Beware the ire of the Indian armchair fan

A scroll down the reader's comments section of any cricket article on the web will quickly educate one into the reality that we fans are an emotional lot - quite intemperate in our praise or excoriation of our idols, and invariably scathing about our team's opponents. The blogosphere is filled with bloviators foaming at the mouth, and while no nationality seems to have a monopoly on stupidity, some definitely seem more extreme than others. Belying cricket's image of a bucolic game played by gentlemen, the game's keyboard warriors seem cut from much rougher cloth than anyone would expect.

In this blog, I ponder a theory: is it likely that the higher the level at which one has played the game, the calmer and more balanced one is likely to be in reacting to its fluctuating fortunes? And conversely, the less adept one was at playing the game, the more extreme one's judgements may be? I'm not very sure about the veracity of my claim; it's obviously a generalisation with many exceptions.

During the 2003 World Cup in South Africa, a group of us fans in Honolulu pooled resources for a live telecast of the matches and watched at the home of one of us. Our small group was multinational - weighted towards the subcontinent - though I don't recall anyone from either the West Indies or Africa (South Africa or otherwise). I viewed the occasion as a chance to compile an ethnography of cricket fans. And gradually I noticed that it wasn't the nationality of the fans that correlated with the ways they reacted to events on the field. Rather, the calmest watchers were invariably also the best cricketers, often people who had played the game at a level that required real skill - representing a university renowned for its cricketing prowess, for instance.

When a batsman got out, they tended to see it more as a result of good bowling (or fielding) rather than his well-known bonehead tendencies. When a captain's decision backfired, they shrugged their shoulders suggesting that sometimes your hunches work and at other times they don't. And when the team's spearhead was getting smeared by the opponent's tailenders, rather than attribute it to his losing the plot as usual under pressure, they gave credit to the pluck and luck of the batsmen.

I am not suggesting these skilled cricketers were lacking in passion for the game or a desire to win: in fact, their own success at it probably arose from precisely those qualities. Nor did they eschew judgement in evaluating the merits and abilities of various players on the field. It was more that they viewed the game with a degree of detachment - as a contest between teams of differing abilities or skills, knowing that, more often than not, the team that was collectively better would prevail: this was not something that could be overcome (except on rare occasions) by trying harder or being more passionate.

I was reminded of their detachment when some years ago MS Dhoni sarcastically told the media at a post-match conference that no matter how hard someone like Sreesanth tried, he was never going to bat like Bradman. This was probably Dhoni's exasperated response to yet another jibe that maybe India were losing because their players weren't trying hard enough.

At the other end of the spectrum, it was hard to miss the fact that the less success one had in the game, the more one tended to be severely critical of the abilities and, regrettably, often the character of the players involved. Further, for such fans, the minute a player from one's home team succeeded, he was immediately hailed as a remarkable talent. They fluctuated wildly between praise and calumny in their assessment of players.

So Ashish Nehra, who had run through England in the league stage in that 2003 tournament, went overnight from being in the same league as Wasim Akram to being a useless trundler when he failed to pick up a wicket in the final. Sourav Ganguly, hailed as a tactical genius when his team was winning, was castigated for his lack of nous (and courage) when he decided to bowl first in the final. (Okay, that decision still sticks in my craw, but surely hindsight plays a part in our easy critique? And after all those years of Ganguly walking in to face the music first up in one-dayers, his courage at least should not be under question?)

If I am right, or even mostly correct, in my theory, then it should be obvious why manic ranters are so over-represented amongst cricket fans everywhere: for every one player who succeeds in ascending the steep and slippery pyramid of cricketing success there are tens of thousands (or tens of millions in the case of India) of the rest of us who tried but never made it very far up. The performance of our cricketing team becomes a site on which we project our innermost fantasies of success - and we are therefore overly elated when they come good. Conversely, that same site also becomes the source of our deepest nightmares of inadequacy and frustration - and hence the intensity of our disappointment and bitterness when we lose.

As I reread the above, the social scientist in me is not entirely convinced by my theory; the amateur psychologist is, however, rather pleased by its explanatory potential. I think what I like most about it actually is that it offers a rather secular, common-sense explanation for why fans from India seem to be over-represented at the fanatical end of the spectrum: the simple logic of numbers decrees that the disproportion between those who make it in this game and those who are left behind is the greatest in our case.