You Must Like Cricket? (3 page)

Here is another coincidence. At the very ground at which India won the 1983 World Cup final and first announced to the world that it could be as good as any nation in limited-overs international cricket, we now see them proclaim that they have a new outfit of spirited young guys who will be the future of the sport in this country. (To make the coincidence sweeter, the two who took India to victory – Yuvraj and Kaif – had won an Under-19 World Cup for their country not so many years before.)

For someone like me, who has grown up watching India lose more games than they have won, it is not just the victory itself that matters. It is the manner of it. It suggests that India are beginning to play their cricket differently. That they can absorb pressure, believe in themselves, be dauntless and ruthless.

Fans tend to make too much of one win (just as they tend to make too much of one defeat) but somehow this one really does have about it a sense of things to come. It means a lot to people like us who first started following cricket in the early or mid-1970s. It also means that my daughter or her friends, when they begin to watch India play, are likely to see a different India play.

If it lasts – and will it? That we can never know, only hope and see over the years – it implies a paradigm shift. (Already, in the spring of 2006, as this book is being wound up, the star cast of Indian cricket has changed. Ganguly is no longer captain. Tendulkar is not the player he once was. The narrative of cricket is continually evolving.) It is impossible to see things coming. Things change, the reality changes. But for fans, these individual moments of joy remain like reference points of truth and beauty within a larger story.

* * *

Cricket gives me – has given me for as long as I can remember – a sense of time: a certain feeling or event in my life is referenced with the memory of a particular game. It also gives me a sense of place. This may be an extraordinarily blinkered way to look at the world (and you have to be extraordinarily blinkered to have Queen's Park Oval flash across your mind the moment someone says Trinidad), but I think of cities in terms of their cricket grounds. It is the most enduring geography lesson I have ever had and it brings closer and makes familiar places with which I have little acquaintance. It is, I have found, something which gives my life a coordinate, a kind of centre amid the changing clutter of daily life with which it is so tough to keep up.

But most of all, perhaps, cricket gives me a sense of myself. They say you only get a sense of yourself when you see yourself in relation to another. Cricket is that great other.

It's like a relationship, this thing between the fan and his sport, some say. Well, only those who are not fans say that. Because it is not like any relationship that I've ever known. (It may be odd to be thinking about all this on the day after a historic win, but then historic wins are, well, historic because they don't come along too often. Usually, there is the routine stuff. And given that we are talking about Indian cricket, the routine stuff does not involve much winning.)

On the average day, it is a relationship that is too full of shame and humiliation, too unrequited and too committed at the same time, too like a one-way street. If my wife had let me down half as many times as India have on the pitch, I would have walked out on her. But when it comes to the game, I can never, however great the disappointment in the last match and however certain I am of impending doom in this one, bring myself to turn away.

Can you?

If you can, you are not one of us. Which, come to think of it, is not such a bad thing. Because you are spared the painful pleasure of being a masochist. All fans – the ones like me who
need
sport to give a sort of shape to life – are masochists. What else can you be when you switch on the TV at three o'clock in the morning knowing that your team is going to get a pasting –
again
?

For those of us who are too far gone, gone far enough in fact to embrace torment (we lost three-nil against Zimbabwe? No matter, throw us a defeat against Bangladesh. We'll still watch. We'll be able to take it), it's not a choice. It's a compulsion. Addiction does not have rationality at its heart.

The pact between a fan and his team is sacrosanct. It cannot be broken. It is not like the colas or the cars or the credit cards or the car tyres the players endorse. Don't like it? Flush it down the toilet. Sell it off. Exchange it for something better. Buy a new one.

When things go wrong on the pitch, some of us go on mock funeral processions. Some of us threaten players' families. (The first gesture is banal; the second despicable. But morality or ethics is not the issue here; it seldom is when you are talking about addiction.) Still, few of us can stay away when our players walk out on to the field. Were we able to do that, TV ratings would slip and channels would not pay millions for satellite rights, companies would hesitate before pumping in billions to sponsor the team and soft-drink majors would worry about putting their money where the nation's heart isn't. The fact that they have not suggests that there are millions out there like me. Sometimes it feels like a brotherhood of misery.

Every fan realises this: feeling miserable is part of the deal. But riding the misery and sticking with it
is
the deal. You can't support another team (Namibia?), or suddenly be passionate about another sport (ice hockey?). It's this or nothing. And nothing is so much worse.

The morning after winning, though, is different – perhaps because it is so rare.

* * *

My wife emerges from the shower, draped in a couple of king-size towels. Her hair is lank, plastered on her skull. She looks achingly beautiful. I have never told her this though I suppose I am telling her now. Smell of soap and shampoo and body lotion. She catches me staring at her in the mirror. ‘Are we going out for lunch or are you going to watch the highlights?' she asks. She thinks this is normal now; she has allowed for – and accommodated – the kink into the rhythm of this Sunday.

Before I can answer, the mobile begins to trill.

‘Feels like a hangover.' Another friend.

Oh no it doesn't. I smile to myself. I type out my response quickly. ‘Feels like nothing else on earth.'

I
n the autumn
of 1993, I spent a while as an intern at the London
Times
's offices in Pennington Street. A friend of a family friend of ours in Kolkata, a veteran cricket writer, had given me a letter of introduction to the paper's Sports Editor. I was in London nearing the end of a journalism course and this was an opportunity like no other to gain what everyone in India called ‘invaluable experience'.

It was one of the most memorable periods of my time in London. I revelled in the sense of self-importance it gave me. (Afterwards, I would often say, ‘At
The Times
, they would have sweepstakes during an important football game'; or ‘At
The Times
, some of the writers often work from home'; or ‘At
The Times
, they always asked me . . .' – statements which were sometimes true, just as often made-up, but always prefaced with that phrase, ‘At
The Times'
. This practice stopped only when I realised that a) people thought I was a crashing bore, and b) they didn't give a damn about how things were done at
The Times
anyway.)

I loved the hum and the busyness and the clutter of the office, the talk of well-connected, experienced journalists and the subsidised canteen where I would have my lunch with plastic cutlery. I loved, I now admit with more than a fair amount of guilt, the array of telephones from which I could make frequent calls back home – a rare luxury which seemed more delightful because it was so furtive.

And of course I loved the assignments I used to be sent on. Finally, after the mock-ups I had had to do at journalism school, this was the real thing.

That autumn, Nigel Short was playing Garry Kasparov for the world chess championship. I was sent to one of the games to write a colour piece. I arrived outrageously early at the Savoy in my eagerness to get my first ever accreditation card – a blue name tag with black typed letters. I stood there in the foyer fingering the card's edges.

Suddenly I saw a small, lean man, familiar from his photos on the dust jackets of the books that lined the shelves of my room as a student. I couldn't believe my luck. I shuffled towards him.

‘No, they haven't left any message, sir,' the thickset man from across the counter was saying. ‘We don't have your name on this list. But I'll check again. Who did you say you were again?'

‘Martin Amis.'

‘Ah.' Thickset sucked the end of his ballpoint pen. ‘Any proof of identification, sir?'

Amis shrugged. He looked bored. Then he produced his driver's licence.

As the official prepared Amis's name tag, I sidled up to him and extended my hand.

He was friendly and kind and looked pleased as I babbled something about how I'd read everything he had written. ‘Oh,
The Rachel Papers
. I feel a little embarrassed about it now. But I was young then, only twenty-three, Soumya,' he said peering at my tag to get my name.

Soo-me-ah. That's how he pronounced it.

‘It's pronounced Show-mo,' I said. ‘Not phonetic.'

‘Oh. Sou-mo.'

‘No. The “s” is soft. As in “sugar”.'

‘I see. And is it always like that with Indian names?'

‘No, not always.'

The tag was ready and Amis was clipping it on.

‘So how does Sa-shin Tendulkar pronounce his name?'

‘Sachin. You've got the “s” right. But the “ch” is different. It's like in “champion”.'

Amis smiled. Already, even while we were speaking, I was rerunning the sequence of events inside my head, planning how I would tell it in my letters home to my friends. I was also, at the same time, running on fast forward, imagining how Amis and I would become best friends and have a drink together after a game of tennis. This was experience, I thought then. This was what I had come to London
for
. Later in the evening, he even gave me his telephone number. Over the following weeks – to my shame – I even called. On several occasions. I invariably got his answering machine.

Afterwards, when the glamour had worn off, what struck me most about that first conversation was how it seemed to epitomise the English view of Indians. It would be repeated time and again over the years. It's a surefire conversational opener, a safe, neutral topic. If you're Indian, you must be crazy about cricket.

Some of it has to do with the fact that it is the only game that India is really ever any good at. If you're Brazilian, you must be crazy about football. It is a stereotype we all acknowledge. Whenever I meet anyone from Brazil, I always ask why so many of their footballers have various versions of the name Ronaldo. One Brazilian woman I met in Mauritius replied, ‘Dunno. I don't really watch football. I've lived in Baltimore all my life.'

India has been playing international cricket since 1932 but, in a way, it all started with the 1983 World Cup. The fact was that India did not merely win the tournament; it was the year which marked the beginning of India as a cricket superpower – and the gradual shifting of the game's heart, soul and bank balance from Lord's to Kolkata.

The image of India as a nation fixated on cricket became sharper during the 1990s. This was the decade in which perhaps the single most significant social change of recent years occurred in India: the arrival of satellite television. Cricket's viewing figures shot up, of course, but it wasn't merely about the numbers of people watching. Satellite TV made the game far more accessible and far more plentiful for the average fan. He could now, from his living room, just as easily watch the Ashes as the match being played in his hometown.

As viewing figures grew and the game became stronger, everybody wanted a part of it. Cricket was making incredible amounts of money from advertising and TV rights. In no time, and in a tournament being played outside India, billboards of Indian companies could be seen in the stadium. By the time the World Cup came around in England in 1999, several of the main sponsors – Hero Honda, LG, Pepsi and Emirates Airways – were targeting subcontinental audiences.

This, of course, was a period in which cricket was being marketed as a global game. With tournaments in non-Test playing nations like Canada and the Netherlands, the sport's reach was widening. The subcontinent played the key role in expanding its frontiers. India began to wield more clout in the running of the game as a whole. Jagmohan Dalmiya, one of its shrewdest administrators, became boss of the International Cricket Council.

Today, in the first decade of the new century, much of the money that keeps cricket financially healthy comes from India. According to
Time Asia
, of the $45 million that the England and Wales Cricket Board received for the right to show the 1999 World Cup, India and Sri Lanka accounted for more than half. And that was small beer. In the next round of deals, the ICC received $550 million for sponsorship and broadcast rights to two World Cups (2003 and 2007) and three champions trophies. This would not have been possible without advertising and satellite-TV money from the subcontinent. A huge chunk of the 1.25 billion global television audience for the South African World Cup was Indian.

TV gave the Indian fan not merely a more diverse menu; it offered his obsession wings. Suddenly, we were exposed to fandom in the international sense: faces painted in the country's colours, banners and placards, the Mexican wave and the chants. Seeing what our counterparts did in other parts of the world gave us a template. Young people going to the grounds in India or watching the game from their living rooms realised for the first time that there existed a code of conduct for supporters, liable to be adapted differently according to the demands of each ground or team, but a code of conduct nonetheless. (The Bharat Army, an indefatigable – and indefatigably good-humoured – band of expatriate Indian supporters who danced the bhangra at cricket grounds, was modelled on the Barmy Army.) Before long, fans – and players – from this part of the world began to realise that they were more crucial to the health and the future of the game than they had hitherto believed.