Thought Crimes

Last summer, I took part in the annual charity cricket tournament that our office organises. It was a quintessential English corporate cricket event- whites were mandatory, we played with a leather ball, no one could bowl more than an over each in five over matches, we had sandwiches for lunch and scones for tea and to top it all, every team had a pro in its ranks. We drew Chris Lewis, who most Indians of a certain vintage would remember as the spearhead of the English attack during the 1996 series when a certain Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid made their test debuts. Devon Malcolm participated as well, he of the ‘you guys are history’ followed by the 9-57 demolition job fame.

The day was remarkable for the American and European turnout that we saw. Young women and men, hitherto strangers to terms like runs (one Swedish colleague kept calling them points), wickets and overarm bowling donned their pads, swung their arms and kept wicket with the best of us. Before the matches began, one such newbie said to me: ‘I’m very excited about today. All I know of cricket is that it’s supposed to be boring’. ‘Some people say that’, I admitted. ‘My own belief is that playing, or even following cricket makes you a better human being’. And I’ll stand by that belief forever.

I mean, Cricket is a sport that allows you to bowl 3 overs for some 25-30 runs, take no wickets whatsoever yet come back feeling on top of the world because within those 3 overs, you bowled 3 beauties. We reached the semi-finals which we spectacularly lost, I uncharacteristically made a decent contribution with the bat- outscoring above Chris Lewis in a 30 run partnership; and my shoulder and hamstring ached for the rest of the week. We all had beer, made new friends, took lots of pictures and made mostly unkept promises about playing cricket more often. On the same day, Virat Kohli made his epic 149 at Edgbaston in a match which did much to typify all that we love about the sport.

Cricket, particularly the long form, is setting an alarm for 5 am on a cold winter’s night to wake up in time for yet another Boxing Day classic (and usually falling asleep over the lunch break to miss the second session altogether). It is watching Shoaib Akhtar launch 2 successive missiles to dismiss Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar, groaning and hearing the primal bit of the heart guiltily say- can we have another of those please? It is the better part of the Australian or English cricketing public watching Pujara step out and kick Lyon’s beautifully flighted balls in as ungainly a manner as they come and wishing for a Pujara of their own. It is the word riveting applied to 3 hours of play when the score has moved by 70 runs for 2 wickets and the outcome of the match is as uncertain as it was 3 hours ago, with sharp intakes of the breath following unplayable near misses and involuntary applause for a perfectly executed drive being the only souvenirs to show for that passage of play.

Cricket is the realisation that while luck can give you an edge, the better team will nearly always prevail. Or even more importantly, that you could be the better team but still not win due to a momentous rear-guard effort or the intervention of the elements. And if that is not one of the greatest life lessons, I am hard-pressed to think what is. Unlike almost any other sport, test cricket does not need to end with a winner and correspondingly, its unfairly and much maligned twin, a loser. I can still recall Sue Barker saying to an inconsolable Andy Roddick at the end of the 2009 Wimbledon final: “… after a match like that, I just think this sport is cruel sometimes.” Roddick got the cheers, the sympathy and the respect that may suffice a lifetime for many but at the end of the day, cold-heated history wrote him down as the man who lost the 2009 final.

Sport serves two main obligations to its audience: to inspire and to unite, and for the most part, cricket tends to deliver on both. In the last few months alone, we have witnessed Kusal Perera play perhaps the greatest innings every played in the game’s well-decorated history. Watching him defy the fury that masquerades as Dale Steyn, withstand the emerging force of Duanne Olivier and tame the beast called Kagiso Rabada, we were all Sri Lankan. Miracles had been performed before: 153* was already rife in the annals of test cricket as Lara’s personal signature. 281 is the name of the era that Rahul Bhattacharya proposed the most celebrated of Indian cricket’s tenure be known as. But these had been performed by super-humans who made quadruple and quintuple centuries when mortals dream of the one and by magicians to whom the laws of nature, physics and Shane Warne didn’t apply. This guy scripting history as no one imagined he would? Before that day, he was the lesser Kusal to Mendis and probably the lesser Perera to Thisara. Go figure.

In an alternate universe, Sachin has caressed a straight drive off Akram to win Chennai in 1999, Lance Klusener has dispatched the penultimate ball of Fleming’s over to the gap between gully and point and Sourav Ganguly has decided to bat after winning the toss. While the search for that universe continues, I can live in the one where the Eden Gardens at Kolkata are more sacred than their biblical counterpart, where Gibbs architects the space-age at the Wanderers and Dhoni launches a billion dreams over long-on at the Wankhede.

And that is why Football may be Bloody Hell but Cricket was surely Made in Heaven.