The cat is out of the bag! All those who had bet a significant amount on the duration of Indian cricket team's domination on world cricket can now safely redeem their purses. How the public mood has shifted! An average Indian cricket fan is more of a skeptic now than a believer like yesteryears, so much so that it is now as much a staple of mainstream culture as the talented commentary booth comprising of erudite orators like Wasim Akram and Mohinder Amarnath (what happened to Richie Benaud & David Gover?).
After every jaunty home series victory, the common rancor surrounding the neighborhood tea stall is-"Wait for a foreign tour and see how badly they perform." People no longer talk about how our team is one of the most feared squads when playing at home, or how much our performance has improved over the course of the last decade when playing at a bowler's paradise in England or South Africa (compared to pre-Y2k years). Coincidentally, the World Cup victory last year did no favors to our reputation as chokers outside our sovereign territory. Hidden somewhere in the corners of the sports section were columns suggesting that India might have to another 12 years before they can think of getting their hands to the cup. A highly anticipated series with England followed, billed as the informal Test cricket championship due to the rankings of the participants being 1 & 2. While England held up their end of the bargain, the Indian team appeared flustered, unprepared, and last but not the least, exhausted. By now, we all know that the Indian cricketers are as active as Digvijay Singh's publicist, with the already busy calender cramped further by the IPL. But so do most of the top 5 nations, and Kumar Sangakkara was valiant enough to put it in words during his speech at the MCC last year. So stop blaming the IPL for our cricketing woes. It is as transient as pulling an nightout before an exam, for all practical purposes.
Also, spare a thought to our cricketers. While mental preparation is a big component of achieving the level of success and competency that our players do, they are not blanked from the negativity surrounding Indian cricket in general. The Indo-England home ODI series witnessed empty stands even at the cricket-starved Eden gardens. Key players are getting injured left-and-right, while the public mood is swinging in the other direction to empathy. England went through a similarly disastrous phase in 2006, when they were mauled at the hands of the Aussies in the Ashes, followed by a disastrous World cup campaign. England have since gone on to retain the Ashes twice, most recently away from home, and even won that elusive major championship in the form of the T20 world cup. If you think our media is cut-throat and fickle, the English media is predatory in nature, so much so that the phone hacking scandal surrounding News Corp has been described as just another event in the day-to-day British media circus, that happened to get exposed.
In a nation of 1.2 billion cricket enthusiasts, we are also unfortunately 1.2 billion strong cricket pundits, or so we would like to believe! Sachin's search for the awe-inspiring 100th international hundred has been beaten to death in the public. Let the man enjoy the last leg of his glorious career without hounding him with the intense glare that surrounds every post-match presentation. If nothing, this shock might be exactly what the Indian team needs, a sense of emergency that can prop them to hit back like the 2003 world cup.
PS: Speaking of Sach, this is my favorite of all his commercials. And Carl Hooper would make a great Ra.One is SRK is thinking of a sequel to the best comedy of 2011.
