You Must Like Cricket? by Soumya Bhattacharya

Author:Soumya Bhattacharya [Soumya Bhattacharya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2006-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

6

‘And they make millions from endorsements’

‘Bastards.’

‘They have no shame.’

‘No shame at all. No pride in playing for the country.’

‘They have sold the country, you see. They have cheated on us. Must have been bribed for them to have played so badly.’

‘And they make millions from their fucking endorsements.’

‘Then this is what they give us.’

‘Bastards.’

17 February 2003. My car has broken down on the way to work and I am at a garage, sitting on an upturned carton and sipping a bottle of water. In front of me, there are a couple of mechanics. One has opened the bonnet and is peering inside; the other is on the ground, beneath the car, fiddling with something I can’t see.

Two days ago, India lost to Australia in their first serious fixture of the World Cup. (And just a few days before that, they’d been woeful against the Netherlands. They couldn’t even bat through their full quota of overs. The Dutchmen – given that they’re famed more for their dribbles than their drives – found India’s 204 too intimidating and were all out for 136.)

‘Battery’s gone, I reckon,’ the mechanic with his head inside the bonnet says.

‘Could it be that it has just run out of charge? It’s not very old. I don’t need to buy a new one, do I?’

‘I think we should replace it.’

I keep quiet. The other mechanic emerges from underneath the car.

‘Yeah, yeah, replace it. Replace the whole bloody team. Get a new captain. Drop the bowlers. Get rid of the batsmen. Bloody scoundrels.’

‘Excuse me . . .’ I say.

Neither man is listening.

The Australia game was a bit of a mess. That’s the polite verdict. Going in first, India was unable to bat out fifty overs for the second time in two matches. Worse, they picked up from where they had left off during a disastrous winter tour of New Zealand. (They lost pretty much every game they played – they lost to district sides; they lost games where the weather had made a result almost impossible; they were regularly bowled out in less than fifty overs.) This is the World Cup. We thought the tide was bound to turn. We were wrong.

In the end, we managed 125. It was the lowest total we had ever made in the championship’s twenty-eight-year history. Tendulkar fought for his thirty-six but the other batsmen (Sourav, Dravid, Kaif, Yuvraj and Sehwag) did not even reach double figures. Australia overhauled the target in a little over twenty-two overs. They lost Gilchrist while doing so: the wicket seemed like an aberration rather than anything else.

A week into the World Cup. We had played against the Netherlands as though they were Australia. We had played against Australia as though we were Bangladesh. And all this less than a year on from the glorious English summer in which we had chased more than 300 to win the NatWest Trophy; less than six months after we had beaten South Africa and Australia to become joint winners of the ICC

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