As I write this, Munawar Faruqui has spent 3 weeks in jail for a joke he did not make. Meanwhile, Virat Kohli has spent 3 weeks at home, basking in the glow of a series of victories he wasn't part of. To me at least, there's something strangely tragic about the times we live in.
Since I like my freedom, this is not a post about India's kangaroo courts. Instead it is about kangaroos who courted disaster by underestimating the character of this Indian cricket team. Can't blame the Aussies though, because many of us did too. As mentioned in the previous post, there is a traumatised section of the Indian population, roughly spanning the ages of 60 to 35, which still cannot fathom just WTF happened and HTF the Test team won at the Gabba on Tuesday. Like the delicious pain of a loose tooth, I revisit the first half of January 19 over and over in my mind and yet scarcely believe it happened. How fiercely my heart thumped when we were just 3 runs away. It was akin to the unconstrained thrill of finally knowing that your crush likes you back; a "Holy fuck, this is really happening... to me!" moment.
Since that day, I have watched videos and heard podcasts involving gentlemen of a certain age discuss the event and it's gratifying to realise that they thought, hoped and believed exactly the same thing I did - block, block, block for the love of heaven, draw, take the trophy and come home. There's no shame in it because, to borrow the immortal words of Roger Murtagh, "We're too old for this shit".
Only to have Pant, Gill, Thakur, Saini, Sundar and their ilk give us quizzical looks, say "Take it easy then, Uncles" and proceed to win the game. This team - this bunch of odds & ends cobbled together from whoever was available, beat the best team in the world (at the time) at a venue where the home team hadn't lost in 32 years! 'That' West Indies team was the last one to do it. January 19 did not happen. Except, no doubt to poor Tim Paine's immense discomfiture, it did.
It's not fair man. Whether we were at the edge of the couch in Vancouver*, lounging in bed in Atlanta, hugging a pillow for dear life on the sofa in Pune or pacing up and down elsewhere, my kind will never, ever be able to completely change the way we approach these moments. The scars of helplessly watching Indian team after team lose games we should have drawn or won don't fade away just like that. Because once upon a time, we were also young. We also believed in our players, hero-worshipping their skills and passion, wearing our hearts on our sleeves, game after game, series after series. Of course, there were some joys, incredible ones, at that. But they seemed more like one-off miracles, not par for course, unlike the ruthless Aussie teams of yore, racking up 16-match winning streaks (twice!), expecting to win at all times, phlegmatically grinding oppositions to dust.
I think about Agarkar's 6/41 and his row of hapless ducks. Of Dravid, batting alone in England as the team collapsed around him, wearily signing up for one last tour Down Under, spirit more willing than body. Sachin at Madras, Sachin and Bridgetown, Sachin and not playing on the off-side. Kumble bowling with a broken jaw. Sehwag and 195 at Melbourne. Srinath's 8/86. Actually, his whole weary career. Fucking 2003 WC Final. If you can't forget these instances, good luck telling yourself it'll be different the next time.
Everyone has that personal moment when they stop blindly believing and start hoping & praying instead. I cannot pinpoint when my wearing-heart-on-sleeve act went kaput because my heart was worn out. At some point, I simply gave up watching games and started followed the bland text commentary on CricInfo instead. It needs far less emotional investment and the window can be closed at any time. Telling myself that I'm older, there's work to be done and god knows what else to get away from the unbearable tension. To hide the fact that I still kinda believe. I hate acknowledging this. But hey, if that's what it takes, so be it.
To millions of us, what happened at the Gabba was a epic miracle. To 11 guys and, by extension, the millions of their generation, it was another day at the office.
That's the difference. That's what's important.
Song for the moment: Keep the faith - Bon Jovi
P.S: *Vancouver Uncle said we should go for victory though.
Comments
So it was kinda annoying to see everyone in my orbit not seeing which way it was headed even by lunch. At lunch, it was all too obvious that an Indian win was on the cards. And yet you had those AI predictors give us a 1% chance of win, actual people giving us less than that, and seemingly nobody being able to really see what was actually going on. Which brings me to all these pundits who really need to take a break so they can pull their heads out of their asses. Not ONE of them even so much as suggested that India might be chasing a win until an hour before tea. That's ridiculous. The likes of Harsha Bhogle haven't had one interesting thought in about 20 years now. But I usually turn a blind eye to it because commentating cricket is a tough job given that not that much really happens. So that competency ultimately boils down to being able to recycle the same old thoughts and dressing them up and delivering them like they are brand new insights. But at the Gabba, while it was painfully evident was actually going down, these sinecure fucks couldn't be bothered to earn their keep the one time in a decade when you'd believe their so called expertise would help them read those tea leaves at least a little bit better than folks like us who really only follow the game like we are cursed to do that.
Oh well, in the final analysis, and indeed in hindsight, only the exhilaration will stick. And for those of us who still remember 2001 vividly, hopefully this will last us at least until 2041!
Btw, one thing that nobody seemed to have noticed at all, was how similar Gabba was to England at Chennai 2008. In a lot of ways that was a more difficult situation, but the way Sehwag had gone about it by literally single handedly taking the option of a draw off the table for the rest of the team was something to behold. If you look at that Test as a reference point, Gabba was simply Chennai 2.0 in that they basically used the same approach, but tempered that down a bit and to great effect. I suppose the only reason I was looking at an India win for all of day 5 was because I couldn't help but notice the similarities of the situation right away and so I was inadvertently tracking everything we were doing against that template and everything seemed to check out every step of the way.