Boo boo in select company

Boo boo in select company
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Wednesday 3 July 2019

Cricket and Me

CRICKET AND ME


I started playing cricket with the other urchins in the neighbourhood when I was ten years old. My cousin, Appuettan, cut the stem of a big coconut frond into the shape of a bat. (The bat lasted no more than three or four days till the soft wood split)  It was my job to weave a green ball out of the thin leaves of the palm, with a stone inside to give it weight. This was an essential skill learnt early in life in a household devoid of toys. A wicket was manufactured out of branches from the bushes at the back fence.

So I learned the language of the game: boundary, maiden, Yorkers (a bit unsure)... LBW was a bit of a mystery, but not so much as an off side goal in football. By the time I was fifteen I was an acolyte, listening to Swaminathan's perfect diction describing the exploits of Ben Hutton, Vioo Mankad and Vijay Manjrekar (the present Sanjay's father?) Five days glued to the black Bakelite box until one day, I connected it up wrong, and it went up in smoke and then flames.

There were no twenty-twenties or one-dayers then. Before the time of Kerry Packer and IPLs. And I still prefer the test form to anything else. Mind you, my little town in Kerala, Thalassery was always a sucker for cricket. It claims that the first local India versus English match was played in the big Maidanam in town. Since there was no stadium then, (there were enough Englishman to make up a team in that town) many a ball would have ended up skimming the top of the Arabian Sea next to the Maidanam. If the batsmen looked up from the crease Tippu Sultan's old fort loomed, with all the history of Dutch, French and British trade and shenanigans attached to it. The Sub-collector, the top British apparatchik in Thalassery resided in a magnificient bungalow on top of the fort too, ass always the British picking a high ground with a view of the waters.

The present World Cup is a bonanza for the likes of me. The garden, kitchen, books, all go on the back burner. I eat large numbers of biscuits and devour many cups of tea. I take loo breaks when a wicket has gone and the ads come up. Or between innings. I expect this is true of many men and women in India.

Cricket Season Sindabad!

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