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 50th
Grand Slam!
And, by the way, T20, even in name, sounds so much like a
cyborg world destroyer of James Cameron’s creation!
