Men in White

Yesterday my son, who is fifteen, said: “ Last year we had a great team.” I was about to set him right, to say that it was nearly three years ago, in 2004, that we’d had something approaching a great team when Ganguly’s Goers had nearly beaten Waugh’s Invincibles in Oz, when he resumed his sentence: “…then Bergkamp and Viera left.” I felt a goose walk over Indian cricket’s grave.

Most of my son’s classmates find greater pleasure in watching Thierry Henry, a Frenchman who captains a London club, Arsenal, than in watching Rahul Dravid turn out for India. The boys in his class who aren’t fixated on Arsenal are obsessed with Manchester United and someone called Rooney who looks worryingly like an Eighties model skinhead. I could be wrong, my sample could be too small, but I think we’re seeing a shift in the sporting culture of metropolitan Indian schoolboys of a particular class. They’re seceding from international cricket and offering their enthusiasm and loyalty to English league football.

Before you go off thinking that my son’s school is some deracinated, air-conditioned NRI heaven, let me assure you that it’s not. Sardar Patel Vidyalaya is an austere, emphatically desi school, with a great cricket tradition. It has produced Indian internationals (Ajay Jadeja, Murali Karthik) and it has one of the most powerful cricket teams amongst Delhi’s schools. Lots of sensible kids in the school aspire to play competitive cricket. So far, so good. But ask any parent with a boy in middle-school and he’ll tell you the same thing: cricket’s reasonably popular, but it isn’t cool.

This is a fan's eye blog. At a time when cricket commentary on television, in print and online, is done by former internationals punchdrunk by too many years in the fray, this blog offers non-playing lucidity as a corrective. Written with a historian's experience in fixing the facts and a fan's unwinking commitment to his team, Men in White aims to be an indispensable blog for cricket tragics, showing them that they are not alone.