Gone are the ghostly batsmen in cricket today

For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host,
As the run stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro,
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

I am quoting from the 19th Century British poet Francis Thomson’s At Lord’s. While ecstatic over the triumph of India at the World Cup Cricket, I am saddened to as I belong to the fading community of oldies - albeit living in mutual exclusivity - who nostalgically remember the days when cricket was not entertainment, unlike what it is today.

Entertainment is not a sin. Which is why people throwing off the retarding effects of generation gaps get involved in the entertaining aspects of cricket. Among my acquaintances are the ones who keep off appointments during the ODIs like a couple of Sahitya Academy laureates and even one of the few living members of the national council of the Communist Party of India at its Sixth Congress (Vijaywada, 1961), the last of the pre-split party.

Nonetheless, entertainment is often afflicted with moral aberrations. The effervescent growth of match-fixing - don’t mix this with betting ¬- thrives on the negative side of cricket and money-spinning entertainment. Like black-money hoarders, match-fixers and speculators are at large. After all, involved in the network are big shots, including a few government officers, players, hand-picked subordinates and politicians.

The doubts about match-fixing may have some basis. Take Sachin’s 99th international century in the India vs South Africa match. India was 240 for one, chasing SA’s 300. Right at that moment, a Delhi-based construction-firm owner, camping in Kolkata, said India will not win the match and that is what happened. Or consider the SMS claiming that Virendra Sehwag would be out early in the final match. Are we to believe that people are unaware of all this?

Former Mid-Day editor Aakar Patel in his weekly column in a Lahore paper, recalls how in February 1993, SA were skittled out for 198 in Durban against Pakistan’s 208, although starting off with a dazzling 158 for 1. Five of the batsmen were clean-bowled by Waqar Younis, mainly by his yorkers.

Permit me to say, dear reader, cricket of today has forfeited the moral right to be described as “a game of glorious uncertainty”. Kerry Packer must be laughing conceitedly in his grave. But the game deserved this epithet very much when India deprived the West Indies of hat-trick in 1983, defeating the Windies at Lord’s.

Betting was there then, and still takes place openly in England, but the murky match-fixing era was to begin years thereafter, thanks to the high growth of money-spinning ODIs. Who can forget Kapil Dev’s swashbuckling 175 against Zimbabwe when many of us switched off the radio in the afternoon in despair when India was 17 for five and stupefied to learn that Kapil’s feat had put India back into the reckoning? There was no dearth of dramatic interludes alongside remnants of dignity that used to girdle the concept of ‘glorious uncertainty’.

Anuj Bhuwania’s pungent comment in a pro-Left website that “cricket is the opiate of the Indian masses” is very true. India’s left-liberals are too disempowered to deal with this grim reality. The younger generation is committed to ‘cricketainment’ in sync with neo-liberal global economic order. It’s an appropriate issue for debate as cricket today survives as a mass entertainment.

That is why housewives of various age groups, including domestic helps, too fix their eyes to live telecast of ODIs and Twenty-20s. They won’t tune into the channels that run popular serials which are close to their hearts. These viewers are light years away from those who made fortunes out of cricket-speculation.

A New Delhi-based strategic analyst and a former fellow in economics at the Madras Institute of Development Studies were the ones who agree that the hype about the media - especially a couple of TV channels - dance to the tune of vested interests that wanted diversion of commoners’ attention from the exposes one after another from the Commonwealth Games to 2G mega-scams. No wonder then that some of us are indeed in a silent melancholia.