I would have backed this Indian team to beat this Australian team in a World Cup final in any other stadium in India, or in JoBurg, or even in Perth. But like many others, I wasn’t sure how they would fare in Ahmedabad.
There was a real sense of several different kinds of ugliness coalescing in Ahmedabad, some local and some not. There, in that over-bloated stadium still carrying the stench of Donald Trump’s 2020 visit, was added the humiliation of the crowd behaviour during the Pakistan match. There, in that stadium from which Sardar Patel’s name has thankfully been removed, the cricket was always set to be diminished against all the other planned hoopla.
For an India player, there is always the huge pressure of expectation in any big Indian stadium. But in Ahmedabad, that pressure was both distorted and multiplied several times over. The Aussies were there to play cricket – unusually as underdogs. But what the Indian team was being forced to play was some other game, one both lesser and bigger than cricket. It is that game in which Rohit Sharma‘s men were slaughtered.
Over the last 15 years and more, there has been the relentless hollowing out of cricket, especially in India, an evisceration of this most subtle of games in the service of cheap spectacle, a coarse dumbing down carried out for an easy, immediate gratification poisonous for the sport. This money-gluttony has created fear in the administrators of the game as well as advertisers and TV channels.
All the crass circus-tamasha, (at one time) the dancing women from abroad, the bizarrely costumed drummers, the waving of oversized team flags, the smoke jets, the constant noise and screaming ‘DJ-ing’ between overs, the relentless, crazy carpet-bombing of publicity, all stem from this terror of dropping profits, the game itself be damned. While the players might be used to all this, the circus-tamasha was pushed to absurdly new heights across the World Cup, culminating last Sunday. ‘Aapke India mey toh fog chal raha hai!’ repeated the deodorant ads on TV. And once the flypast of the Air Force’s aerobatics team was over, the smokescreen laid by the money-spinners was joined by another, peculiar kind of fog spreading over the neighbourhood of Motera – one that we had seen just a few days earlier.
Studies carried out on football hooliganism and partisan football gang behaviour in Europe and South America point out that hooligans are usually from deprived sections of society, usually poor, unemployed men. There is the craving for immediate, violent gratification, only partly to do with football, as an assertion of herd identity, to bolster a sense of superiority in extremely insecure mobs.
Often seen is the vicious targeting of minorities, in Britain, not least of all South Asians or ‘desis’. The abusive and violent tribalism gives ‘meaning’ to the existence of these young, and not-so-young men, whose lives otherwise lack any meaning or opportunity.
On display at the final was a strange variation of this hooliganism conducted by elements of the Gujarati middle class. As with the greedy and grasping organisation of the tournament, this too has a history. For the last three decades and more, civility, love, empathy, concepts of right and wrong, any truthful history, have all been squeezed away from succeeding generations of my fellow Gujaratis. And what we saw at the Narendra Modi Stadium during the Pakistan match, and then the night of the final, was one fallout of this deliberate deprivation.
Watching this crowd abusing the Pakistan team, chanting religious slogans, ghosting great Australian play, or booing two blameless umpires, brought indescribable shame upon us Indians in front of the world, and upon all those of us who are Gujaratis before all of India.
