DNA Edit: India in depression - Country needs to come out of its shock cricket defeat

Basketball legend Michael Jordan, in a moment of levity, chose profundity over the mundane. ‘Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game’, he said, with a casual shrug of his massive shoulders.

Well, it be can be said that Jordan did not play cricket in a country with a billion-plus population — a population that had enjoyed a month of World Cup Cricket, where their beloved India had gone from strength to strength. Never in their wildest imagination — buoyed on, undoubtedly, by cheery jingles that predicted an Indian win even before the tournament had started - could they have visualised that the sucker punch would be delivered by a lower-ranked New Zealand.

Yet that is what has happened. Since the defeat, a cricket crazy nation has been stunned into disbelief. Attendances in offices on Thursday morning were low, market places were less than bustling and the buzz on every lip in public places was how things had gone wrong.

Naturally, the hunt for scapegoats is on in full earnest and just about everyone knows, from the benefit of hindsight of course, how India should have played. That the obvious did not strike the team’s think tank, is a matter of deep shame and outrage.

Such despondency is, perhaps, understandable. India’s IPL is the world’s most lucrative private cricket league, the playground that hosts the world’s best talent. It is also the nursery for Indian cricketers and some others who have made their mark in their respective countries.

Indian cricketers are the globe’s highest-paid, the envy of many a neighbour. Their demi-god status is enough to put a movie star in the shade. Therefore, the Indian public has every right to expect its heroes to perform well.

When they come a cropper — in the second consequent World Cup — the disappointment and agony are but a natural outcome. Steve Waugh, former Australian World Cup-winning captain, was once asked about India’s cricket mania. His reply merits wide publicity. Cricket in Australia, he replied, came fifth or sixth on the list of sporting popularity. In his country, there was Australian football, athletics, hockey, swimming and then, perhaps, cricket. So if you lost in one sporting discipline, you had another to fall back upon. In India, there was just one sport at the total exclusion of everything else. A loss in cricket, therefore, is pretty close to the end of the world.

That the World Cup is a closed chapter for most Indians now, is a foregone conclusion.  There is a lesson in this, if we care to learn. While there is no denying the lovely game of cricket, its all India character and people’s passion for this avowedly British sport, India needs to widen her horizon a bit more. A rising global power like this country cannot sit content with playing just one sport. It would be instructive to learn from China, whose rise as an economic powerhouse has run concurrently with its ascent as a major sporting superpower.