From 100 yards away

Imagine standing 100 yards opposite a taking off airplane, train and triple-decker bus, all three filled to capacity; imagine the noise, the hues, and the ambiance in such a scenario. Then multiply it all by two. The result would be something vaguely like the atmosphere I experienced yesterday sitting around with 40,000 or so cricket starved Karachites, about half a dozen rows back in the Waqar Hasan Enclosure.

The official capacity for the NSK is only 33,000, but I suppose that only caters for spectators that have occupied seats, and not the ones that are sitting on the stairs leading up to the seats, in between the seats, in the foyers besides the lavatories, and in the little space here, there and everywhere. No potential vantage point was left vacant. When you read somewhere in the papers today that yesterday’s match was a full house, the papers were lying. It wasn’t a full house, it was an over-full house.

I am usually someone who is used to sitting around in my living room and watching cricket with 2 or sometimes 3 people and a remote control. At other times I prefer to be alone, the commentary turned down to mute, the curtains pulled down and across, in the glow of a sole 50 Walt bulb. My cricket-system as such is used to calm, unruffled moods; there is an indifference to time and circumstance outside cricket.

I am aware of every little half chance, the could-have-been moments, the dropped catch, the chance that fell short, every appeal, its duration, intensity and result, the batsmen’s scores, the strike rates, the over rates and the run rates. But this is not what you get at the NSK, or at least not unless you’re nicely seated in one of the hospitality boxes inside the pavilion. But then again, that’s precisely what makes yesterday’s adventure, and it really was an adventure, such a stirring, unforgettable experience.

Sure you miss the feeling of being totally in control apropos the match situation, but so what. So what if you can’t really discuss the finer points of Yasser Arafat’s action, or distinguish between Trescothick and Prior immediately when they’ve come out to open, but only after a while.

At least you get a close up look at Salman Butt and Andrew Strauss (both of whom spend the majority of their time patrolling the square boundary behind which I resided), at least you can be proud that Inzi, Blackwell, Shoaib Akhtar and Flintoff can be recognised no matter where they are (it is not for my own visual satisfaction alone that I demand of more chubbier cricketers!).

Best of all, Sami, Younis Khan and Anderson’s pitiable hairstyles remain a distant, outlying sight, you don’t have to bother closing your eyes on exposure, the risk of potential gastrointestinal and minor psychological disorders are more or less eliminated from 100 yards away, when everyone’s hair appears the same.

Cricket on television, barring the commentary, in-between overs advertisements, and the little Biscuit, Bank or Beverage logo that pops up at every four, six or wicket, is a very fulfilling experience. You have a full speed replays, slow motion replays, super slow motion replays, snickometers, trackers, Hawkeye, magnifiers, and views from several different angles. But unless you go and watch a cricket match for real, you don’t realise how some elements of the game just don’t get their due. In many ways watching cricket on television is like an optical illusion.

And I only realised that my self when I glanced through the highlights package last night amongst superfluously excited siblings and family members who were on a quest to locate them selves in the crowd. The NSK looks so much smaller on TV; Fred looks only big, when in reality he is everything like a giant. And the bats, those look way, way bigger then they are in real, from 100 yards across and in the hands of the players, they look more like toothpicks. In a strange realisation some players look larger then they are actually.

And then there are the shots themselves. Remember that six from Razzaq that hit the roof? When you see something like that in real life, steadily standing up and cheering as it’s trajectory goes higher and higher, and finally exploding into a plethora of screams and cheers as the umpire raises his arms to signal six, you feel a bit surreal.

“That wasn’t a six” you tell your self, “it was a 12”; a real monster. The TV cameras don’t do any justice to shots like those. It was plain ridiculous how human that shot looked in the highlights, relative to how superhuman it appeared in real-time. How could some one possibly hit a cricket ball so hard and so long?

As you sing along Strings’ Hay Koi Hum Jaisa (Is There Anyone Like Us?) with the others, you’re also recovering from shock, the shock that Razzaq isn’t part human part robot like in The Bicentennial Man, but he’s actually just a strong bloke, in his mid 20s, who likes hitting a cricket ball hard and make it look ridiculously easy. It’s a pleasant shock I tell you. It gives you great joy.

When I looked back on it on TV that’s when my grin was as its Colgate-addvertisment-esque widest, this is when you know you can tell your great grand kids one day that ‘I was there’. Not that this match will be remembered in the same way as something truly astounding in history of the game, despite the flurry or records we’d broken in the process of giving a first class mauling to England, one-day matches, simply because there are so many played, are rarely spoken of in that context, but still.

That’s why when I tune in to watch the 4th ODI at Rawalpindi, even though I’ll have access to every form of comprehensive coverage I can ask for, I’ll know what I’m missing out on. There isn’t any substitute to being there and experiencing, and being a part of that atmosphere, nothing in the entire wide world.