It's not cricket. But we like it

These are the evenings on which we sit in front of our television sets, slightly listlessly, and think: Man, how naive are we…?

Sport works—and cricket in India works—because it is supposed to be the best, most authentic form of reality television. That it has a dimension that is scripted for profit we are reminded of every now and then. The list of ‘fixing’ controversies is long, and all that can really be said about them is that the methods get more innovative.

Just as in the game of cricket itself—what with all the switch hits, helicopters and scoops, that the modern fan now embraces, longs for—there has been innovation in another dimension of cricket that the fan never sees even though it is happening before his eyes. Every no-ball—fixing’s most glaringly simple innovation—should have been suspect from the time that we saw Mohammad Aamer and Mohammad Asif a few years ago. But we will not learn. RP Singh bowls one, on the last ball of a tight game (by a foot!), and we think of it as part of the excitement.

Perhaps it was.

Perhaps it wasn’t.

These are the thoughts that occupy the fan’s mind on a day like this. Which of us would have suspected a fellow like Sreesanth?

A chap who says ‘grace of god’ in every second sentence; whose on-field aggression is so juvenile that it pisses off teammates more than offends the opposition; a good, break-dancing, pious, Malayali boy who adorns (as Malayalis tend to say) a saffron ‘Manya Prasaadam’ on his forehead. Pedants with HD may differ on this one—say its yellow and stuff like that—but the manya prasaadam, or tilak, to most of us, has connotations of ‘waiting for the beloved’ in Sreesanth’s tradition. The supreme beloved, of course, is God.

According to the Delhi police, however, Sreesanth prefers money a little more at the moment.

And if a few bookies indeed have to deal with him, then my sympathies are entirely with them. Unless slapped on a regular basis, the bugger would have driven them completely mad.

Sreesanth is not a great loss to Indian cricket, even less so, to the game in general. If you think about it, then the beautifully upright seam position which his fingers and wrist were able to combine and deliver is about the only thing in his bowling that had ‘special” written on it. His place in the spotlight rested on getting Sachin Tendulkar bowled: one delivery in a domestic game. A ‘spot’ performance.

Speaking of losses to cricket, neither are the ‘mystery spinner’ (the mystery lies off the field now) Chandila, or the bit player Ankeet Chavan. But what they have done has bitten a large chunk of confidence off the paying fan’s share in this deal that hinged purely on reality.

There are dimensions to it that we do not know. How do you and I deal with this? We could develop a healthy scepticism, a deep cynicism or a complete lack of interest about what, for India, is the “beautiful game”. I suspect however, that we will put this decision off.

There will be a few bans, we will discuss whether the results of the games that were ‘infected’ should count. We will talk about the future of this IPL—IPL 2013—of which there’s just a week or so left. By the time the next one comes around, with new rules in place, new checks, balances, we will be fine and watching again. Until we find out about the next generation of innovations in the partial reality shows that so enthrall us. It’s not cricket. But we like it. I don’t exactly know why.

—The writer is an author, journalist and consulting editor with dna.