George Bernard Shaw once famously said that cricket is a game played by eleven fools and watched by eleven thousand! Being a lifelong member of the eleven thousand, I would have loved to see his reaction today, now that his country, Ireland, is a full member of the ICC - the International Cricket Council.
My love for cricket is probably six decades old and even though I have never been much of an athlete, one sport I have followed unfailingly from childhood to adulthood to the present senior citizen status has been this game. I should blame my late father for this! He had played cricket at both college and club levels, though when pressed for details of his prowess, would smilingly say that the only reason he started playing the game was that he was the only person available who had a pair of whites ready when his college wanted to make an eleven for a match. Be that as it may, in more ways than one, he made me soak in the essence of the game more so by taking me to every Test match played in Delhi when I was in school.
When I started reading the newspaper for instance, I would start with the sports pages. The newspaper would be spread on the dining table and I would sit or kneel on the chair breathing all of it in. In the early sixties, Indian newspapers had not still fully got over the colonial hangover and the English County Cricket Championship was covered as elaborately as the Ranji Trophy. Even today, I can reel off the names of the sixteen counties who played for the Championship and the memory is probably still good enough to remember the counties of most of the stalwarts who played for England then. Following Test match coverage especially when India played its infrequent Tests was another high point. However, when the coverage pertained to a Test where my favourite team had lost, I would read all the articles around this piece and ignore the reportage of the Test totally. Since India did not win too many matches in that period, it did mean that I skipped reading large chunks of the sports page often!
Live radio commentary brought a totally different dimension especially the beautiful word pictures painted by the raspy tones of John Allott on the BBC or the fruity voice of Alan McGilvray of ABC or our own V M Chakrapani (who went to Australia later) and Anand Setalvad. Many of this group of commentators gravitated to the television when this medium also joined in, in the late seventies. This explained why many of them sounded a bit verbose as they had not yet adjusted for the differences in media - they had not factored in that the viewer could see exactly what they were describing. The year 1983 was a watershed. Not only did India win the World Cup for the first time but colour transmission also picked up speed, so much so that today, one has a variety of channels available on television to watch cricket.
A slower but deeper medium was reading books on cricket and my father's membership of the British Council Library helped a lot here. It introduced me to authors such as Cardus, C L James, Peebles and Fingleton - a love which was strengthened when people like Ramchandra Guha weaved their own magic as in 'A Corner of a Foreign Field', for instance, one of the best accounts of the evolution of the game in India. My prowess at the game was definitely very much less always than my love for it and the latter brought in its wake one more type of engagement.
One lazy Sunday morning, while doing my management course in the mid seventies, I strolled over to the XLRI cricket field where the preparations for a match were under way. Being one of the few around, I was press-ganged into becoming the official scorer for my Institute, despite my protestations that I didn't know anything about the job - a pretty drastic form of 'on-the-job' training. As I did not do that bad a job and more importantly, our team won that day after a string of losses, I was designated as the lucky mascot. This lovely game thrives on superstitions and I was pressured to do scorer duties for the rest of our matches in the League in which were playing. Believe it or not, because of this or otherwise, we won the League that year, even after being 19 for 5 in a crucial match, on a green top aided by early winter morning swing!
Looking back, one realises that this period has seen many momentous changes - from whites for the players to coloured uniforms, from runners for injured batsmen to concussion substitutes, from umpires to third umpires and the DRS, from rain hit matches to the Duckworth-Lewis system which nobody understands, from staid newspaper and radio coverage to live pictures and breathless commentary on the television and the Net, from Tests to ODIs to T20s, from red balls to white to now pink.
Happy as I am to have seen all this, I am curious to see what impact technology would have further on the game and how much of its original quirky character this lovely sport would be able to retain. I hope the core is not affected much more as the eccentricity of this game is what adds to its charm. In any case, my attitude is 'Bring it on'!
My love for cricket is probably six decades old and even though I have never been much of an athlete, one sport I have followed unfailingly from childhood to adulthood to the present senior citizen status has been this game. I should blame my late father for this! He had played cricket at both college and club levels, though when pressed for details of his prowess, would smilingly say that the only reason he started playing the game was that he was the only person available who had a pair of whites ready when his college wanted to make an eleven for a match. Be that as it may, in more ways than one, he made me soak in the essence of the game more so by taking me to every Test match played in Delhi when I was in school.
When I started reading the newspaper for instance, I would start with the sports pages. The newspaper would be spread on the dining table and I would sit or kneel on the chair breathing all of it in. In the early sixties, Indian newspapers had not still fully got over the colonial hangover and the English County Cricket Championship was covered as elaborately as the Ranji Trophy. Even today, I can reel off the names of the sixteen counties who played for the Championship and the memory is probably still good enough to remember the counties of most of the stalwarts who played for England then. Following Test match coverage especially when India played its infrequent Tests was another high point. However, when the coverage pertained to a Test where my favourite team had lost, I would read all the articles around this piece and ignore the reportage of the Test totally. Since India did not win too many matches in that period, it did mean that I skipped reading large chunks of the sports page often!
Live radio commentary brought a totally different dimension especially the beautiful word pictures painted by the raspy tones of John Allott on the BBC or the fruity voice of Alan McGilvray of ABC or our own V M Chakrapani (who went to Australia later) and Anand Setalvad. Many of this group of commentators gravitated to the television when this medium also joined in, in the late seventies. This explained why many of them sounded a bit verbose as they had not yet adjusted for the differences in media - they had not factored in that the viewer could see exactly what they were describing. The year 1983 was a watershed. Not only did India win the World Cup for the first time but colour transmission also picked up speed, so much so that today, one has a variety of channels available on television to watch cricket.
A slower but deeper medium was reading books on cricket and my father's membership of the British Council Library helped a lot here. It introduced me to authors such as Cardus, C L James, Peebles and Fingleton - a love which was strengthened when people like Ramchandra Guha weaved their own magic as in 'A Corner of a Foreign Field', for instance, one of the best accounts of the evolution of the game in India. My prowess at the game was definitely very much less always than my love for it and the latter brought in its wake one more type of engagement.
One lazy Sunday morning, while doing my management course in the mid seventies, I strolled over to the XLRI cricket field where the preparations for a match were under way. Being one of the few around, I was press-ganged into becoming the official scorer for my Institute, despite my protestations that I didn't know anything about the job - a pretty drastic form of 'on-the-job' training. As I did not do that bad a job and more importantly, our team won that day after a string of losses, I was designated as the lucky mascot. This lovely game thrives on superstitions and I was pressured to do scorer duties for the rest of our matches in the League in which were playing. Believe it or not, because of this or otherwise, we won the League that year, even after being 19 for 5 in a crucial match, on a green top aided by early winter morning swing!
Looking back, one realises that this period has seen many momentous changes - from whites for the players to coloured uniforms, from runners for injured batsmen to concussion substitutes, from umpires to third umpires and the DRS, from rain hit matches to the Duckworth-Lewis system which nobody understands, from staid newspaper and radio coverage to live pictures and breathless commentary on the television and the Net, from Tests to ODIs to T20s, from red balls to white to now pink.
Happy as I am to have seen all this, I am curious to see what impact technology would have further on the game and how much of its original quirky character this lovely sport would be able to retain. I hope the core is not affected much more as the eccentricity of this game is what adds to its charm. In any case, my attitude is 'Bring it on'!
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