My waking up early in the day and keeping me awake till the middle of the night to watch the highlights and post-match analyses all turned in vain. After the disastrous show in Australia and the tri-series, I never expected India to be a strength to reckon with as the world cup kicked off.
The first victory against Pakistan was the game changer. I deliberately use the word ‘victory’. In sports it’s more of a win except for when India is taking on Pakistan. In love and war every encounter is a battle and for the triumphant it is a victory and not a mere win.
The victory against Pakistan lured me to the world cup. I subscribed to the Sky Sports channels, dug out statistics from the websites, read and watched expert comments and more than anything else prayed for the boys. The boys in blue! Our boys in blue!
The first time India clinched the world cup in 1983, they were nothing more than a minnow. Starting as an underdog their opener against the W’Indies was the turnaround. Then Kapil Dev’s hurricane innings of 175 followed, and the rest is history.
Just before the half-yearly exam in our residential school, we were given a glimpse to watch the Indian innings. With 183 on the board, the West Indians were more than sure to clinch the title for the third time in a row. As we huddled in our rooms for self-study the joyous roar from outside the school campus at regular intervals made us aware that history was in the making.
As Jimmy Amarnath clinched the last West Indian wicket a few of us simply gate-crashed into the room of one of our wardens Nirmal Mirani who was listening to the commentary on the radio.
Cricket then was a delicacy not a staple entertainment. The winter vacations were marked with no studies as the annual exams were over, visiting places of interest, Christmas cakes, oranges, the Bengali delicacy of Joynagar-er Moa and Nalen Gur-er Sandesh, and of course the festival of cricket. Almost every year one or the other team would play a test match during the winter vacation in Kolkata.
Not anymore!
Cricket now has turned out to be a power play than a source of pure pleasure and entertainment. India with its cricket-crazy market is dominating not necessarily the art of the game but the business and politics of cricket.
The world cup victory of 1983 was a turnaround for Indian cricket though. The victories in Asia Cup, Benson Hedges Cup were bright reminders that India had arrived on the world stage.
The semi-final exit in the 1987 world cup turned out to be a dampener. I remember Kolkata, which was longing to host India in the final, was heartbroken after the hosts lost to England in the semi-final at Mumbai.
The overdose of cricket created an apathy in me. The economists refer to it as diminishing marginal utility. The experience at the Wanderers in 2003, very similar to the one at the Sydney Cricket Ground today, made me promise to myself not to watch cricket anymore. It was kept until India was playing Sri Lanka in the final of the 2011 world cup.
I was at a dance show of my daughter at the Paul Robson Theatre in Hounslow, and the brilliant performance of the Indians tempted me to occasionally skip the performance and glance at my mobile to check the scores. The win at Mumbai was a consolation after the drubbing at 2003 and the unceremonious exit in 2007.
Since 2012, India has been performing miserably in all forms of the game and I had no expectation from the men in blue after watching India play England in the last summer. Yet the victory against Pakistan and the wins that followed aroused a glimmer of hope. I started believing that Dhoni and his boys are going to make it. The dream run of winning seven consecutive matches, clinching all ten wickets in every encounter made me feel that despite taking on Australia in the semi-final India will make it.
That dream is dashed and the hope strangulated!
Also on cricket:
Partition imagery on cricket
MSD defined a new India
Cricket, corruption & configuration of power relations
Custodian of decency and determination
That was more than cricket
Street cricket comes to London
Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant.
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com
All comments are personal.
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