not surprisingly, even in the minds of these spectators, the distinction between the sublime and the good has blurred. Or was it never there at all?

It's possible. For most of the current lot of spectators, cricket has become a byword for jingoism. It's win or bust; nothing comes in between. Would there be any takers now for a match like the one at the Oval in 1979 when India very nearly pulled off a win chasing 400-plus, aided by a Gavaskar double hundred and held back by a dubious catch in the covers by which Viswanath was dismissed? We didn't win, did we? So who cares?

Not many. I'm sorry for sounding so stuffy but television has created hordes of cricket illiterates who watch the game as the most interesting and interactive family entertainment package on offer. Forget the floodlights, the white ball and the black sightscreen and all the other accoutrements of the cricket circus. There's one thing that really gets me: players with their names emblazoned across the backs of their shirts. Could we please have a little less of making cricket seem more like baseball?

If I were to say this in any living room in Kolkata while a one-day match was being shown on television, I would run the risk of being booed out of the room. Everyone likes those names on the backs. They make spotting players easier. The analysis and the cameras in various places, the pitch report and the weather report and the graphics have a huge following even among those - no, especially among those - who never used to follow the game before. All these elements make it easy for the spectator to sound knowledgeable without quite knowing much about the game. Meanwhile, what about those like me? What about those of us who grew up listening to Test Match Special, who ran our fingers along the edges of the cover of the odd copy of Wisden which used to be brought in, like contraband, by a friend or a relative from England, who heard, saw or read about the courage of a Pataudi or the daring and unpredictability of a Chandrasekhar and committed them to memory, to whom the game was like a talisman, a key that unlocked the doors to a wider horizon, a philosophy, even a way of life? We are already approaching the end of cricket as we knew it. Too much of a good thing can be bad because we lose sight of its preciousness, begin to dissociate ourselves from the joy it gives. It's a sad loss because, in a way, it is the loss of childhood, a rupture with our pasts.