The most watched sporting event of the year played out last weekend, and as a dutiful media consumer, I made it a point to watch it with several friends in a crowded neighbourhood sports bar. It was the finals of the World Cup of football (or soccer, as they call it in these parts), and I sat through 120 excruciating minutes of some of the worst bare-knuckled, ill-tempered, fouls-littered football I have ever been unfortunate enough to witness. After a good hour had passed, many of my American friends were arguing stridently that a game which lasted so long and did not produce a single goal would never catch on in the US. I politely refrained from educating them about cricket.
Ahhh… cricket! The gentleman’s game, pride of the British Empire, bringing joy to its former colonies, while consigning them to absolute mediocrity in every other sporting endeavour. I love the game, as indeed almost every Indian does; and thus I know firsthand the pain of loving something utterly useless. Cricket is the virtual antithesis of sport. Not for cricket the banality of Pierre de Coubertin’s plebeian work ethic — “Faster, higher, stronger” — which sounds like a slogan more suited to a factory assembly line than a stadium. While lesser sports work themselves into a sweaty lather chasing such humdrum goals, cricket takes a long, leisurely break to sip tea, munch scones, and watch the grass grow. What other game takes five whole days to play, and ends most often with a legitimate no-result! At the soccer world cup finals, I heard some fans complain that some of the players were wasting time because they were faking injuries and such. To my eyes, accustomed to the idyllic pace of the cricket field, the whole game seemed to be moving in jerky fast-motion, rather like those old black-and-white Charlie Chaplin movies. I could not see any time being wasted, and if these men were deliberately trying to do so, I could only pity them for being so terribly incompetent at it. Rank amateurs these; a couple of days on a cricket field would do them all a world of good.
I’m a traditionalist when it comes to cricket, as you’ve no doubt guessed, and so I’ve watched its coarser, glibber cousin taking over its mantle with shock and dismay. I don’t like Twenty20. Any game that feels the need to be completed in less than a full workweek is simply not cricket. The only saving grace in the whole sordid saga of this nouveau riche beggar masquerading as king has been the sight of Sachin Tendulkar playing even this version with his sublime touch and skill. That makes up for the cheerleaders and their ridiculous outfits, and the ageing percussionists banging on their drums like performing monkeys. It even makes up for the hyperbole incessantly spewed out by the overpaid commentators. The whole thing is a rather vulgar spectacle, though. As one commentator infamous for his gaffes would no doubt put it — “If Geoffrey Boycott were alive to see this, he’d be turning over in his grave.”
(Papi Menon is a writer and technologist based in San Francisco)
