Outside Looking In

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.)

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.

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 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.