I may have covered a wide variety of topics up until now but there is one highly controversial topic I have left out on. You may have guessed what it would be. I’m going to talk about the most corrupt bunch of clerical egomaniacs to have ever lived. No, I already did politics last time, I’m talking about cricket now. As the IPL just headed to its curtain call, let’s honor the game of the gentleman. Of course, I use the term gentleman in a highly broad sense. So broad that gentleman actually translates to a shameless and shrewd illiterate. I understand that shrewd and illiterate do not go in the same sentence, but neither do Gentleman and cricket. At least not since when Rahul Dravid retired.
They say that sports bring out the character of a person. If that’s the case, the entirety of the Indian cricket following crowd is headed for a certain doom. Well, so is Pakistan, but I’m sure that’s not only because of this. Cricket was a sport resonant amongst everyone while I grew up. Hence it formed a generation of cricket fanatics of which, I was once a proud member of. I used to leave home at around 10 in the morning with nothing but a cricket bat and return home by around 6. I don’t know what part of this routine made a mould of a general class of ignorant hypocrites, but I seem to have escaped that part. Lucky for me, the 2004 Euros happened and I got out of this cricket loop before it turned ugly. I have come home from school to see my brother watch a re-run of some stupid test match between two third world countries for the second time. Things cannot possibly get any uglier than that. It wasn’t long before he too got out of this loop, but lets address the community that still watches test match re-runs.
Hypocrisy and stupidity walk a thin line that often merges. Not with cricket fans. With cricket fans, Hypocrisy and stupidity share an apartment. As there exist some smart fans for every 10 stupid fans in any sport, the trend is continued in cricket as well. If there are 100 stupid fans in cricket, only around 4 of them would be unbiased fanatics. Call me old school but I grew up watching cricket at a time when the advertisements and the commentary were mutually exclusive. I didn’t have to sit through the torture of people like Sanjay Manjrekar and Shoaib Akhtar being pundits. The sad part is how, people like watching these minutes of mental Guantanamo Bay. Fans are people who admire a game for its beauty and history. Fanatics are those who ardently follow every single detail of it with utmost interest. Lunatics are Indians who watch cricket and make snarky remarks to wage imaginary wars. Let’s take a few case studies on the overall hypocrite behavior of the Indian Cricket watching audience.
So, the ICC T20 world cup took place in Bangladesh a while ago. This was imperative for two main reasons. One being the fact that, the influx polarity was reversed when the Bangladeshis in India snuck back to Bangladesh for this tournament and the other being that, India and Sri Lanka were to meet each other in the finals. I know many of you would have gotten bored of India and Sri Lanka cricket finals, but this holds some importance as this encounter between the two countries did not lead to any civil wars or assassinations. Small steps guys, small steps. Evident by the fact that Star Sports isn’t still showing re runs of the match and in depth analysis of every blade of grass on the field, we lost the finals. In India, we don’t simply lose a game because we are outplayed. We lose a game only because someone obviously screwed up. Ignoring the exemplary death bowling by the Sri Lankans, we chose to point and blame a certain Yuvraj Singh for costing us the finals. He apparently slowed down the pace of the entire team and was subsequently the cause for our downfall. Lucky for him, there are just a handful of understanding cricket fans in the country. The rest are just people who run pages like ”Troll Cricket” on facebook. I’m okay with banter but when it goes to a point where there are death threats and stoning, it just speaks about the overall stupid Jatt nature of people. I am pretty certain I saw some status on my feed saying “Yuvraj singh should have just died of cancer; that way at least Suresh Raina would have batted up the order and won us the game.” I’m pretty sure the same person would have put up a status like “Wow Yuvraj Singh is back to form in the IPL! I always believed in his ability.”
Hypocrisy aside, cricket has always been the attention seeking teenager of all the other sports. It has taken all the selling points of the other games in the world and has tried to create its own corrupt version of the same. Take the various cricket leagues in the world for example. Cricket has taken the idea of a system that promotes young talent from the country on a stage set by the competition between teams from each district (English Premier League) and made it into a reality drama show called the IPL. It has taken the challenge system from Tennis and the Free Hit/Bowl Out (now shelved) concept from football. It has gotten the Exxtrraaaa Innings concept from the Match Day in football and has murdered it. You can see in Tennis or Football how the commentators use complex idioms and phrases to frame a sentence to pump more adrenaline into the already tense situation. They will bombard you with mind blowing facts about the history of the clubs and what had happened when those two had met earlier. Then you have cricket. Commentary in cricket sounds like a Roadie trying to read a question in his English arrear exam. Of course, you have the exceptions in the form of Harsha Bhogle who actually do justice to the sport but for every Harsha Bhogle, you have 800 Ramiz Rajas. This leads to a vast difference between commentary lines where Indian commentary is just like “Ohhh what a DLF maximum through the Tata Nano covers into the Pepsi VIP box. This is surely a Star sports Kanna keep calm moment in the Pepsi IPL 2014. Micromax micromax nokia reebok srini mama, haha what do you think mate?”
Ear cancer.
Apart from those abhorrent pieces of sound you are subjected to, there are also certain aspects that make you wonder if there is a thing called negative IQ. Apparent from the fact that Arvind Kejriwal made it to the CM post in the national capital, we know that Engineers will somehow find their way into every field. There was a time when the entire statistics involved in a game gave you just the strike rate of the batsman, the economy of the bowler and the run rate achieved and required. It was then, that computer graphics and mathematics came together in the same ugly fashion as English did with Pakistani players. There are now around 50134 graphical representations of minor useless details like how many times the particular player has scored something between 10 and 30 while playing in that turf while wearing his favorite jockey underwear as compared to when he hasn’t. These systems also glitch sometimes and these glitches provide us with some funny moments like these :
All said and done, cricket will continue to get commercialized and boring. There will be more Sanjay Manjrekars and Ramiz Rajas. There will emerge another 500 brands who will fling crores at each other to get advertisement time. There will be more scams, more fixing, more corruption and more of everything. There however, will also be that one moment of magic. That one magical over or one magical spell in a match that will be worth watching. That one player who would make others look like toddlers in a ground. That one Sachin Tendulkar or Don Bradman who will inspire a generation to watch cricket no matter how bad it gets. That one performance that will make you shell out a standing ovation at home. Until these moments of unadulterated adrenaline continue, so will the cricket craze in India. We may even forget how cricket functions, but we will not let go of our innate Indianism when it comes to cricket and that is commendable, to say the least.
The Daily Offensive 