I love sports but I am really a cricket tragic.
It has been one full day since the test match concluded in Brisbane with the Indian team overcoming extraordinary odds to defeat the Australian team on the last session of the last day of the last test in a test series fought with depleting troops and injuries, by teams stretched by the tiresome seclusion in covid bubbles. I have not fully recovered from the shock.
The venue was historic — Australia never lost there since 1988, with most visiting teams perishing in the battery of short-pitched deliveries. The terror of the venue is signified in its name, Gabbatoir, a portmanteau built from the location and destiny — Woolloongabba (a suburb of Brisbane) and abattoir (a fate that awaited the unsuspecting touring teams).
There are some anomalies in the world that seem to sustain despite the temporal “market pressure”. They have invariably emerged from acculturation of traditions, idiosyncrasies of shared cultures, and nurturing affections of partaking custodians over the years: Carnatic music, thousand-page Russian novels of life and death, the explorations of the outdoors. These endeavors of the human mind, body, and soul seem unconstrained by the relentless hurry of the world. These distinct pleasures constantly battle the pressures of time and the constraints of unrewarding urgent matters. Test Cricket is one such anomaly.
I feel lucky to have learned it through osmosis through the ethos of people, rather than studied attention or through developed taste. To a puzzled outsider, standing in the sun for a day is not the idea of fun.
For there is no sport in the world, I feel, where surviving is an achievement. We are not talking of a blood sport, like Battle Royale, or Death Match 2000 here. We talk of a gentleman’s game with allotted time for lunches and tea breaks, that is punctuated by operatic violence. A game that pauses for rains but where wooden missiles are legally thrown at your face at nearly a hundred miles an hour. The only way to stay safe (the right batting technique, as they call it) is to watch the swerving and swinging red cherry, spitting spitefully off the cracks in the pitch. Watch it unceasingly till the last second, averting the temptation to look away to save your eyes and head. Take it on the chin, on the back of the neck, on the side of your helmet, on your arms and ribs, on your toes, and on your fingers. Start again. Stare at the ball, memoryless of the past humiliation. Bide your time. Such were the vagaries of Chet Pujara’s life at the crease.
I got my young daughter to watch it with me; for I hoped it would be a lasting memory that she would cherish, watching me nervous and excited, even though the only thing she knew was that the runs total was a monotone increasing process, and the team with most runs on board eventually “won”.
How could there be a sport, where the delights comprise of a solitary man vs the elements and history? A loner fighting against his own demons, against the prodigious talent of top opposition, against the steepness of statistics to launch an audacious assault to culminate the pressure building over the days, amidst rain and shine.
Who watches this? Few nowadays. Why does it persist? We don’t know.
The players revere it. We tragics embrace it. Test cricket stands as an anomaly in the modern world.
It is simplistic to treat cricket as a metaphor for life. As CLR James argued, life is more than cricket. However, I shudder to think of a life with no test cricket.