Just Not Cricket

India drew their third Test match against the West Indies as well(yawn!). In my opinion, a boring test match ambling towards an inevitable draw is possibly the worst sight that professional sport has to offer. I consider it even more boring than watching Billiards or Chess (I do appreciate the skills involved in these sports, and also the thrill of playing them, but with all due respect they aren't exactly a spectator's dream!). I have spent a large percentage of my life watching sports (I Once actually watched the National Korfball Championships on DD) and of this a rather huge fraction has been spent on cricket. It has provided me not only some of my best sporting memories (Venkatesh Prasad bowling out Aamir Sohail-1996 world cup), some of my worst (India losing the Chennai test to Pak after Sachins century), and also some of my most boring and exasperating sporting memories(Innumerable test matches being drawn, matches being rained out and abandoned, matches being abandoned due to poor light)

I really believe if it wasn't for India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Cricket would be extinct by now. Its just that we suck at every other sport, and crickets the only game where we can consistently stay in the top ten (any guesses why?), that we are so crazy about it. The Aussies, despite being really good at lots of other team sports probably continue playing Cricket because its one game where they can consistently thrash the pommies(yes, I know what happened in the Ashes this year, but I consider it an aberration till England can prove otherwise).

India, I'm sorry to say is not a sporting nation. Don't get me wrong, I'm a proud Indian, but we must accept what our limitations are. The environs we grow up in are not really conducive to developing future sportsmen. I thus have extra respect in my heart for the Leanders, Sanias, Gopichands, Irfans and Baichungs who make it despite all odds - and perhaps even more so for the many others who don't.

When we watch a cricket match we don't treat it like a sport, we treat it like entertainment. I agree that the line dividing sport and entertainment is a blurry one, but the facts remain that we booed Sachin off the pitch in Bombay, we booed the Indian team off the ground in Delhi for scoring just 200 runs (our side eventually won the game-but who cares-we just want to see Dhoni hit the ball out of the park), we throw stuff onto the field and disrupt games when things aren't going to plan(Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta). We are very bitter losers, and not very sporting people at all. This behaviour is sometimes really disgusting and actually reminds me of a couple of terrible movies I've had the misfortune of being audience to, where the junta got bored and erupted into whistles and catcalls, and on one occasion went so far as to break the chairs in the theater and threaten to beat up the manager if they didnt get their money back! Contemporary cricket is designed to appeal to the masses, with silly rules being introduced into an already complicated game (powerplay, super-sub). Its like a masala movie - Sachin and Sehwag are the heroes, Shoaib/Brett Lee/Murali the villains, Dravid and Kumble are the heroes' ever reliable friends ("best supporting actor goes to.."), Bhajji is the hero's funny friend (the guy who usually gets beat up by the villain and waits for the hero to save his ass), and Dhoni is the latest 'tadakda-bhadakta' item number - comes on anytime in between,usually doesnt last long, and is there for pure entertainment value - the item number after which the match can be classified as 'paisa vasool' or not.

The ICC and BCCIs relentless peddling of the sport in the name of spreading Cricket to the far corners of the world has to some extent resulted in even a cricket crazy population like us losing interest(yours truly included). They have turned it from a unique, if somewhat placid sport needing patience and skill, to a mediocre circus advertising cheap thrills(twenty-twenty,anyone?). Gone are the days when an India Pak match in Sharjah would capture the imagination of the entire sub-continent, when kids in school would mass-bunk to catch the game on TV. Gone are the days when a cricket match defeat would hurt till the next victory, when we actually hated the Pakistan team, and the matches were like war. Now many of us just dont see what the big deal is. They beat us today, we'll definitely play them next month, so we can beat them then. If not even then, we can just dismiss it with a wave of our hand and say, "saala match fixed hai" and forget about it.

All this can be attributed to a number of reasons, not least of which is the extreme overdose of cricket. Its a huge moneyspinner, especially in the sub-continent, but ICC should really read the story about the hen that laid the golden eggs. Another reason is the dilution of the level its played at. Teams like Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and Kenya have done little to increase the interest in the sport. They manage to please the item number fans to an extent(by proving to be easy meat, and getting thrashed all over the park), but the purists are quite turned off by their pedestrian efforts to make it internationally.

I know its a bit surprising that with the football world cup(i refuse to call it soccer) in full swing, I'm actually writing about cricket, but its just that a certain Mr Bhogle's habit to compare "the beautiful game" to "the gentleman's game" gets on my nerves(who let him anchor the World Cup on ESPN anyways? Blasphemous, i say!). Especially when what we see these days is just not cricket. Its too much of something else.