A metaphysical hangover: Coping with a heavy loss

After the Battle of Waterloo, as the Duke of Wellington surveyed the carnage on the battlefield, he famously remarked, "The saddest thing after a battle lost is a battle gained" (or words to that effect). Well, I hope England suffer a bit too after their great victory at Edgbaston. Perhaps from what Kingsley Amis termed the metaphysical depression of an acute hangover, perhaps from the empathy they might experience for Indian fans, confronted with the loss of the No.1 ranking, and left licking their wounds after one of the worst thrashings of all time in their Test history.

Well, let's be realistic. England might suffer a hangover, but I doubt they'll be feeling sorry for Indian fans anytime soon. They might perhaps say, "Now you know what we felt like" but that's about it.

I'll be honest. When I was a schoolboy (and a graduate student, and a post-doctoral fellow, and sometimes even after that), I often dreamed of India handing out such comprehensive defeats in Test cricket to Pakistan, England, Australia, our most implacable foes (all away, of course).

Some of those fantasy wins had this precise template: win the toss, contemptuously send in the opposition, bowl them out on the first day itself, with strapping young virile Punjabi fast bowlers leading the way, while canny Maharastrians and South Indians snapped up catches in the slips. Then, at leisure, our batsmen, batting for two days, with a wonderful blend of aggression and discipline, skillfully deploying wrist and bicep in equal measure, would grind the opposing bowlers into the dust. And then (after a declaration, of course, for who could bowl out such a team?), bowl the opposition out again, all with a day to spare.

Back to the dressing room, to put up one's feet and to contemplate tea on the Rashtrapati Bhavan lawns with the President.

Somewhere along the line, the deities in charge of dream fulfillment reached in, plucked out the scorecards, and sent them to the Dream Instantiation Unit. But the idiots in charge, proving that divine incompetence is the norm, not the exception, switched the names on the scorecards.

Test match defeats are painful. The close ones torture you with their brief fleeting glimpses of a promised land, cruelly snatched away. The heavy ones are like extended sessions on the rack with the Grand Inquisitor, their exquisitely painful denouement suggesting to us that somewhere in our primeval childhood, we made a really, really bad decision to ever let this game get under our skins.

Since I mentioned that legendary dipsomaniac Kingsley Amis and his notion of a "metaphysical hangover" in the first paragraph, let me close with him, paraphrasing just slightly to accommodate Test cricket:

Your team, dear friend, has simply been thrashed in a Test match, a Test series.