World Cup Diary

Not a day to go home early

Some decisions haunt you for a long while

Brydon Coverdale
Brydon Coverdale
25-Feb-2013
The packed crowd at the Chinnaswamy rose and fell in unanimity as the match hung in the balance  •  AFP

The packed crowd at the Chinnaswamy rose and fell in unanimity as the match hung in the balance  •  AFP

Some decisions haunt you for a long while. I’m guessing that will be the case for the two men who were sitting next to me in the stands at the Chinnaswamy Stadium on Sunday night. At the final drinks break, when England needed 110 from 16 overs, with Andrew Strauss and Ian Bell cruising, these two gentlemen got up and went home.
Two overs earlier I had asked them if they thought India would win. “No, no chance now,” one of them said, despondently. What they missed was one of the most epic finishes in World Cup history. As a neutral observer, it was as fine a match as I could have hoped for – two brilliant hundreds, 676 runs scored and a game that could have gone any of three ways from the last ball.
When the final run was taken, the Indian fans around me cheered, and it seemed like they thought their team had won. In reality, they were just relieved India hadn’t lost. One man sitting near me was wearing an England shirt, but spent the entire day blowing a shrill whistle to celebrate every Indian success. If he had divided loyalties, he must have gone home happy.
I’d never sat in among the crowd at an Indian home game before, and I spent the first half of the match a little surprised at the lack of noise. Sachin Tendulkar’s century, of course, brought a unanimous uprising, but every time an Indian wicket fell, there was a silence that seemed implausible from a crowd of 40-odd thousand people.
But in the last ten overs, when India looked like holding on for victory, things got insanely loud. The inflatable tubes that are handed out at the start of the game – I was pleased when I saw their name on the packet, Pong Bong Sticks – were sending their tinny popping sounds around the stands, and whistle guy - who incidentally didn’t say a word to anyone all day, perhaps the whistle is his only means of communication - went into overdrive.
The thing that struck me most was the unanimity. When India got a wicket, or even a dot ball in the final few overs, everyone jumped out of their seats to cheer. Then the ritual began again: all sit down, wait, and leap up once more. If England hit a boundary, hands sat on heads in dismay.
There was the unsavoury as well: the chants of “cheating” that followed Ian Bell’s reprieve, when an lbw review on the big screen showed the ball hitting the stumps. In fairness, from the crowd it was impossible to tell why Billy Bowden had not overturned his not-out decision. Only later did I learn Bell was so far forward as to make the predictive element unreliable.
But mostly it was a terrific atmosphere. Even the man sitting in front of me, the most vehement of the head-in-hands brigade, gave Andrew Strauss a decent clap when he reached his century. And a foreign player in India can’t ask for any more than that.

Brydon Coverdale is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo. He tweets here