World Cup Diary

Politicians create an inconvenient truth

Here's the most definite 'learning' from this World Cup: lets keep the heads of government and state away from it

25-Feb-2013

Here's the most definite 'learning' from this World Cup: lets keep the heads of government and state away from it. If the India v Paksitan semi-final featured two chatty prime ministers, the final is being witnessed by two heads of state, the presidents of India and Sri Lanka. With all due respect to the Excellencies, ask the two policemen who walked in to one of the old city's Irani cafes for tea and biscuits just after 10am. They had been on duty since 6am and would be working till the game finished and the crowds cleared - an 18-hour day. They were there because an area around the stadium was to be 'sanitised'. Read made inconvenient for the general public and the Wankhede has to be a presidential-size inconvenience.

So spectators were told to be in the stadium by 1.30 pm because the ground was going into lockdown after that. Marine Drive, an iconic stretch of curving road that the stadium is built on, will have no traffic for a while, except the presidential entourages. The cops in the Irani cafe sighed because, to use a cricketing cliche, this was not going to be “a normal match”. One of them said, “So much bandobast.” It's an old-fashioned, Raj-kind of Urdu word now found in pucca English dictionaries and it means organisation or arrangement.

The only way cops on bandobast duty outside the Wankhede will follow the match, one of them said, was to listen to the noise of the crowd. They will have no access to giant screens that will be set up in even the most crowded neighbourhoods and they have been forbidden from carrying mobile phones so their friends and family can't even text them the scores. All police communication is to be done in the old-fashioned way – via walkie talkie. Because of the presidents, of course.

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The grandmother of all headaches

News flash: The Indian and Pakistani cricketers are not having bun-fights over breakfast

Sharda Ugra

25-Feb-2013

News flash: The Indian and Pakistani cricketers are not having bun-fights over breakfast. The world inside their world is normal. They are getting harassed for tickets though, with one Indian cricketer stating that the only tickets he could provide was bus tickets to Mohali. The world just outside Mohali actually is normal too. A short distance away from the stadium which will host the India v Pakistan semi-final, workers spend their mornings breaking bricks. It is a large pile but they should be done by Wednesday.

Yet, it is not normal, not merely because one bunch of guys in blue will play another bunch of guys in green. The cricketers have suddenly become the bit-part actors in the drama. The two states and their prime ministers have struck. The Indian invited and the Pakistani accepted which now leaves the local hosts worrying about more than whether their sofas and carpets are spruced up and smelling of roses. Hosting prime ministers is one thing, but where the devil can the 50-strong 'entourages' that will accompany each of them, be fitted in? Surely their Honourable-nesses could have watched the game on some giant LED television?

It is a very big match, in a very small stadium and security staff are now on something approaching perpetual alert. With all apologies to the headline-makers, this is not the "mother of all battles", but the grandmother of all headaches.

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In the other camp

Two South African journalists travelled on the diverted flight that went to Dhaka to fetch the New Zealand cricket team and carry them to Colombo

Firdose Moonda

25-Feb-2013

Two South African journalists travelled on the diverted flight that went to Dhaka to fetch the New Zealand cricket team and carry them to Colombo. When they got on the flight, they found that the seating plan was non-existent since the plane had made an extra stop and seating for the few passengers from Dhaka was free. They chose a row of three seats, leaving one free for a countryman of theirs – Allan Donald.

The fast bowler walked on to the flight, spotted the familiar faces and soon found he couldn’t escape their familiar sound. “Howzit Allan,” they said. “Hi,” he replied. Hi?? Their faces dropped. He said hi. A few months in England, and now some time in New Zealand, does this to you, they eventually concluded. You have to say hi and not howzit. But they let it go, understanding that Donald is a professional, who puts his job first, and if his job is coaching another team that don’t say howzit, then so be it.

Donald is a passionate man; that people have known since the days of his fiery fast bowling, but South Africans were surprised, and even a little alarmed, to see him punching the air and high-fiving his New Zealand colleagues on Friday night. Donald, to many South African fans, will always be the man who dropped his bat and caused the run-out that saw South Africa exit the 1999 World Cup. That semi-final against Australia could well be the moment that started the choking phenomenon, and to see Donald celebrating a choke in that fashion led to much criticism.

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Motera, trapped in a time warp

Sharda Ugra

25-Feb-2013

If the World Cup is to be a roll call of some of India's leading venues across the country, then the ones lurking at the bottom of the pile should be Delhi (for administrative inefficiency) and Ahmedabad for a startling shabbiness. Delhi's Feroz Shah Kotla has been remodelled, but its governors have stayed the same. It is Ahmedabad which is a mystery.

When the 1987 World Cup came to Motera, with an India-Australia game, crowds walked in carrying picnic baskets of food and spent the day munching through a hamper of goodies, which beat the quality and quantity of everything on offer. Motera was still a village with a cricket ground plonked in it. Its surroundings have gone from being fields, farmlands and mud houses to concrete low-rise homes, shops and a south-north access road. Over the last two decades, the stadium has made additions to its stands and is now entirely covered. In the city that has one of India's few drive-in cinemas still working, a big cricket match is still treated like Friday night at the movies. Everybody wants to make the only show on the solitary day. Two days before the World Cup, the ticket stands outside the Motera are not marked "Sold Out" but "House Full".

The world around it and the sport it celebrates has changed radically, but on the inside, the Sardar Patel Stadium has stayed trapped in a time warp. Let it be known however that players facilities are immaculate: the dressing rooms are huge, there are a handy bunch of nets on one side of the ground and teams get feted and looked after like State guests. For the public though, it has all been allowed to go into what appears to be a state of decay: corridors are musty, toilets are dirty, their powerful smell hangs around the staircases along with paan stains. There are cobwebs and trails of dirt running on walls, this even through the newer parts of the stadium. Special 'boxes' in one section of the ground were ready for the big day with a decor that could only be called grunge.

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March 16 - A day for the ages

The best 24 hours of my life – March 6 2011

John Mooney

25-Feb-2013

The best 24 hours of my life – March 6 2011. A date that will be etched in Irish sporting folklore. Maggie Thatcher, Winston Churchill, your boys took a hell of a beating!

It might have been portrayed as one of the biggest shocks in World Cup history, but this team were always confident that we could compete against the world’s best, and if things went our way, would prevail.

We bowled well in the latter part of the England innings to restrict them to 327, when they seemed destined for a score in excess of 350.

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Jamtha: the fans' stadium

There's something about Jamtha

Sharda Ugra

25-Feb-2013

There's something about Jamtha. It actually used to be a village just outside Nagpur but is now best known for its cricket stadium that can easily claim to be among the top three in India. When an outsider first arrives, Jamtha's inconvenient distance from the city itself suddenly shrinks into relative unimportance.

The 1996 World Cup first gave to India the Punjab CA Stadium in Mohali, where for the first time Indian crowds were not packed in behind high metal fences as if they were in a cage. Mohali was open, generous and kept out pitch invaders with a moat. In 2011, Nagpur has set the standard that other grounds must follow. It is a compact bowl of a stadium that is built tightly around the field - and its moat has barbed wire - reaching its 45,000 capacity as its stands climb high. Yet the hallmark of this stadium is not its architecture or even what it gives to the cricketers, but the fact that its spectators have both been thought of and also included in the stadium's lineage.

Ticketholders can travel free to the ground from the city, which is 20km away, with the Vidarbha Cricket Association putting out 150 buses for the India v South Africa World Cup game. Spectators are allowed to carry in cameras and binoculars, given free water and have space to walk around the grounds. As they walk towards their stands, they see a message on the walls in English and Hindi which asks them to be on their best behaviour. The stadium, the notice says, is the recognised centre by the BCCI/ ICC and spectators are asked to “retain this recognition, it is in your hands”, and the notice then goes on to explain what that all means.

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Nagpur is more than just oranges and cricket

Sharda Ugra

25-Feb-2013

Nagpur gets a lot of bad press particularly when cricket comes to town – the stadium's too far, transport is over-priced, there aren't enough hotels around for an event the size of the World Cup, the restaurants are average, the bars are minimum. Where do you go? What's there to see? (okay, sales pitch: this is exactly what happens because you don't read this).

Despite its Dominos and McDonalds, Nagpur just doesn't do globalisation very well. God bless its socks for that. It may be the geographical centre of India, 1190 kms south from the capital Delhi (the centre of the universe, of course) and is still a bit detached from the megalomania of the new, shining India. The outskirts of Nagpur now stretch towards its airport, all along the two-laned National Highway No. 7 where women in saris still ride a confident bicycle along it into town. For the outsider, the rural and the urban do not appear locked in mortal combat here, their edges kind of mingle.

The cricket stadium that will host India v South Africa, the hotel that is running a non-stop room service for players, umpires, officials and the airport that brings them to Nagpur and takes them away are found all along NH7, Nagpur's World Cup bloodline. There will be many who will be in Nagpur but still not in Nagpur during the World Cup.

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Klusener's favourite knock

Lance Klusener always preferred doing his talking with the bat

Firdose Moonda

25-Feb-2013

Lance Klusener always preferred doing his talking with the bat. It’s a horrible cliché, yes, but for this man, his bat was his mouthpiece. Find some archived footage of a post-match conference featuring Klusener as Man of the Match - and there are many - and you will see a few mumbles, eyes shifting nervously, fingers twiddling incessantly and feet tapping, waiting to make a hasty exit.

It was nothing like his persona at the crease, particularly the Klusener we came to know in the 1999 World Cup, the best bludgeoner of them all. He was the only batsman in the top 15 to have a strike rate over 100; his bat didn’t just talk, it shouted every word with! an! exclamation!

Twelve years and three World Cups later, Klusener does not have a bat to do the talking for him, and it seems to have helped. The words flow as the runs once did, maybe not as fluently, but with as much spark and zest. There’s even room for a joke or two. We caught up in Chennai, with the sun baking down at over 35 degrees.

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The last revolutionary standing

“We knew we were all going to die,” he says, casually.

Sidharth Monga

25-Feb-2013

“We knew we were all going to die,” he says, casually.

I have heard this line many times in films, read it in books, but to hear it face to face, from a man who knew he was going to die, is something else. This is not a line we, born in free countries, quite appreciate when it is played out in the movies. To feel the real meaning of the words, make a trip to Momin Road in Chittagong, and find Binod Bihari Chowdhury, who lives in one of the bylanes in a small non-descript house. He had a bullet pierce his neck, but he has survived to tell the not-often-told tale of the Chittagong Armoury Raid in 1930.

Binod is 101 now, the last revolutionary alive among that group, mainly comprising students, who fought a battle that they knew would eventually claim their lives. He is as frail as can be imagined. Recently he has been to Kolkata for treatment. He struggles with high blood pressure, but still watches cricket, much to the chagrin of those who look after him. He struggles to talk, but likes to tell stories. Dadu we call him. Like a dadu, a grandfather, he has us sit around him and tells us of the people who fought for independence. He doesn’t blink at all when he is talking. There are four of us there, and he looks into the eye of each, one by one, alternating, as he admits his memory plays tricks at times.

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The Dutch go back to school

Nagraj Gollapudi

25-Feb-2013

A polite request arrived from the ICC a couple of days ago: would I like to join Ryan ten Doeschate and Atse Buurman, the Netherlands’ players, on a visit to one of the government-run schools as part of a drive to encourage education through reading? My first thought was, forget it. But I chewed on it for about an hour and then randomly gave my nod. I felt it was rare to meet a player in a private space and it could be worth it.

A few hours later I found my way into the school in South Delhi. “Some cricketers have come ... but sadly not Indian,” I heard a few disappointed murmurs from the teenage kids standing in the courtyard. But moments later I was in a small classroom, barely the size of a double room in a hotel, but which now held 25 kids and five teachers surrounding the Dutchmen. ten Doeschate and Buurman, both dressed casually in the same colour denims and T-shirt, were completely open and relaxed in a packed environment. Both tried hard to understand the questions and came up with honest answers.

Of course 10-year-olds don’t ask about life. “Can you a hit a six?” a toddler asked ten Doeschate. He could only laugh back. Buurman was asked his favourite stroke. But Buurman, the reserve wicket-keeper, was curious to know about something specific. Buurman had dyslexia as a child. Even now he stresses on every word and makes sure he is right about what he says. “I had remedial teaching which helped me. But I was curious about how dyslexic kids here deal with it. I tried asking the teachers how the dyslexic students in the school deal with the issue, but never got a clear answer.”

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