Boo boo in select company

Boo boo in select company
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Thursday 25 February 2021

The Test Cricket Fiasco

 The Cricket Test Fiasco

I am British Indian. Yet, I would normally support India wherever they played Test cricket. Norman Tebbit was right -- my loyalties in this respect are very suspect. Most of the time it is O K; however when India plays England, we have a Lakshman Rekha down the middle of our sitting-room; my daughter strenuously and loudly supporting England and I equally stubbornly rooting for India.

However, today both of us had a sense of anti-climax, the test started with a whimper yesterday and ended today before the whimper could quite finish. India is celebrating victory, a victory, which seems to me, rather short of anything to celebrate. I feel sorry for the people of India who took five days' leave and paid a fortune by the standards of the country to watch the match.

Now, India takes its cricket seriously; the whole country holds its breath and grandmothers like me crawl out of our multiple blankets to watch the T V.

I went to a one-day, fifty over match once; this was the notorious one when match-fixing became a serious issue. Several famous Indian cricketers got banned after that. I bought myself a front-seat at the Kochi international stadium; international matches are hardly ever played in Kochi, so the occasion was unique. It was one thousand rupees a head, and I had to buy my companion's ticket too, because a thousand rupees was serious money in the India of 1998. 

At one point,India's captain Azharuddin was fielding right in front of me, a metre from the boundary line, and I felt I had got my money's worth. India made 300 runs in its innings, replying to South Africa's 300, and the match was declared a draw. The teams went inside and then --  filed out again! Apparently the last over should have had one more ball; India hit and ran blindly, and got one more run to win. Something askew, rotten in the state of Kochi, I remember thinking.

Today, however, both India and England could not manage the bowling. The totals were laughable. My daughter and I wonder what the Narendra Modi Ahmedabad pitch was like. It destroyed the game of cricket.

What we watched today was not cricket -- It was an impostor. False, off-putting and disgraceful. England need shed no tears for losing it. 

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