Samba Cricket

It is infuriating when you come to another city with some urgent business and find that the other party is going to be very late for the rendezvous. Every place is not a cricket field though, and sometimes discretion asks you to look the other way till you have digested the green stuff instead of letting it out.

Finding little else to do in the silly free time, I cross the road and stroll into a nearby internet cafe, where I am writing this post....

Okay, okay, I'm coming to the cricket fast.

Checking mails is over pretty fast and I find myself having the leisure to recollect the frantic day's events since that very early Kolkata wakeup. While on the way from Delhi Airport (IG) to East of Kailash I was overtaken by a bus plying from Najafgarh to Delhi. The bus had to be seen to be believed. It was absolutely bursting at the seams with passengers, with people's backs pressed firmly even against the window glazings. Inadequate decentralisation of hubs at many Indian cities ensures that suburban commuters have to face this daily ordeal.

[Now we finally come to the cricket.] I try to imagine a roly poly teenager travelling with his cricket kit every day in a bus like that, a decade back. Other than the 'coffin' he also carries with him a humble aim (honing his skills at the Kotla) and a big dream (to be a top cricketer).

The coffin still travels with him, and he is a top cricketer now. But inside there he may still be some teenaged boy who honed his skills only so much as to support his strengths instead of suppressing them. Things can get awkward when genuine pace bowlers expose the rough edges to his methods from time to time. It is World Cup football season and going into a soccer analogy, so is Brazil's defence sometimes found inept in front of European compactness.

That however does not prevent the Brazilians from letting their boys kick football untrained till they are ten. Time has already told us about the good or bad of it.

The job of Bennett King and his bowlers is to see the interests of West Indies team. If it means making Virender Sehwag of Najafgarh doubt whether he did enough work at the nets during those Kotla days then they are rightfully entitled to that business. The ruthless result-orientedness of modern cricket makes opposition players and coaches track every weakness in a player's game and reflect it back to him bigger, much like those funny mirrors at the carnival. On the positive side though it presents to the targetted opposition player an opportunity to raise his game.

At the start of the Indian 2nd innings on Sunday, a war bugle is sounded by Sehwag's sixer against Fidel Edwards. Fidel's response with awkwardly well directed and fairly quick rib-cage deliveries ensures that there would be no backing out of it. The two protagonists exchange numerous eye contacts, each lasting nearly as long as an extra delivery.

Sehwag displays increasing discomfort from Edwards' accurate hostility as the battle wears on until Edwards feels a twang at the back of his leg in the climactic phase of engaging battle. Edwards limps off with the physio, normalcy is restored and soon Sehwag, as if getting bored at the significant reduction in drama, gifts his wicket yet again to the off stump line of a medium pacer.

A year of Greg Chappell nowithstanding, Virender Sehwag's methods remain largely incorrigible. As with Brazilian football, time only will tell if that is good or bad.