Leaning, puking out of the iron barred window of an Indian train is not unusual. Being greeted like a celebrity outside a cricket stadium is.
Recovering from a 20-hour train journey from Chennai to Cuttack (spent suffering the effects of food poisoning) I set out to buy my ticket for the 5th ODI. The reception afforded me by the hundreds of people waiting to buy tickets at the Barabati stadium was surreal, therapeutic and extremely fun.
While the match in Bangalore was beginning- with Virender Sehwag taking the attack to England’s bowlers as he has done so often this series- hundreds of fans waited patiently in searing heat to buy tickets. Their boredom was lifted by the sight of my girlfriend and I: jeers and cheers rang out from whoever we passed. But this was nothing to what followed.
Our arrival outside the stadium brought a hoard of television cameras with presenters thrusting microphones at us and requesting interviews. Either they thought I was someone important, or as I suspect, English cricket fans in rural east India are a rarity at best. Searching questions were asked: what did I think of England’s performance so far? (Crap) and who was my favourite England player? (Michael Vaughan: even though he wasn’t playing).
Travelling with a woman in India is well advised; my girlfriend used the ladies’ queue and bought us two tickets within 20 minutes, rather than the hours I would have had to wait otherwise. We then posed with our tickets, whilst more cameras and crew surrounded us as well as a crowd of 50 or so onlookers taking pictures on their mobile phones.
These further interviews was more searching than previous ones:
Interviewer: “How are you exactly feeling at this moment?”
Me: “Very good- I am very pleased to be here in Cuttack, and I am looking forward to the match on Wednesday.”
Interviewer: “And who is your favourite Indian player?”
Me: “Sachin”
Enormous cheers rang out behind me.
This is the upside of the BCCI’s stadium rotation policy. This will probably be the only opportunity fans in Cuttack will have to watch their hero’s in the flesh all year. If the reception given to me is anything to go by, they are determined to make the most of it.
Tuesday 25 November 2008
Thursday 20 November 2008
Something rotten at the core
India’s cricket team is heir apparent to Australia’s world champion crown and its board is the richest and most powerful in the world. Over the past week Yuvraj Singh has scored two memorable hundreds, and the Board of Control for Cricket in India has attempted to shift the dates of the first Test match to accommodate a newly created money-spinning Twenty20 competition – the Champions League. The two sides of Indian cricket are captured in these events: sublime stroke-play, and a behemoth greedy for more cash.
The ECB rejected calls for changes to the Test dates, but even before this tour got under way England’s itinerary has been suspect. Most of the ODI’s are being played in provincial industrial cities like Rajkot or Indore – and not in the premier cricket grounds of Calcutta or Chennai.
Beside the fact that I would rather see England play in some of the world’s great stadiums – the rotation policy has left the tour itinerary in a constant state of limbo. The game originally planned for Jamshedpur was moved to Bangalore because the stands were unsafe and Guwahati in Assam is a potential war-zone. Just a couple of weeks ago 18 bombs planted by separatists in the city killed 64 people and injured over 300. Around ten thousand people have died in the regions political struggles over the past three decades.
The BCCI’s ticketing policy also leaves much to be desired. Despite its gleaming new website it does not sell tickets online, only locally around the respective stadiums. I am relying on friends in Cuttack and Delhi to get me into the ground, while the Barmy Army will not officially comment on the problems it has had in gaining a quota of tickets for the Test series lest it anger the BCCI in public – putting their quota in jeopardy.
The ECB rejected calls for changes to the Test dates, but even before this tour got under way England’s itinerary has been suspect. Most of the ODI’s are being played in provincial industrial cities like Rajkot or Indore – and not in the premier cricket grounds of Calcutta or Chennai.
Beside the fact that I would rather see England play in some of the world’s great stadiums – the rotation policy has left the tour itinerary in a constant state of limbo. The game originally planned for Jamshedpur was moved to Bangalore because the stands were unsafe and Guwahati in Assam is a potential war-zone. Just a couple of weeks ago 18 bombs planted by separatists in the city killed 64 people and injured over 300. Around ten thousand people have died in the regions political struggles over the past three decades.
The BCCI’s ticketing policy also leaves much to be desired. Despite its gleaming new website it does not sell tickets online, only locally around the respective stadiums. I am relying on friends in Cuttack and Delhi to get me into the ground, while the Barmy Army will not officially comment on the problems it has had in gaining a quota of tickets for the Test series lest it anger the BCCI in public – putting their quota in jeopardy.
Thursday 13 November 2008
MS Dhoni on your crisps
One of the first things you notice as a foreigner in India is how readily complete strangers are willing to strike up probing conversations with you. When I explain I’m following England’s cricket tour they often laugh before explaining that their country is “cricket crazy” - as if they are somehow detached from it all. This impartiality usually passes within minutes and they fall to musing about the skiddy medium pace they bowled as a teenager, or the intricacies of Bhagwat Chandrasekhar’s action. Unwittingly they prove their own point.
On television there are several channels devoted to cricket: ICL, IPL repeats, highlights of old Indian ODI’s - on one I found a repeat of the Sussex-Lancashire C&G trophy final from a couple of years ago. Advert breaks bring you Sachin Tendulkar promoting the Royal Bank of Scotland and Yuvraj Singh advertising Pepsi. If you fancy a snack, Mahendra Singh Dhoni appears on the front of your packet of crisps.
The money flowing through the Indian game makes much more sense when you are here. The advertisements and the endorsements are the physical representations of the billion dollar television deals which are made by companies desperate to show live International matches. For a cricket follower it is a strange experience – I’m both ecstatic at the amount of cricket I can consume, and uneasy at how entwined with money and markets it has become.
As for England and their practice matches – few people have been talking about them. Pietersen and his colleagues have been footnotes in the English-language papers as Sourav Ganguly and Ricky Ponting have dominated the front, back and opinion pages. India’s victory over Australia was felt viscerally by many I’ve spoken to: “We hate the Aussies”, a man from Mumbai told me, “we even danced in the streets when England won the Ashes”.
This focus away from the upcoming one-day matches might give England an advantage, especially with Tendulkar rested and Ishant Sharma injured for the beginning of the series. This being said, modern cricketers should be accustomed to the seamless transition between different tours and contrasting forms of the game. England will have to start well against a country riding on the crest of a wave.
On television there are several channels devoted to cricket: ICL, IPL repeats, highlights of old Indian ODI’s - on one I found a repeat of the Sussex-Lancashire C&G trophy final from a couple of years ago. Advert breaks bring you Sachin Tendulkar promoting the Royal Bank of Scotland and Yuvraj Singh advertising Pepsi. If you fancy a snack, Mahendra Singh Dhoni appears on the front of your packet of crisps.
The money flowing through the Indian game makes much more sense when you are here. The advertisements and the endorsements are the physical representations of the billion dollar television deals which are made by companies desperate to show live International matches. For a cricket follower it is a strange experience – I’m both ecstatic at the amount of cricket I can consume, and uneasy at how entwined with money and markets it has become.
As for England and their practice matches – few people have been talking about them. Pietersen and his colleagues have been footnotes in the English-language papers as Sourav Ganguly and Ricky Ponting have dominated the front, back and opinion pages. India’s victory over Australia was felt viscerally by many I’ve spoken to: “We hate the Aussies”, a man from Mumbai told me, “we even danced in the streets when England won the Ashes”.
This focus away from the upcoming one-day matches might give England an advantage, especially with Tendulkar rested and Ishant Sharma injured for the beginning of the series. This being said, modern cricketers should be accustomed to the seamless transition between different tours and contrasting forms of the game. England will have to start well against a country riding on the crest of a wave.
Sunday 2 November 2008
Cricket the sideshow
The democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama spent millions of dollars this week in airing a half-hour campaign advert on several prime-time US television networks. An orator in the finest classical traditional, he offers a compelling vision for his country. His pitch was moving, uplifting and polished in presentation.
This coming Saturday another commercial will air: this time for the billionaire financer Sir Allen Stanford. The comparison between the two is marked. While Stanford employs a camera to trail him throughout his set-piece cricket-match, Obama highlights the lives of the ordinary Americans whose lives he hopes to change. These two words “hope” and “change” are ubiquitous throughout the speeches Obama makes. The word most often seen at Stanford’s event is Stanford itself: the Stanford Stadium, the Stanford Super Series, the Stanford Superstars. He likes alliteration as much as the sound of his own name.
And this is the crucial point. This is not about the cricketing spectacle (if it was the pitch would be better) – this is about image and ego, compared to substance and character. Stanford is now the most well-known 205th richest man in America. Nobody has heard of John Catsimatidis, the next on the list. Money is his raison d’etre, and in buying the England cricket team he has bought the biggest advert the City of London has ever seen.
Here is one final thought: before the stadium was developed, with its pristine outfield and vernacular West Indian pavilion, the site was used as an old rubbish dump. Some metaphors come just too easily.
This coming Saturday another commercial will air: this time for the billionaire financer Sir Allen Stanford. The comparison between the two is marked. While Stanford employs a camera to trail him throughout his set-piece cricket-match, Obama highlights the lives of the ordinary Americans whose lives he hopes to change. These two words “hope” and “change” are ubiquitous throughout the speeches Obama makes. The word most often seen at Stanford’s event is Stanford itself: the Stanford Stadium, the Stanford Super Series, the Stanford Superstars. He likes alliteration as much as the sound of his own name.
And this is the crucial point. This is not about the cricketing spectacle (if it was the pitch would be better) – this is about image and ego, compared to substance and character. Stanford is now the most well-known 205th richest man in America. Nobody has heard of John Catsimatidis, the next on the list. Money is his raison d’etre, and in buying the England cricket team he has bought the biggest advert the City of London has ever seen.
Here is one final thought: before the stadium was developed, with its pristine outfield and vernacular West Indian pavilion, the site was used as an old rubbish dump. Some metaphors come just too easily.
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