Season ball to ball season

USA’s premier cricket tournament, the USA Cricket Association’s (not so fondly known as USACA) ‘2010 Senior Nationals’ has just concluded. The tournament serves as a sieve that separates the star-spangled trousers from the spar-strangled diapers. Ignorance adorns the guise of passion, and negligence, administration, during a lot of this tournament with pure talent punctuating it at vital moments. The mug shots for USA’s team page for the next round of the ICC’s World Cricket League (WCL) emerge from this extended weekend. And yet, a vast majority of the weekend transformers from the summer couldn’t be bothered to take note.

This dichotomy seems predetermined when you know that a lot of the league cricketers in the USA hadn’t even played cricket with the “seasoned ball” – a term sometimes used on the subcontinent to refer to the iconic “red cherry” – before they arrived here. It is a privilege to play cricket in whites with a 5.5-ouncer and all the gear that it demands in most countries from which these cricketers come. From my experience growing up in Bombay and Madras, the well-established leagues, highly organised clubs, abundance of high quality talent and scarcity of pitches represented a significant entry barrier to a lot of the observers of the sport if they wanted to experience playing a “proper” season-ball cricket match.

They come to the land of opportunity and … voila! They now have access to public parks, facilities, money and equipment. They can play season-ball matches, weekend after weekend, leaving cricket widows and orphans in their wake. The “parks and recreations” departments in most municipalities provide their residents with access to these grounds. In many cases, they will even throw in permits and create and maintain pitches and outfields.

In at least one example, in the state of New Jersey, the local government has actually built a nice cricket ground, complete with a pitch in the middle of it and pylons of flood lights all around to facilitate night cricket. It is another matter that in their eagerness to serve their residents, they threw in some “sod”, late in the fall of 2009, hoping it would take root and eventually mend the undulations in the bowlers’ run-ups before the beginning of the next ball season. But the next ball-season came; the grass never took root and the bowler’s heels would keep throwing up huge chunks of green and brown stuff into the air, mostly into the face of … well … my face, actually! “No Baa..sffpppfssss” … “tspppfff” … “sppf.” But I die-grass. How many members of the dozens of clubs who enjoy the luxury of playing night cricket on this ground can claim to have even imagined doing so “back home”? The closest they’ve probably been to doing so is at some “tennis-ball” or “tape-ball” night tournament that they went to watch because it was happening near their home and the noise wasn’t allowing them to sleep anyway.

It would seem natural, that when those observers arrive on the US shores, they pounce on the chance to drive the seasoned ball to the boundary or grab the opportunity to swing it away from the batsmen. While some of them might even be successful in doing those things, most of them would never pounce or grab anything on the cricket field again.

“People don’t want to watch 40-plus men run around a field on a nice summer day,” went a parent of an up-and-coming teenage cricketer in New Jersey recently. Maybe that’s why many of you probably don’t know that one such man scored 200-plus runs in a single Twenty20 innings recently. But 40-plus men are the blood that nourishes whatever body of cricket the US has to show for itself. They are interested primarily in playing as much season-ball cricket as they can, thereby making up for what they missed the first 20-plus years of their lives. No wonder “comebacks” into the national team are made by 40-plus men. The last time I had heard the words “40-plus” and “comeback” in the same sentence before was when I saw a doctor on the TV asking a patient to return for a prostate exam. But now that many of them have kids in the early teens, the much-needed oxygen might enter their blood.