Requiem

How do you bury a childhood friend?

With a heavy heart of course! That goes without saying.

It is never easy but you can compose yourself if the death was due to natural causes. It gets more difficult when you know it has been a murder. A swift one at that.

It gets Kafkaesque when the childhood friend who is dead is still alive!

In the late '70s and early '80s, I was glued to the transistor listening to the running commentary of most of India’s cricket matches, played in India. I had company. My brothers, at times my neighbors. All India Radio used to broadcast commentaries in both English and Hindi, half an hour each. It was unbelievably tense, those 30 minutes of Hindi commentary! I did not know Hindi then, even now my Hindi is not at the literature level but I am able to converse and understand, and it was more of a guessing game and trial and error. I learned numbers in Hindi via those slots of 30 minutes.

Ek, do, teen, char, paanch, che.

This was enough. Out was fortunately out!

I used to keep a notebook and mark each over, ball by ball, with runs scored.

When the English commentary resumed, I corrected the total score, accounting for all the errors I had accumulated with my limited Hindi. Those were still the years when the original version, the test match, ruled. The one-day internationals, the 50-over matches, were a new entrant. That version rocketed to the top-notch with a combination of assured results in a day’s work, plus television coverage. The fact that India won the 1983 Prudential World Cup, at Lords, converted almost every single Indian into a die-hard cricket fan. And we had stalwarts then. The most fearsome and complete assembly of such a team came from the, then, invincible West Indies.

Greenidge, Haynes, Richards, Gomes, Lloyd, Dujon, Marshall, Holding, Garner, Roberts.

40 years later, I can still recall this team without referring to Google!

When we were almost certain that the thrill of a World Cup win can never be paralleled, we were exposed to an early morning telecast of those unbelievably green pitches from Australia via channel 9, which defined world-class coverage to us. And the commentary, fully in English.

The Packer series drew a few greedy players to go and sell their wares (and souls) in South Africa. It did not have much of an impact on a regular cricket aficionado like me and millions of others.

The ODIs were just in time as the original version, the test cricket, was slowly dying. Dead tracks in the sub-continent were one of the main reasons. Exciting test cricket prospered only Down Under and of course in the Ashes series.

When the Benson and Hedges series of ODIs ended, the cricketing world needed an alternative, and little did the world body know then that they were making the first moves that would alter the nature of cricket forever.

The ODIs had already undergone a lot of modifications, day-night matches, colored clothing, white ball, field restrictions, etc., and were in a healthy stage with each successive World Cup becoming bigger and better, throwing new champions (Pakistan, Sri Lanka) while Australia consolidated its grip as default favorites with India slowly emerging as a serious contender. The West Indies, once a terror, were reduced to part players (and not even qualifying for the current 2023 tournament)

The Buggles had a song called "The video killed the radio star”. That defined a change of an era. Thus if ODIs nearly killed the Test Matches, the next mutation (similar to the biological mutations, with each new mutation becoming deadlier than its earlier avatars) the despicable T20 destroyed the other two versions.

It killed all other forms of cricket, for all practical purposes, and even destroyed the fundamentals of the gentlemanly game. It came to represent all that is ugly in modern sports; greed, uncouth conduct, brazenness, lack of class. It simply reduced a once beautiful game where wily bowlers teased and taunted staunch batsmen, who in turn started with respecting them, then slowly mastering them and finally mastering them, into a showdown between willow-wielding madmen wildly heaving at anything that was pitched at them.

There were extraordinary players from the time of the test matches and ODIs. Willis, Hadlee, Botham, Gavaskar, Vishwanath, Chandrasekhar, Venkatraghavan, Taylor, Waugh brothers, Boon, DeSilva, Jayasuriya, Kapil Dev, Gooch, Gilchrist, Crowe, Mc Grath, Donald, Dravid, Laxman, Cronje, Jonty Rhodes, Klusener, Lara, Richardson, Warne, Murali, Gower, Imran, Wasim, Waqar, Inzamam………..

I am trying to remember a single player from the T20 circle today and failing naturally.

My interest in cricket started to die along with the birth and the monstrous growth of the abomination called T20. The richest board in the world, the BCCI, spotted an opportunity before anyone else could, and launched the IPL, the final nail in the coffin. By that time, I had already stopped following cricket in almost all its forms.

Gone are the days when Neville Cardus had seen through his romantic eyes when the test match report read like a piece of literature when watching the left-handed David Gower stroke the ball, almost caress it to the boundary with the least effort, who could make batting look effortless and elegant make you swoon. No more 140 deg turns that defy physics from the wily wrist of Shane Warne, no more “eyes popped so big, they at times appeared bigger than the ball” Murali, no more frog in the blender Adam

Now it is bang bang bang bang, pause, more bang bang bang

T20 has reduced this one beautiful game to a procession of muscular thugs who wield heavy bats, whose eyes rest beyond the boundary line, who swing at every ball, connect more often they miss, the balls sailing into the stands, sending an already stupid crowd further deep into raptures of ecstasy. 40 overs (or less if you are fortunate) of such madness later, there is not even a piece of carcass left to perform the last rites.

The only silver lining to this extremely dark scenario is the recent resurgence of nail-biting, last-day suspense and results in The Ashes!

Long live Ben Stokes!

Some might call me anachronistic, say that the game has evolved and I chose to stay back. I have been following two other sports from the late 70s.

Football and Tennis.

Those two games have still retained their core beauty and continue to remain relevant. While I have moved from Borg to Federer, Martina to Iga, Socrates to Mbappe, Zico to Messi, and Lothar to Xavi, the games by themselves have not self-combusted into a meaningless oblivion. Yes, commercial interests have crept in there too, the football World Cup had grown from 24 to 32 to now (shudder) 48 I think in the next edition. The 2030 World Cup is going to be played in three continents and six countries. FIFA appears to have picked up enough cues from BCCI on “How to kill a sport”

But, as I write this today, Football still appears enjoyable, With petrodollars pouring in, with almost most top-tier teams owned by Oil nations, with Saudi Arabia strengthening its grip on the future of football, (there is a serious possibility that Saudi Arabia will host 2034 World Cup) Thankfully, I will be 70 years old by then, and may have lost my senses to follow any game.

So, in the end, in my lifetime, I would have seen the fall of two of the best team sports of my generation. One is already done and dusted. One is a slow work in progress.

Tennis may be all that would be left. And there is every possibility that Djokovic would still be playing in 2034 gunning for his 50^th Grand Slam!

And, by the way, T20, even in name, sounds so much like a cyborg world destroyer of James Cameron’s creation!