It ain't cricket any more

Any expatriate Indian living in America has, at some point, to deal with questions from incredulous friends and colleagues on three topics — caste, arranged marriage, and cricket. To the American mind, Cricket is as confusing, if not more, than the other two. While Caste has a continental cousin in Race with the same undertones of shame and guilt; and Arranged Marriages don't seem like such a bad thing once you've been on a horrendous Internet date or two; Cricket remains an enigmatic, inscrutable beast. It is very hard to explain an entire nation's obsession with a game that goes on for five whole days, with the distinct possibility that both teams walk off the field without a result at the end of it all.

To the uninitiated, it often seems that cricket is too boring and slow. What they fail to realise is that it's precisely this sameness and thisendless repetition of little rituals that holds such power over its admirers. Baseball and cricket are often compared, but in truth, they are like chalk and cheese. Every pitch in baseball results in something happening; the game is moved forward in some way. Cricket looks upon such unseemly haste with disdain. A ball that's left alone in cricket is often called “well played” and batsmen diligently practice leaving deliveries outside the stumps well alone. In other words, they are practicing how to do nothing, perfectly. Try doing that in baseball!

Unseemly change

Of course, cricket is changing these days. There is an impostor calling itself cricket, which aims to speed up the game. This is as misguided as it is short-sighted. Cricket's charm is not in its athleticism or speed; it is the leisurely pace of proceedings that lulls and comforts. While watching a game of cricket, one can always take a break to grab a beer, take a nap, or pick up a new hobby, safe in the knowledge that one can always get back to the game and nothing much would have changed in one's absence.

In keeping with the pace of the game, its traditions have been similarly somnolent, but change is afoot there too. First, there was all the uproar of the match-fixing scandal, which first started in India. Determined not to be outdone by their neighbour in anything cricket-related, Pakistan raised the stakes with the murder of their national coach, and followed that up with a terrorist attack on a visiting team. Dismayed by all these goings-on, the British decided enough was enough and jailed a few of the more promising members of the Pakistani squad, in a desperate attempt to slow things down a bit.

To the faithful, these were tumultuous events, striking as it does at the very core of the cricketing ethos — nothing much is supposed to happen. And here things were happening with the manic speed of a barrel of monkeys on crack. It was simply not cricket, we moaned, and trying to make sense of it all, we turned to the cricket pages of our favourite newspaper. Whenever I felt lost by the recent developments in the world of cricket, I turned to one man who could perhaps bring some method to the madness. His name was Peter Roebuck.

Back to basics

One of the advantages of being a cricket writer (I suppose — never having been one myself) is that the game in its traditional form allows one the time and space to craft a finely turned phrase. No one crafted them better in recent memory than Roebuck. It was a shock to read about how he plunged to his death from a hotel window in South Africa. It seems that he too finally succumbed to the disease that is infecting cricket like the Plague — something has to be happening all the time.

Roebuck's columns were a throwback to a more leisurely time. They were well-thought-out, reasonable, articulate, one could almost say learned. The jingoism and blind adoration that often passes for cricket commentary were missing from his writing. His pieces — like the game they described — were an anachronism.

As I write this, I don't know what prompted his swan dive to eternity, but I do know that I will miss his wry sense of humour, his clear-eyed views on the game, and his unique voice. I also know that I yearn for the days when nothing much happened on a cricket field. I want to be bored once again by the game I loved.

(The author is a San Francisco-based techie.)

COMMENT NOW