The World Cup That Cheers

In cricket, we have something that we can share with our families, neighbours and indeed, the whole country.

It is colour-blind, language-neutral, truly secular and transcends all regions, from Kashmir to Kerala and Mizoram to Maharashtra, explains Shreekant Sambrani.

Cliches galore

In the day-and-a-half since India won the International Cricket Council T20 World Cup, literally millions of words have been said, written and expressed on social media about the famous victory.

One may not have noticed that many of these comments contain several standard catchphrases, chiefly because they have become common currency in cricket analyses and our everyday language.

These coinages are attributable mainly to the army of British commentators plying their trade since the time the good Dr W G Grace elevated cricket to Great Britain's national pastime in the second half of the nineteenth century.

That should not surprise us since the Blighty's singular contribution to the world is the English language.

The title of this column is itself a cliche, but not from cricket jargon. It describes the favourite afternoon beverage of the Islanders.

But never in my more than five decades of avid pursuit of the games and comments on it have I found that some of these hoary chestnuts to be so apt and appropriate.

That is how unique this tournament was. Here is a sampler of some of the major cliches I heard or read in its duration, especially since the night of 29 June 2024:

Catches win matches

Wise heads often tut-tut when a fielder drops a catch, regardless of whether it was a sitter or an almost impossible one.

But that is the phrase that most appropriately describes the miracle of a catch millimetres short of the boundary line Suryakumar Yadav took to dismiss the in-form, settled, David Miller, a known power hitter and finisher for South Africa on occasions beyond count, off the first ball of the 20th over in the SA innings.

Miller wanted to ice the SA victory with a six on the first ball of the last over when SA had to score 16.

Yadav snatched away that dream, the match and the cup which SA had all but grabbed by then.

The catch not only won the match but also the cup. So breathtakingly acrobatic was it that The Times of India has headlined its edit with it.

Veteran sports commentator Boria Majumdar has written an entire column on it, 'Anatomy of a catch,' in The Economic Times (both on 1 July 2024).

To say that this catch was the defining moment of the entire tournament would be a most accurate description, not hyperbole.

Cricket is a game of glorious uncertainty

Virtually every second statement about cricket is some variant of the sentiment underlying this truism.

Every time we heard it, my wife and I used to grimace and say, "Oh no, not glorious uncertainty again!" I call it a truism since the outcome of all sports events is uncertain, unless they are fixed in advance by punters -- not an uncommon occurrence.

There could be a vast difference in the record of competitors, tilting the possibility of winning in favour of the player or the team in form, but that is not assured.

But in case the just concluded WC final, the uncertainty manifested itself in all its glory, like never before.

The sports channel ESPN Cricinfo has an elaborate statistical model of predicting the victory possibility of cricketing teams involved in a match, which is updated after every single ball and is displayed (others also have prediction models, but I have not seen them as well displayed).

I have found these probabilities fascinating and come to believe that they are quite realistic.

Throughout the tournament, I have watched all games with one eye on the TV screen and the other on the win probability on display on my phone. The final was no exception.

The probability turned in India's favour after the tenth over of the India innings when the Virat Kohli-Axar Patel partnership appeared to have steered India out of the possibility of a collapse towards a par score or more.

That is where it remained until the tenth over of the SA innings. But with Heinrich Klassen and Quinton de Kock crossing 80 at the halfway mark, the probability turned in favour of SA, slowly at first and rapidly later.

The loss of de Kock did not change this. In the fifteenth over when Axar Patel was bleeding runs to SA to allow it the luxury of facing the task of 30 runs in 30 balls, the probability seemed to all but ensure India's loss, with only a 2.5 per cent chance of a win.

Jasprit Bumrah's stinginess of conceding only four runs in the sixteenth over made little difference.

Even the fall of Klassen on the first ball of the seventeenth over made only a marginal improvement in India's chances.

It was Bumrah's scalping of Marco Jansen in the eighteenth over (in which only two runs were scored) that saw the probability of India's win improve to 65 per cent.

It was all in India's favour thereafter, even though the acknowledged finisher Miller was still hitting the ball hard.

India's chances went past 90 per cent after he got out the first ball of the last over.

I have never seen such roller-coaster behaviour of the odds.

Even when Afghanistan beat Australia, the dramatic improvement in odds occurred only in the last four balls of the match.

It isn't over until the last ball is bowled

This is a variant of the glorious uncertainty dictum and equally a truism. But yet again, the WC final showed how excruciating the wait for the last ball could be.

With Miller gone on the first ball of the last over, SA needed 16 off five balls.

Kagiso Rabada hit the first ball he faced for a boundary and it was 12 off four.

Two leg byes and a wide later, it was nine to get in two balls, a real possibility, but Rabada spooned out a catch to Suryakumar Yadav.

Only one ball left and still nine to get. That's when the match was well-and-truly over, on its second last ball!

Bowlers, and not batters, win matches

This is again a truism in case of Test matches, where the winning side must secure 20 wickets.

But that is not so in white ball cricket when the completion of allotted overs and not the fall of all wickets determines the innings closure.

In the WC, India played eight matches (one was washed away) and won all of them, all but two of them (v Pakistan and the final) with comprehensive margins.

India was always described as a mighty batting machine. In these WC matches, it was India's bowling that dominated.

India lost 40 wickets in the eight matches, but claimed 68 of its opponents. No further comment is needed as to who won the matches for India.

The Indian bowling ace Bumrah being named the player of the tournament says it all.

Class is permanent, form is temporary

This rationale is spouted forth every time an established star goes through a slump.

It was never truer of anyone than the reigning superstar of India batting, Virat Kohli, who opened the innings in all eight games with Captain Rohit Sharma.

But after his thundering success at the top of innings in this year's IPL for his team the Royal Challengers, Bengaluru, Kohli managed what can only be called an underwhelming show in the first seven WC fixtures with a total of 75 runs and an average of 10.7 runs.

There were suggestions, not all sotto voce, that Kohli should be dropped, but the captain and the coach persisted with him, assuring us that Kohli was saving his best for the final.

That didn't sound too convincing to anyone, not even to themselves perhaps.

And he proved himself! He began with a blast of three boundaries in the first over, followed it up with one more, but when three wickets fell in quick succession, he didn't have to be told that he was the sheet anchor.

He allowed his partners Axar Patel and Shivam Dube to seek boundaries, but didn't himself lift a ball thereafter until the sixteenth over, after reaching his 50.

And then he cut loose, hitting two fours and two sixes in quick succession to accelerate the scoring.

Altogether, a masterclass in turning adversity to advantage, for which he was named the player of the match.

Why the WC matters to India

There is a lot more that can be written about the cricketing aspect of the WC, but there are better and more qualified writers to do it than this columnist.

I will turn my attention to why and how much the WC win matters to us non-cricketers in India.

In 1789, Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, wrote to a friend, 'In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.'

Had he been alive today, he would have surely added Indian mass obsession with cricket as the third certainty.

This wasn't always so. Indeed, in the first 25 years of Independent India, cricket was an import, a sport with following limited to urban, Anglicised, elite.

We lost international matches regularly and an occasional victory was often attributed to freak phenomena such as matting wickets at Kanpur.

Our spinners such as the Guptes won respect, as did old guard batters such as Vijay Merchant, Vijay Hazare, Vinoo Mankad and Polly Umrigar.

Things started changing in the early 1970s, with the emergence mostly of Mumbai batters such as Dilip Sardesai, Sunil Gavaskar, Dilip Vengsarkar and Ajit Wadekar.

India started notching up international victories.

The emergence of the spinning quartet of Bishan Singh Bedi, S Venkataraghavan, E A S Prasanna and B Chandrasekhar gave heft to the bowling.

When Kapil Dev burst in on the scene, we had someone who could be considered a true speedster and an attacking all-rounder.

India scoffed at limited overs cricket at the beginning and was nowhere in that format as well, until the historic world cup victory against the then reigning cricketing royalty, the West Indies, in 1983.

A couple of years later, India took to white ball and coloured clothing cricket as fish to water.

But we were still a middling power and not even the emergence of Sachin Tendulkar changed our international standing all that much.

Things were happening though, and Tendulkar was soon joined by Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and V V S Laxman.

But it was not until the 2003 World Cup that India began to be taken seriously.

Indians, though continued to be interested in cricket only as long as Tendulkar was batting.

India's cricket mania was a few years away yet.

It had to wait until the introduction of the shortest format, the 20 overs a side game, with its myriad restrictions that favoured the batting side.

India's sporadic success in the desert cricket and many bilateral or multilateral series kept the mass interest alive, but Tendulkar was often the boy on the burning deck.

That prompted a seminal comment from a journalist how Tendulkar was carrying alone the burden of his billion impoverished countrymen (I have tried to find the original, but not succeeded in it; the best I could find was the Time essay after the 2011 WC victory using the same metaphor).

The unexpected triumph of India in the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007 and the launch of the Indian Premier League almost immediately thereafter were the triggers that made cricket the mass sport in India it is today and raised Indian interest to manic proportions.

The phenomenal appeal and success of the IPL (and spread of the electronic media) took cricket to every nook and corner of India.

The lure of instant glamour and fortune lit up millions of young Indian dreams and we discovered a rich vein of innate talent and abilities.

With meticulous care and nurturing, the many franchises turned this mother lode into world-beating national teams.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Virat Kohli, Suresh Raina, Rohit Sharma, Zaheer Khan all became shining stars on the cricketing firmament and feared and respected internationally as well.

This is where winning became not just important -- it was all that we wanted.

That was an assertion of our collective aspiration, a mark of our having arrived on the global stage.

It was of little consequence that cricket was confined to barely a dozen countries.

We would become the biggest frog in this well, we hoped.

Isn't baseball, America's national sport, also limited to a handful of countries? we asked incredulously.

And at a billion plus, we had the largest pool of eyeballs, which could allow us to dictate terms for the international circuit.

The old, mostly white, Anglo-Saxon, members had to welcome the new sheriff in town with the biggest wallet.

That was our ultimate decolonisation, taking over an English game and making it our own, to the point of asserting that cricket was an Indian game accidentally invented in England.

And what good is owning a sport if you can't win and win consistently? So winning is everything to us.

It is not just the masses but the elite who are now wholeheartedly into cricket.

The somewhat leisurely pace with frequent breaks -- even the shortest version lasts longer than other field games such as soccer and hockey, which have no breaks after every three to four minutes due to completion of an over -- allows many of us (this columnist included) to become couch coaches and captains, simultaneously critiquing and strategising.

Winning bilateral series is important, but does not have the prestige of triumphing in ICC events.

That puts the gold seal on our having arrived, a goal that suits all the many-hued political dispensations in the country.

That is why cricket is now our number one obsession, leaving behind those perennial favourites, politics and films.

I have no problem with this. It takes our minds of the pettiness and corruption of politics, and the scandals of films.

In cricket, we have something that we can share with our families, neighbours and indeed, the whole country.

It is colour-blind, language-neutral, truly secular and transcends all regions, from Kashmir to Kerala and Mizoram to Maharashtra.

What makes this cup triumph even sweeter is that it has provided redemption to soft-spoken three heroes: Coach Rahul Dravid, Captain Rohit Sharma and all-rounder Hardik Pandya.

Dravid and Sharma, genuine stars in their own right, have always had their light shrouded by the aura of their more admired contemporaries, (God) Tendulkar and (King) Kohli.

Dravid has finally buried the ghost of 2007, when he as the India captain faced the ignominy of a first round exit in the same Caribbean islands.

And Sharma has avenged the defeat last year at the hands of Australia.

Poor Pandya had to face incredible trolling from all (including this columnist) on his being para dropped as the Mumbai Indians skipper.

He has now redeemed himself, and how!

That's why the Cup cheers.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com