You Must Like Cricket? (2 page)

On the off side, Rahul Dravid had once said, there is God, and then there is Sourav. It's one of those days when you begin to think that on the off side, there is Sourav, and then there is God.

Another text message. This time from Chirantan, one of my closest childhood friends. He lives in Delhi these days, so we don't watch cricket together any more. We grew up together, went to the Eden Gardens together; once he picked his way through a tangle of outstretched legs to spit on a spectator who was obstructing our view.

He is a serious bloke, Chirantan. Serious about his cricket. He is in Kolkata for a few days and we had planned to watch a bit of the final together. Like old times. Now that doesn't seem like such a good idea. We're going to lose, I think. But Chirantan is undeterred. He is on the road and is asking about the score. The roars coming from inside the houses of the middle-class neighbourhood through which he is driving tell him that India's reply has begun well.

The streets are deserted this Saturday evening. If you had taken a walk when the game began (as I did), you would have thought it was a public holiday. As the England innings progressed, the city seemed to turn in on itself, becoming quiet and introspective. You could hear the commentary from every television set inside every flat in every borough across the city.

In the impoverished neighbourhoods, where large families can't afford their own TVs, money has been raised to hire sets for the duration of the tournament. It's common in Kolkata when championships like this one are on; it's imperative when India do as well as they have been doing in England this summer. Gaggles of unemployed anxious young men squat in front of rented televisions propped up on cardboard packing cases or wooden crates. These men are the most outspoken, the most boisterous and uninhibited of India supporters; there's no middle-class self-consciousness to cramp their style. Or their vocal support.

But the England innings has shut even them up. This is not the Indian team's fault, they think, because most of them believe, in the great tradition of the sport they follow, that cricket is a batsman's game, tailored for batsmen, won or lost by them.

Perversely, the bowlers get away with a lot. These fans will not blame the bowlers for allowing the opposition to pile up an intimidating total. No, it's the batsmen's fault. Why couldn't they have got the runs when the other side did? Not today, though. This is beyond us, they murmur, this is beyond any team.

‘106 for 0,' I write back. And then, ‘Sourav, Sehwag on mission impossible.'

The headline writer in me always takes over on occasions like this.

‘Will reach your place in half an hour', comes the reply.

Suddenly it all begins to go horribly wrong. Tudor gets Sourav; Sehwag perishes to Giles; Dinesh Mongia comes and goes; Tendulkar looks out of sorts and is then done in by Giles; and Rahul ‘The Wall' Dravid, so immaculate, so dependable, crumbles.

From 106 for 0 to 146 for 5. Half the side out with the addition of forty runs.

‘Score? Score?' Chirantan asks.

I don't bother to reply.

‘And we're throwing it away again', writes my lawyer friend from Delhi. It's hard to bear the torment.

On television, a sanctimonious commentator calls for more resolve and discipline. He might as well have said ‘India need more balls', or perhaps, to borrow a line from Eddie Murphy, ‘more testicular fortitude'. That's what he meant anyway.

I don't want Chirantan to come over now.

I want to suffer this agony on my own, in silence. I want to grit my teeth, mute the volume and watch till the bitter end.

It's funny, this. Watching cricket with other fans, in a cheering, arguing group is something I love when things are going fine. Then we become part of this backslapping, beer-swilling clique, high on locker-room humour and memories of other victories in other games. ‘Remember Sharjah 1998?' ‘Oh no, this is more like Old Trafford during the World Cup.' ‘Come on, Kanpur in 1989 was more exciting.'

We speak in a code of our own, throwing out dates and names, games and grounds, and each one of us knows what the other means. On those occasions, there is enough bonhomie to go around. Watching India win a game on my own is never as much fun as watching it with people who are as overwhelmed by it as I am. It fosters a sense of belonging like few other things.

But at home alone, jumping up and down in front of the sofa as victory nears is embarrassing. It makes me feel self-conscious. On the other hand, jumping up and down along with a whole lot of other people or hugging complete strangers at the ground makes perfect sense. In the mind of the fan who is scenting victory, there is always security in numbers.

But what happens when the game is slipping away, when India are on the brink of getting thumped? Then I just want to hide away. Watching becomes a masochistic activity, a secret anguish. Watch I must but I must watch in the privacy of my living room. It's a strange sort of protectionism. I can't bear to hear the players being sworn at. And I can't suffer the blackness of my mood being lightened by a casual remark, a stray joke. A perverse pleasure can still be a pleasure.

Defeat is not meant to be taken lightly. Whoever said you needed to be objective about the game? Whoever said it was
just
a game anyway?

The 150 has come up – still for five wickets – and I am about to call Chirantan to tell him that we ought to wait till the Test matches start. The bell rings. He is here.

‘Tendulkar out?' he asks as he comes through the door. The collective groan from inside the houses as he drove past has confirmed his worst fears.

I don't reply. He flops down on the sofa.

Yuvraj Singh and Mohammad Kaif have come together. With 180 runs to get in twenty-six overs, they are cobbling together what the commentators call ‘a semblance of resistance'. Yuvraj cover drives to the fence. Kaif pulls backward of square for four. These two are not taking any chances. We aren't seeing wild slogs here but percentage play, sensible cricket shots which are finding the gaps. Hussain still looks relaxed. In the pavilion, as the camera zooms on his face, Sourav's face is not even grim: it is empty.

What must it be like when you know that the cameras are zooming and a billion people across the world can see your private anguish? It happens only to sportspersons, perhaps, this live beaming of torment to the homes of so many strangers.

Giles's spell is coming to an end. Yuvraj – who is playing with a chipped bone in his finger – picks Giles's last ball early and carts it over midwicket for six. Twelve overs after the two came in, Tudor gets the treatment from Yuvraj: another six over midwicket. Things suddenly explode. Flintoff goes for three consecutive fours in the next over and Tudor is pulled again for six in the over after that.

Runs are coming in a flurry. So are the text messages. Channel 4 is showing the game in the UK and Indian friends who live there now are getting into the act.

The six-year-old in the house next to ours – you can see their living room through our window – is squealing, little fists punching the air and then slamming down hard on the divan on which he sits watching.

Chirantan is yelling, giving the springs of our old sofa a hard time. ‘
Chalo, chalo, chalo! Shesh kore dao!
' (‘Go, go, go! Kill them!')

What is it, this paradox of watching sport, of turning an essentially passive pastime into something so active? In no other form of entertainment are we so much on the margins while being so much at the heart of the action, so utterly powerless to do anything about anything out there and yet so engaged with it, so keen to shape the course of events with our enthusiasm. Can you imagine going to a play and exhorting (insert your favourite actor's name) to act better? Could you seriously believe that your urgent plea will actually have any effect?

Kaif drives Tudor between cover and extra cover. Neither fielder has the chance to move as the ball rockets to the fence. Yuvraj pulls Paul Collingwood to the fence off the front foot, and then does it again to Ronnie Irani.

I am silent, a stone-faced counterpoint to Chirantan's stomping, screaming optimism. My stomach is constricted, the wall of my chest seems to be pushing upwards. It hurts. I always feel uneasy on these occasions. I cannot share my friend's hopefulness. V. S. Naipaul pinned down this anxiety most memorably – although in a completely different context – in his novel
The Enigma of Arrival
. He called it ‘a dream of glory together with a general pessimism, a wishing to hope and a nervousness about hoping'. And so it is with me. I fear that if I dare to hope, what I fear will come to pass.

But the target has shrunk to less than sixty. I pump my fists and do a little jig for the first time. Not hoping for a miracle, not being carried away on the groundswell of this enormous optimism, is hard to resist.

No sooner do I sit down than what I fear happens.

Collingwood holds one back a little, Yuvraj picks the length wrong and tries to send it sailing above midwicket. The ball arches upwards in a parabola, Tudor gets underneath it and hangs on. The spell is broken.

Fifty-nine runs to get in fifty balls.

If you were to make a list of guys you would trust to bat for your life, not one of the men to follow would be on it.

I'm cursing myself. The rest of the room is quiet. Through my window, I can see my little neighbour sitting quite still. Only my lawyer pal is busy with the keypad of his mobile. The message arrives as Harbhajan takes guard. ‘Do you still believe in miracles?'

I believe in Mohammad Kaif. The young man is so unfazed tonight, he maintains his composure with such grace that I won't be surprised to learn that he had an ice bucket strapped to his head beneath his helmet.

He rotates the strike, scampers the singles, keeps talking to Harbhajan, finds the gaps. India are inching forward. The gulf between the runs to get and the balls in which to get them is closing.

Harbhajan sticks around for a while, stodgy and cavalier by turns. Then Flintoff shatters his stumps. Kumble goes for a duck. Zaheer Khan is in and, with Ashish Nehra to follow, India have twelve to get.

Kaif is unperturbed. ‘Mohammad scales the mountain', the
Wisden
website will report the next day and Kaif is up there, where the air is rarefied and breathing is difficult, just a few steps more to go before he can plant the flag at the peak.

And then we are in the final over and with four balls left and four runs still to get, Kaif finds the gap on the off side. We hold our breaths for the moment that the ball speeds across the green. It reaches the fence. Chirantan has knocked me to the ground and Sourav has leapt up, taken off his shirt and is waving it wildly, now he is on the field and on top of Kaif, the firecrackers are going off all around us in the streets of Kolkata and the noise of the supporters at Lord's is deafening.

A text message is coming in but it's not my lawyer friend. He has phoned. I'm on three phones at the same time – the one in the living room, the one in the bedroom and the mobile – and I'm saying the same thing, ‘Yes, yes, it's fucking crazy, it's Lord's again, like nineteen years ago,' and the anguish and the agony of all those lost finals, the label of ‘Chokers, again', are buried beneath the exultation and the tumult and all those voices from all those parts of the world saying ‘We did it, we did it' over and over again.

* * *

Now, in the stillness of the morning, as I hear the water from the shower hit the tiles on the bathroom floor and watch my daughter turn over on her back and look as if she will wake, now is the time to think of things beyond the pitch, beyond the rerun of the images which have filled my wakeful night.

For a cricket match is nothing without its subtext. Its backstory is always a part of the real story. How about this for starters? An Indian captain takes off his shirt, and standing bare-chested on the balcony of Lord's he waves it with wild abandon. It's a gesture of reprisal directed at Flintoff who did much the same thing in Mumbai a year before. But the media will choose to see more in this than was perhaps intended. They'll question whether it is ‘proper' for the skipper – an ambassador for a billion people – to do what he has done.

But hell, Sourav is an ambassador for a new, young generation of cricketers and cricket fans; he is tough, aggressive and articulate. He is unlike any of his predecessors. He is not humble, polite, undemonstrative,
middle class
. Indian cricket has always had about it a sense of elegant puckishness; about splitting cover and extra cover without either fielder moving. It has always been about silk. It has taken Ganguly to put the steel into it.

He sticks by his men and makes hard choices (dropping a bowler like Anil Kumble, who has taken more than 450 Test wickets, if he feels he has a better – or more effective on a particular day and under particular circumstances – spinner at his disposal). And if he swears at his guys on the pitch, they know that he bears them no grudges off it. His men know he will never sell them down the river at a selection committee meeting.

These are assets that are historically rare in Indian cricket. Cricket teams in India have always been riven by factionalism; factions of class (in the 1930s, when the Maharajah of Vizianagram was the skipper, he is said to have treated players from lesser lineage like little more than his personal attendants), of regions, of loyalties.

Here now is the emergence of a new meritocracy. For the first time we are seeing a captain stand behind his players and the players stick up for the captain. Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, one of India's most successful and adventurous skippers, once memorably said that a captain can either lead from the front or push from behind. Sourav has managed to do both.

If one can't recall any Indian captain waving his shirt from the Lord's balcony, one also can't think of any other Indian skipper who would throw his match-winning player to the ground in a rugby tackle and proceed to squeeze the breath out of him in a delighted embrace. Sourav has fostered a rare sense of togetherness. Watch this team play volleyball before the cricket begins. Notice them go into a huddle after the fall of every wicket. And you will begin to get a sense of why this side, when it is at the top of its game, is greater than the sum of its parts.