Cricket and Its Appeal to Me

 I remember playing and watching cricket when I was young. Oh, how fun it used to be! 

I was easily immersed in it. I wanted to be a cricketer. Be out there with a bat and make a name for myself, take the best catches and stun everyone, or make the ball spin or swing so much that the batsman finds it impossible to play.

Well, this was my dream as a cricketer. A short-lived one but a heartful one nonetheless. And dreams, when these little demons break… It hurts.

While I could never get the bowl to swing beyond a certain limit and only get the wickets on the seemingly worst bowls I bowled, I still made some progress there. I'm not the one for sports, but I had this passion for it. A passion to score better, to win the match for my team, to be a hero for a while, to stand up proud and get to 'bat' again in the next match as we decided. 

It was never about the rewards, not even something as superficial as honor or fame. Mostly, it was about oneself, or well, something within us. It was about our passion for the game and the worth of that passion for us. It was a measure of how our dreams performed in real life.

Unfortunately, my dreams couldn't even make a half-century before they were retired hurt and put back in their place by the selection board. But this is not just about my dreams.

This is about how I admired cricket in my childhood, how I became passionate about it, and what was there in each of those forms of cricket to be passionate about.

Television: So first, I started watching it on the TV. A little boy who got introduced and later hooked to the game because everyone around me used to watch it and talk about it. I seemed to have remembered certain names that would constantly pop up on the screen and watching those names again and again gave me a sense of familiarity.

Watching me watch the game as he kept passing offhanded remarks about the batting style of the players and their history, my father, with whom I didn't share many other topics, introduced me to its rules. 

I didn't understand back then but I gradually became accustomed to the game, rather quickly I would say. I would still ask questions from time to time about those rules though because for some reason, the game had a seemingly unlimited number of rules that kept changing depending upon the circumstances. I could never understand the 'complicated' mathematics required to calculate the score of a team in case it rained(the Duckworth-Lewis score) but I could understand the nuances of power plays(that kept changing frequently), the number of overs a bowler should bowl, and so on. When the DRS system was introduced, I knew about it even more than my colleagues and my father, for the simple reason that I turned on the commentary and listened to it.

Anyway, so it became a break for me. A break when I and my father would bond over, have something to talk about, present our own perspectives, and so on. Surprisingly enough, our opinions and perspectives, unlike everything else, seemed to be quite compatible in regards to our favorite players and the choices they made during the match, overall trends, and so on.

What gradually attracted me more and more towards cricket, however, was an infatuation with the scores and the records. Those numbers appeared to be full of magic, calling me out to remember them, as if they were the only numbers in the world, oh so special.

Now that I look back on them, they were so irrelevant and meaningless but still, they were a part of history, and history, we believe is a part of an immortal legacy that will go on and on and on. My desire to make a record, to contribute something to that eternal legacy made me dream of cricket even when the TV was turned off, even when the match and even the post-match analysis and highlights were over.

Dreams and Daydreams: So, over time, I started to dream of cricket. I wouldn't dream of their faces but their shots, their movements across the crease, their styles and so on. Some surreal dreams later, I started to daydream about cricket. I would be walking with a bowling action, would think of my leg as the bat, and would conjure dreams about hitting six sixes every over. I would think of the ball hitting the center of my bat with a satisfying resounding knock and would feel absolutely delighted after that. 

At times, I used to conjure entire matches in my head, some of 20 overs, some shorter, some longer, some in which I won the match for the team by bowling, some in which I batted to chase a seemingly impossible target, and so on. The game manifested itself in my imagination and shaped how I viewed life itself. These daydreams continued till much later on in my life, until I started playing football more than cricket, and an imaginary football seemed to be accompanying me everywhere as I walked, ate, and even talked.

Imagination: Again, as a child, the characters and toys that I possessed, all so full of imagination and life, played cricket as well. I bowled with small objects such as a bottle cap, a ping pong ball, or a carrom piece with my left hand and hit them with my 'bat', which would also be something as simple as a pencil or a spoon. I kept playing by myself, with myself, all day. At times, I wouldn't even need a 'bowl' to play the match, just an imaginary one would work.

I would even play an entire series of matches with myself, as I divided teams into pencils and toys, imaginary India and Australia, and so on. My bed here was both my pitch and my ground and I was simultaneously a batsman, a bowler, a fielder, an umpire, a hero, a loser, and the audience.  

My fascination with those numbers and records that I saw on television continued here. I counted the scores of both 'teams', individual 'players', and kept 'recording' them on top of my head for as long as I could. Not only did I take them seriously throughout the match, I would remember them after that. Soon, some of my pencils and some other toys became my favorites as well. Funnily enough, I played with some of them so much that the lead inside of them got fragmented. So later, when I used them to write, I realized that no matter how much I sharpened it, the tip was bound to break or fall off.

Then as I grew a bit older and started playing cricket with a bat and a ball, a plastic bat and a plastic ball, a rubber ball, a tennis ball, even a ping pong ball, and so on, I started frequenting my neighborhood and rooftop. In the neighborhood, I played cricket with others, my neighbors’ kids, and other older and younger folks. There was no seniority there, everyone was just a player, and I liked being a part of that. That was also my first interaction with ‘society’.

They had strange rules, adjusted to the stage on which we played. If the batsman hit the ball too far, he had to fetch it himself, or he would be considered 'out'. If the ball was hit in the sewer, he had to take it out and wash it. If he had his own bat, well, he could bat for a while longer if he acted shamelessly enough. If there was an odd number of players, one player would play as a ‘common’ player and play from both sides. 

On the roof, I usually played alone unless a guest's kid or a random cousin dropped by. There, I had a bigger field, a bigger pitch, a bigger range of objects to play, and a broader imagination at work. While playing, I would act as if I was a professional cricketer and then try to emulate their styles as I played. If it was a left-handed batsman, I would even play left-handed there. I had also marked a particular spot on the wall there to act as my 'stumps' when I bowled. Whenever I had an excess of energy, I would also act as a fielder and throw that ball at that spot from different angles and positions. This had a separate 'record' section in my mental book.

Funnily enough, as I was acting as different batsmen, I would play better when it was a batsman that I liked and vice-versa.

If I was a talented cricketer who could learn without guidance, like someone with an inborn talent, I would have shone here. Fortunately and unfortunately, I only had fun and passed my time like that. I would even write down the score at times and fill entire copies with those random numbers. Most of the time however, I would be running down two floors to fetch the random object I was playing with since it was a second floor rooftop. I would go there as soon as the sun shifted a bit to the side and would stay there until it set completely. Then it would be time for snacks or television. If it was time for watching TV though, I would watch cartoons(wouldn't watch cricket now, I wasn't that much of a fanatic).

Mobile: When I found out that I could play cricket on a mobile handset, I started asking everyone I met if they had that installed on their phone(only when I was alone with them or when my parents weren't around). I would then proceed to play a game on their phone until they left. This continued until my father got himself a new keypad mobile with a cricket game pre-installed on it. I played it as much as I could, almost all the time I was allowed to, and even a bit more than that. 

And of course I would keep count of the score there as well. It didn't take time for me to grow attached to the fictional names and numbers there. I even developed a sense of connection to them as I sorted my favorites among them. 

PC: My fascination with playing the game on PC started with playing it on others' computers as well. It was just so much better than playing it on mobile that I couldn't get enough of it. It gave me a rush that was unthinkable to me at that time. I merely wanted to have more time to play it, to complete a single game, and then one more. Years later, when I got my own PC, I was 14-15 years old. And the first thing I did after setting it up was to search for a game like Cricket 07, which wasn't that good in retrospect but still seemed to me the best thing in the world. 

There, I finally got to play it to my heart's content, letting loose my obsession with numbers. Gradually, with an unlimited access to the game on the PC, I was over it. 

With Family and Friends: The dynamics of the game were different when I played it with family members and friends. Each family member that I played the game with taught me something different as well. I remember one of my cousins teaching me how to place the ball at the centre of the bat, another teaching me how to hold the bat(it felt awkward initially), a friend teaching me the right bowling action, and another teaching me how to make the bowl swing. 

Then when I was old enough to go out on a cycle with a bat stuck in the rear rack, I made lots of memories.

We played the game for the sake of playing the game, not for the numbers, scores, or records. We didn't keep records, we didn't care about the numbers. We just loved sweating for our passion. We wanted to win but we didn't want to win for ourselves, we wanted to win one for the team. This team spirit made it so that we forgot our individual scores, only team's runs were kept track of, for that was the only score that mattered. The cricket on the streets was different from the cricket on the rooftop, different from the one on TV, and different from the one on PC. Each had its own appeal, and certain fascinating qualities.

But the difference in appeal between cricket as a show business meant for mass consumption and cricket as a sport connected to some of our sweetest memories is apparent. One is a consumption pattern that is reliant on our emotions, another is emotion itself.

I haven't played or watched cricket in a long time but the emotion that I cultivated with this sport is something that'll have a warm spot in my memories forever.