You Must Like Cricket? (7 page)

Now, at Lord's at the beginning of the 1994 county season, the
real
reality had stepped in.

* * *

Of course, much had changed in the intervening eighteen years. Perhaps, most noticeably, in the amount of cricket being played. In 1975, for instance, the world saw seventeen Tests. Three decades on, in 2005, that number was up to forty-three. Another example. In the 1970s, India played thirteen one-day internationals; in the 1980s, 155; in the 1990s, it was 257.

This surfeit has killed the sharpness of our memories. I still remember, in vivid detail, India's tour of the West Indies in 1976. Especially the third Test in Port of Spain: sitting up in bed till the small hours with my fingers curled around a mug of Bournvita and Dicky Rutnagur and Sushil Doshi on All India Radio; Brijesh Patel racing to his forty-nine not out during that incredible 400-plus run chase after Gavaskar and Vishwanath had scored centuries to lay the foundations for victory.

In contrast, when I try to recall India's 1996 tour of the Caribbean and the match that we ought to have won but collapsed and lost instead, I can't. Without looking at the scorecard, all I can say with any certainty was that Tendulkar was captain. And yet every ball of that Test was beamed live to my living room. I had watched. And I have forgotten. It has become one among the hundreds of matches that we see every year now. When my daughter watches cricket, she can, by flicking the remote, switch seamlessly between Brisbane and Bridgetown, Harare and Hyderabad. The rarity has vanished.

Along with the rarity, the preciousness and worth of a great performance have also diminished. Too many runs are scored now, too many wickets taken for even the most dedicated follower to keep track. (In the 1980s, Indian batsmen scored seventeen centuries in one-day internationals. In the 1990s, that number more than trebled.) With the spiralling numbers, we have had a spiralling number of superlatives; they have become the currency of daily use. For commentators now, every shot is magnificent, every catch is superb, every ball a beauty. Restraint and understatement, never easy qualities to achieve, have been wantonly sacrificed in the pursuit of excitement.

And there are the casualties too. Now that so much cricket is broadcast live, we are in the danger of losing something precious, namely imagination – the gift that still enables us to visualise Stan McCabe's 232 by reading Neville Cardus's description, the gift that made me fall in love with the game, the gift that makes us all become fans.

However, there may be signs of a revival. The delicious paradox is that while technology was once responsible for imagination's banishment, technology may be responsible for its return. And it is cricket commentary on the internet that has made this possible.

Like radio and unlike TV, ball-by-ball commentary on the net manages to create the notion of an inviolable world. It requires the fan to invest thought; it demands of him complete engagement and intelligence for its full enjoyment. From the words that keep coming up on the screen – furiously typed, with a sense of urgency that comes with the commentator trying to keep the reader up to date all the time (more difficult even than radio: it takes more time to write than to speak) – the fan has to conjure up his notion of what is happening on the pitch.

Television tells it like it is in real time; what you see on the screen is what you get. When you are following cricket on the internet, the report is coming to you at a remove: not only is there a time lapse between the report and the events it describes but it is always filtered through the eyes, brain and hand of the guy who is writing it. Far more than watching cricket, listening to it (or reading a ball-by-ball) engenders a rapport between the fan and the commentator (or reporter). And if immediacy is, in a sense, sacrificed, intimacy is gained.

Intimacy is the common denominator between radio and the internet. But the net takes the idea of inclusiveness further. It expands on the idea of sharing between commentator and listener and creates a whole chat room full of cricket-obsessed people.

Intimacy, inclusiveness and imagination: for me, these are the things that make an obsession full-blown. I don't know how many six-year-olds are cementing their love affairs with the game by following it on the internet.

But they and I will be family.

* * *

In his absorbing book
A Season with Verona
(travel writing, cultural studies, analysis of mob psychology and football fandom all packed into a season watching the Italian team Hellas Veronas fight relegation from Serie A), Tim Parks reflects on the etymology of the word ‘fan'. It comes, he says, from the Latin ‘fanaticus', which means ‘worshipper'. The team becomes the god; the fans become, during matches, a sort of zealot, a ‘weekend Taliban'.

By the time we returned to Kolkata from Bankura, I had become that sort of a Taliban, a full-fledged cricket fundamentalist. And as in London, my mother stoked the flames of this fanaticism.

She taught me fielding positions by sketching a rough approximation of a cricket field, pencilling in first slip, third man, square leg. She subscribed, on my behalf, to a weekly sports magazine called – unsurprisingly –
Sports Week
. My first scrapbook of cricket pictures – mostly in black and white, mostly rather grainy – was culled from this magazine. She helped me snip out the pictures (the only pair of scissors in the house were huge – you could use them as garden shears or as a murder weapon – and I was too young to be left alone with them), let me muck myself up with a pot of glue, suggested artistic angles at which I should place my clippings and finally wrote imaginative headlines and captions for each player page in variously coloured felt-tipped pens.

All the while, I honed my game. Batsmen were my idols. I spent hours impressing our landlady's grown-up son by shouldering arms to balls outside the off stump. (A rare Indian quality, though I say it myself.) There was nothing restrained and passive about the action of leaving the ball, though. I left balls not with a wary uncertainty but with a contemptuous glare, arms swirling in an ostentatious arabesque.

Bowlers were my villains, a notion strengthened by the West Indian pacers' intimidating performance against India in the 1976 series. The grace and fluidity of a fast bowler's run up, the guile and subtlety of a spinner's art were lost on me. Bowlers were there, in my view, to allow batsmen to be heroes, to assume centre stage, to appropriate for themselves the pivotal – and most memorable – moments in the narrative of a match. In the two years in Bankura, I had batted and batted whenever I played and cried and cried (and was deemed young enough to get away with it) if someone knocked over my stumps or caught an ill-timed, cross-batted swat.

By the time I arrived in Kolkata again, all I wanted to do was watch a proper batsman in action on an international cricket field.

The time wouldn't be long in coming.

* * *

Block J at the Eden Gardens is one of the worst places in the world to watch cricket. It runs from about wide midwicket to deep backward square leg if the batsman is at the pavilion end, so you are about as well placed to see the turn of a ball or the authenticity of a shout for leg before or the swiftness of a batsman's reflexes as he pivots for a short-arm pull as you would be standing on the road in front of the stadium. Before the 1987 World Cup final it was uncovered, leaving spectators exposed to the merciless midday sun. And the cheering, jeering, raucous crowd (those who had begged, borrowed or stolen for an inexpensive ticket to a day's cricket) were the kind of people that the members of the Cricket Association of Bengal, from their stands on either side of the pavilion, looked down upon with a mixture of contempt and deep-seated resentment. (‘God, what do
they
want to come to the cricket for?')

None of which was of any consequence to me as I found myself on my concrete bench on 2 January 1979.

On one side of me was one of those irritating teenagers who seem to believe that because they are fat and need a hell of a lot of space to accommodate
both
their buttocks on the concrete, the boy next to him is obliged to sit with his knees pressed together
all
the time. On the other side was my aunt, who was exactly the kind of cricket follower that I, later on in life, would scornfully avoid while discussing cricket (‘not a
real
fan, not one of us'; by then I had become a member of the Cricket Association of Bengal), but who had kindly volunteered to chaperone me on the final day of a Test match that had sparked to life. In front of me was a tall, broad and loud man who effectively blocked out my entire view. I had to stand on the seat to get any real sense of the play (and risk being pelted by oranges, abuse or worse) or else crouch forward till I practically had my head in a lock between the sides of the men sitting in front of me. My uncle (a
real
fan, I would admit then as well as later), who had actually got me the ticket, had not been able to get three seats side by side; he was on the other side of the ground.

Perhaps they weren't ideal circumstances for my baptism but I was determined not to let the small matter of being unable to watch the game take anything away from my sense of awe and occasion.

From where I was sitting, the players seemed like midgets. The faces were blurs: the only way you could tell who was who was from the thickness of a waist, the swinging of an arm or the tilt of a cap. But I chanted with the rest of the crowd, clapping till my palms were red and sore for days afterwards, screamed till my voice broke and felt, well, so
grown up
to be a part of this sea of grown-ups. Before coming to the ground for the first time, I had always watched cricket in the isolation of my home. It did me good to see this mass hysteria; it was the first real indication I had ever had that my obsession was not unique.

But the main impression that first visit to the Eden Gardens left me with was how
unreal
the whole spectacle seemed. It was not like the game I watched on television. There was the distance, of course, and the distortion – or obfuscation – that distance breeds. But there was something else too: the vast number of people all around (I had never seen 100,000 people together in one place before), the roar, the glint of sunshine on an angled bat, the heat which made you feel dizzy, the hovering cloud of cigarette smoke and the sound of crackers.

In a curious inversion of the reality-illusion paradox, the actual game in front of my eyes was only a reflection – immensely enlarged in scale but diminished in terms of individual components – of what was borne to me at home across the airwaves. The TV pictures were more real.

I don't remember much of what I saw. The West Indies had come to India with Alvin Kallicharran as captain (Kerry Packer had taken away the best of the best for his WSC series). The first two Tests at Mumbai and Chennai had been drawn and the Windies came to Kolkata more with the intention of avoiding defeat than snatching victory. That day, after the West Indies had reached 143 for 4 at tea chasing 335, the match suddenly opened up. The Indian new-ball bowler Karsan Ghavri snapped up three quick wickets but a dropped chance (Viswanath let Marshall – and probably the match – slip through his fingers) and fading light combined to rob India of victory.

None of this has stayed with me (I had to look it up). I can't really say why. Had India won, perhaps, it would have. (Winning is terribly important for a nine-year-old. Draws are never honourable or fair; they merely seem inconclusive, they merely seem like
not
winning.) Had I watched it on television, perhaps it would have.

My most enduring memory of that Test is of the Indian scorecard on the fourth day. It read 361 for 1 – Gavaskar 182 not out and Vengsarkar 157 not out.

‘Look at that scoreboard,' my uncle said (we were watching television together), ‘and never forget how pride makes your heart swell when you see something like that.'

He was right. I have never forgotten it. But the memory comes to me courtesy of the TV, not from my day at the Eden.

* * *

Actually, I do remember one incident from that day. And the emotion that accompanied it is still fresh: it was a sense of cringing shame.

On his way to a debonair forty-six, Kallicharran developed some sort of a problem with his box. The Indian fielders clustered around and, through the crack of space left between the men in front of me and then through the space between the loose circle that the fielders formed around the batsman, I saw the West Indies captain drop his trousers and fix his box.

I wanted to place a hand over my aunt's eyes. It seemed bizarre that no one else at the ground thought of it as anything but a minor stoppage in the run of play.

I looked down at my shoes. My aunt thought I had dropped something.

‘How can a grown man drop his pants like this in front of so many people?' I squealed. My aunt smiled and ruffled my hair.

Clearly, I had a lot of growing up to do.

E
very fanatic knows
this – it's the moment he lives for. It's the moment I live for. It's the moment when the bass line kicks in, the instant when the drink has begun to take hold, the moment of sharp-edged clarity between feeling a little tipsy and losing oneself. It's the moment when you are floating, weightless, riding the high.

These moments are at the heart of our addiction. They are repeating, repeatable motifs we pursue in every binge. When these moments have arrived, we know we are there.

In sport, our heroes are these moments. They provide an intensity in the heart of a game we are already intense about. These are the players we most look forward to watching in the game we can't live without.

But the analogy doesn't hold all the way. Sometimes, heroes are bigger than the game they play. In fact, they seem bigger than anything else, ever. And that's what holds the key to our devotion.