Then, when I logged on to a newspaper site to check the news, I saw the headline: ‘Kohli exposed as Australia beat India to win World Test Championship final’. This was alarming on many fronts. First, it seemed there was a World Cup Cricket Championship of some sorts taking place that was interesting to many people I know. Second, and more importantly, what had Kohli exposed?!
Any limited love or interest I might have had for cricket vanished since IPL was invented. I was interested in cricket(ers) when players included Ravi Shastri, Dennis Lillee, Hanse Cronje, Sachin Tendulkar, and Sourav Ganguly. The new crop, it seems, are constantly auctioned off by businessmen and women who are either athletic, or want to be by proxy. What’s there for me to love about cricket anymore?
But, I must admit, it did feel a bit odd knowing that I hadn’t been aware there was a World Cup Test thingummy taking place. I didn’t even know who we were playing, but I did see sad pictures of Anushka, which should count for something. I do know a thing or two about the emotional fallout of having lost a championship. That, too, I’m told in a final.
Nowadays the only time I encounter Indian cricketers – whether it’s Shikhar Dhawan, Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, or Ajinkya Rahane (I just doublechecked their names on Google) – is on billboards or in commercials. And therein lies the rub. More often than not, our current crop of cricketers are in the news for every reason other than for cricket. Who they’re dating, where they’re holidaying, whether they’re selling us Manyavar kurtas or carbonated drinks or Pidilite. Like the old Tata Steel line, ‘They also play cricket.’
Don’t get me wrong. When I heard that there had been a great upset in the world of sports involving India – ‘India has been shameful!’ – and saw morose pictures of Indian cricketers and their inamoratas, essentially sports-related pathos, all over my Twitter timeline, I immediately assumed that our Indian cricket team and its many supporters had finally decided to react to our medal-winning wrestlers being treated like something that the cat had dragged in (except it was cops, not a cat). Because the wrestlers had claimed that some among their sorority had been sexually harassed by the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI), Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, against whom a chargesheet was filed by Delhi Police on Thursday. I figured four days after Australia beat India at the Oval, the national Test squad had done something that made the likes of Delhi Police finally take some action against Singh. Silly me. It was just that god’s gift to Indian-kind – our men’s national Test cricket team – had lost a championship title, that, too, to another country. Maybe this super-downer will now leave the lot and their partners with a little free time to extend their support to fellow athletes who get beaten – literally – by their own countrymen and women.
In my defence, I now know that India lost by 209 runs.
But I’m an equal opportunity offender, if ever there was one. Because it seems I also missed out on history being made when Novak Djokovic won his 23rd major title at the French Open on Sunday.
There are two reasons why I was actually interested in Djokovic’s win. One, his life growing up in war-torn Serbia to non-tennis playing parents (they did ski, though) before joining Niki Pilic’s academy in Munich in 1999, and then his journey to becoming a tennis player worth contending with, is the stuff dreams are made of. Two, Djokovic is the poster child of the anti-vax movement. At the height of the pandemic – and till date – he has refused to be vaccinated. Only to make history in tennis. Nothing like a celebrity athlete who endorses a health hazard.
All in all, it’s been an enlightening sporting week. India lost. Novak won. Anushka was sad.
