You Must Like Cricket? (14 page)

The most memorable Test matches and Test series are always animated by these special encounters. When Australia visited India in 1997–8 it was Shane Warne versus Sachin Tendulkar. During the Asian Test Championship, it was Sachin versus Shoaib Akhtar.

When Shoaib arrived in India in the winter of 1999, he was that rare and fiercely beautiful thing: one of the quickest bowlers of all time, a man capable of inspiring fear in the heart of the batsman. He was not the most reliable; he was not always accurate. But he could, on occasion, send down a blindingly fast delivery, the one which rips through the gate before the batsman has had time to bring his bat down; the one even when we see it broken down into super-slo-mo, still seems frighteningly, unplayably fast.

On the second day of the Eden Test match, Shoaib bowls just such a ball. It is the first ball that Sachin faces – Shoaib bowled Dravid with the previous delivery – and he is back in the pavilion before the crowd, who were applauding him rapturously on his way to the wicket, has had time to quieten down. The mini-theme of the match has been set. In two successive balls, the visitors have ripped the heart out of the Indian first innings.

For a couple of seconds, there is the kind of silence that you find only at sporting grounds when misfortune – unpalatable, unthinkable misfortune – has struck. One hundred thousand people go quiet as suddenly as if someone has flicked a switch. It is dramatic, this silence; it is chastening.

Then the cries erupt.

‘Fucking Shoaib, go to hell.'

‘I'll screw his sister, bloody bastard.
Saala banchod
.'

‘Paki! Paki!' (There is an unfathomable irony here. When Indians call Pakistanis ‘Pakis', they have no inkling that for those who invented the term, ‘Paki' can mean anyone from the subcontinent. That, in the UK, a Paki can be an Indian.)

No one is blaming Tendulkar. But, and this is the incomprehensible bit, no one acknowledges how good the ball was either. (If it was good enough to have beaten Tendulkar all ends up, it must have been pretty special.) I feel like squirming. But the spectators are packed in so tight that there isn't the space.

When Pakistan come out to bat trailing by thirty-eight, the match has been thrown wide open.

Eager to redeem his first-innings duck, Anwar plays, as he so often has against India, an innings on which the match may turn. His 188 not out is a classic, but it is a lone hand: Youhana gets fifty-six; the other nine batsmen manage eighty-two runs between them. (In an inversion that is so typical of Pakistan cricket, the last four wickets – the saviours in the first innings – fall for merely thirty-two runs.) Srinath takes eight for eighty-five (making it thirteen in the match) but the spectre of Shoaib is looming over the Indian batsmen. No one is quite sure if Srinath's effort has been enough.

India come out needing 279 to win the match.

Ramesh scores well again, though his leaden-footed swishes outside off stump make you wonder how he manages not to get an edge. Laxman plays in his usual limp-wristed manner – if he did not have a bat in his hand, he'd look dreadfully camp. The two put on a century opening stand. Then with the score on 108, Ramesh is out.

‘Aren't they going to leave some runs for Tendulkar?' asks a man in the row in front of me. ‘Another 171 to get,' he says with a quick glance at the scoreboard. ‘And another wicket to go before he comes in.'

‘They should have sent in Tendulkar instead of Dravid,' says my neighbour. ‘I want to see him murder Shoaib.'

‘Yeah, a duck at the Eden. Can you imagine? No one does that to Sachin in Kolkata. Bloody Pakis.'

As India stride on (125 for 1, 130 for 1) people are beginning to get edgy. No Test between India and Pakistan has ever been decided at the Eden Gardens. The prospect of seeing a winner in a game with so much needle is winding the crowd up. Disconcertingly, it seems to me that a lot of people are spoiling for a fight – whichever way things go.

‘Mian doesn't want Tendulkar to get all the glory.' ‘Mian' is skipper Mohammad Azharuddin.

Someone else pipes up: ‘Mian loves Pakis, na!'

Azharuddin is a Muslim and his religion sometimes makes him vulnerable. The present conversation really doesn't make any sense of course – the new man in, Dravid, is a Hindu just like Sachin. But then, if the sort of people who say these things were rational, they wouldn't be saying them in the first place.

With the score on 134, Laxman falls to Saqlain. There's wild cheering as Laxman trudges back to the pavilion, but it's more to welcome the next man in than to acknowledge the Hyderabad batsman's elegantly crafted innings. With 145 to win and Rahul Dravid at the other end, Sachin Tendulkar emerges from the pavilion, the afternoon sun sliding off his twirling bat.

When Tendulkar walks out to the middle in a home Test, you can almost smell the unnaturally heavy burden of hope that he carries. The clapping and the cheering start from the stands on either side of the pavilion. Then the roar radiates outwards and all around, the ripple of applause swelling to a wave that washes over the ground and then drowns it. Everyone is on their feet; by the time the young man has reached the pitch, looked around, touched his helmet, whirled his bat a couple of times and performed what the Indian writer Mukul Kesavan once referred to as his ‘crotch jerk', every pair of hands in the stadium is sore. And he has not yet faced a ball.

As he takes guard, everything goes quiet. You could be inside a cathedral. You can sense the veneration. You can almost hear the prayers. You know that lurking somewhere in the minds of all these people is a sense of fear: that their boundless expectations, just this time, might not be met. When Tendulkar walks in to bat, every spectator feels that anything – and everything – is possible. The silence as he readies to face his first ball is an acknowledgement of that fact.

On the afternoon of 19 February 1999, 100,000 people are waiting for Tendulkar to explode. They're thinking of the golden duck in the first innings. They want vengeance; it is only fair – and only natural.

The first boundary is greeted with the sort of applause you get when a player has reached a hundred. And then, with Sachin not yet in double figures, it happens.

Tendulkar turns away a ball from Shoaib and sets off for a run. From where I am sitting (in the members' stand to the left of the pavilion, beyond the fine-leg fence if the batsman is at the pavilion end), I see the following things in quick succession: Tendulkar approaches the bowler's end; Shoaib is standing in front of the wicket, and they collide; the throw from the substitute fielder hits the stumps; Tendulkar is scrambling. The Pakistanis are celebrating. They think he hasn't made his ground. The umpire gives Tendulkar out. He starts walking back. The scoreboard says 145 for 3. (What has actually happened I cannot say. The Eden Gardens still does not have a giant screen so there are no replays. Even when I see it later on TV, in slow motion and freeze-frames, I am none the wiser.)

By the time Tendulkar has reached the shade of the members' stand, the stirrings have begun to gather momentum. Spectators around me are screaming, an angry, uncontrollable torrent of filth directed at Shoaib and the rest of the Pakistan team.

‘Butchers, cheats, Pakistan
murdabad!
'

‘Fucking Muslims, go back to your own country.'

‘Cheats! Bastards!
Hai Hai!
Go back!'

The first hail of bottles comes from Block J, to my left. They vault over the high fence, over the heads of the policemen ringing the boundary, to land on the edge of the field. Before long, the grass is littered with sharp, squat, pointed, blunt or heavy objects. The players are in a huddle at the centre. The umpires look embarrassed, they're consulting each other and the Pakistan captain.

I'm sitting in the middle tiers of the stand and things are getting dangerous. However hard they fling their ammunition, those in the upper reaches of the stands will never find their target. Bottles – some still full of water – are falling all around me, like grenades. I cover my head with my hands, sink to my knees on the gritty concrete and wait for the worst. The guy next to me (the meek man with the huge voice) is attacking his concrete seat. A group of young men have come to lend him a hand. The seat splinters bits of stone and sand. Carried away on waves of hatred, they hurl the debris on to the field.

Whenever I look up, I can see faces contorted with rage. It seems like a riot. It
is
a riot. It is mindless, senseless, and after a while it turns in on itself. Small groups of spectators are beginning to fight among themselves. The riot police move in, shoving and pushing their way into the narrow space between the rows of seats, their batons flailing. Dull thwacks catch anyone who happens to be in the arcs of their vicious swats.

It takes a while to bring things under control. Even then, play cannot restart immediately. The Pakistan players fear, with some justification, for their safety. They're reluctant to stand close to the boundary. An early tea is taken. Tendulkar emerges from the pavilion to make a plea for peace and sanity. He walks the circumference of the field.

When play finally resumes India have lost their rhythm. In the evening session they lose the three key wickets of Dravid, Azharuddin and Mongia. As Sourav and night-watchman Kumble walk in at stumps, India are on 214. They need another sixty-five to win. There are four wickets in hand.

The crowd jeered every time Akram and Shoaib touched the ball. And they are not done yet. Walking out of the Eden Gardens, among the thousands trooping across the maidan outside the stadium and towards the buses and taxis on Chowringhee, I catch snatches of conversation which suggest that the worst is still to come.

‘Akram should have called Sachin back.'

‘Yes, don't you remember what Viswanath did against England at Mumbai? He called the batsman back.'

‘I mean, it was a clear case of cheating. I
saw
it. Shoaib slammed into Sachin. I
saw
it.' The man is shaking his head. Each time he repeats himself he grows more convinced that he is right.

‘What do the rules of the game say about it?'

‘Aw, forget the rules. It
was
cheating.'

‘
Banchod
. Sisterfuckers. We won't let them off if they look like winning tomorrow.'

They don't. And the papers do nothing to help matters.

Supporters are waving copies of the Kolkata-based English daily the
Telegraph
as they settle into their seats on the final morning. It reminds me of the Indian parliament, MPs brandishing copies of dailies in the House as sticks to flog the opposition with. ‘
akram loses india, may win test
,' says the headline. The
Telegraph
has made no pretence at objective journalism – it has sided with the crowd. So things got out of hand? Come come, the poor guys were given a raw deal. The fault was Akram's. ‘He could have called back Sachin Tendulkar and become a hero. But he chose to sour the goodwill generated by him and his team with one gesture he chose not to make.'

Everyone in the ground knows what would have happened to Akram back in Pakistan had he called Sachin back and then lost the Test. They know the Pakistani captain had the rules of the game on his side, that he's a professional cricket player, that he wants to win a tough match by any legal means. Claiming that he should have called Sachin back is like suggesting that a tennis player ask for a key point to be replayed because he has won it on a net call. But that's not what the spectators at the Eden Gardens want to read.

I leave the ground as soon as the first bottle lands on the field. India are nine wickets down, and Akram has bowled beautifully. I am scared; I don't want to repeat the previous afternoon's crouching vigil.

In hindsight, it is a pretty smart decision.

By the time I get back home and switch on the TV (there, that's the masochism at work again), the commentators are talking about the Eden Gardens's hour of shame. Play has been suspended: the barrage of bottles, fruits, stones and slabs of concrete has sent the players off.

It continues for two more hours. Then the crowd seems to calm down. The players are coaxed to return. No sooner have they trooped back than the trouble starts again.

I remember the guy I had met outside the stadium the evening before. ‘Sisterfuckers. We won't let them off if they look like winning.' Clearly, he is not alone.

The match referee considers awarding the match to Pakistan, but ICC boss Jagmohan Dalmiya – the man who dreamed up this tournament – is insistent that this charade of a Test match be played out to its grim, sordid end.

Probably bored with the vandalism, thousands of spectators have left the ground. The riot police have moved in again. The truncheons come down, connecting with bone and flesh. The dull thuds are muted on TV. But I was there yesterday, I can imagine what it is like. There are people cowering on the concrete; there are people trying to run; there are children and women. But the police catch them all, flicking out a boot here, bringing down a fist there. The Eden Gardens does not look like a cricket stadium.

In the end, after the stands have been cleared, the players reappear. There's a smattering of spectators in the upper tiers. They make the ground look even more cavernous and desolate. Pakistan take the last wicket before a single run is added. They have won by forty-six runs. The players seem embarrassed, eager to get the game over and done with as soon as they can.

After the match, Akram blames the media more than the crowd. He calls the incident ‘the saddest thing ever to have happened in Test cricket'. But he says ‘it is all because of you people and your reports. You have held them [the crowd] responsible for the wrongdoings but I will never blame them.'

The Pakistan captain is both right and wrong. The media must bear some responsibility but they didn't start this; they merely fed the frenzy. In the best tradition of tabloid journalism, they gave people what they wanted to read.