Cricket's cyber-nationalists

Are love of cricket and love of India synonymous – or are they, in a contemporary context, mutually exclusive? It’s a question that has troubled me often, most recently when a respondent to one of my posts – which semi-facetiously suggested an Indian batting collapse could inject some energy into a destined-for-a-draw Chennai Test – implied I was being unpatriotic.

Since I’ve never measured patriotism or sense of national identity in terms of worshipping dead-on-arrival pitches, I must say I was left bemused. What amazes me even more – and has amazed me for years – is how much and how easily a certain Indian type of Indian cricket fan manages to work himself into a frenzy over fairly inconsequential fixtures.

I’m not going to pretend I’m an ivory tower intellectual who doesn’t scream, shout, wave his fist and manically thump the television at a particularly engrossing stage in a cricket match. Of course I do. I respond as a passionate fan, occasionally as a passionate Indian.

When an Indian player is reported – unfairly in my opinion – for racism, it makes me boil. When India won the Perth Test recently or the limited overs tri-series finals in Austalia, I exulted, felt vindicated like many other Indians did, and was happy to tell everybody within hearing distance, “It serves those Aussies right.”

Having said this, I find it impossible to get similarly emotionally charged while watching matches as deathly boring as the one that’s just ended in Chennai. Aside from Sehwag’s innings – a tribute to fast scoring and stamina in energy-sapping heat – will I even remember this match? Will anyone?

Later in 2008, India plays a tri-series in Bangladesh in June – almost certain to be interrupted by the monsoon – and hosts England for seven ODIs. Unless it’s a particularly exciting game, do I see myself biting nails and praying fervently for India – My Country, My Team! – to win in the fourth match of that series? Can I be expected to treat it with the same importance and emotional investment as the Perth Test, the ICC World Twenty20 or the CB tri-series final in Australia?

Sport can become a channel for nationalism and feeling for one’s country at landmark moments. I still remember Rahul Dravid hitting the winning run and raising his arms at Adelaide in 2004. I was there in Athens when Rajyavardhan Rathore won that silver medal and I was weeping copiously. Yet, can this happen on a round-the-year basis, from Singapore to Sri Lanka, Nagpur to Napier, or wherever the endless and meaningless Indian ODI itinerary takes my television and me?

I know my answer. If you have another one, good for you.

Technology does strange things to us. It has created a generation of cricket cyber-nationalists who are, for the most part, infuriating. India is the best and the damn the rest, goes the mantra; cricket, in these circumstances, becomes less a sport or a human endeavour to savour, more a vehicle for pet dislikes, obsessions and prejudices.

This is a group whose cricket has a limited geography – being focused solely on India, Indian matches, Indian players – but is also essentially ahistorical. The natural corollary to cricket as hyper-nationalism is cricket as anti-contextual. Usually this translates to: the best is now; or rather, the best is the current player I like. He is unprecedented, there was never another like him.

When I was growing up, there were fellows in school who were devoted to statistics, forever quoting one or the other to make their point. I must say I went through my obsession with statistical trivia as well, I still enjoy it at times, but it doesn’t consume my entire cricket. I’ve outgrown that period, as so many cricket buffs do.

Desktop cricket fanaticism, however, is a re-rendition of this belief that record-books and statistics don’t just embellish cricket, they ARE cricket. Statsguru is a very useful tool provided by Cricinfo and while it can be invaluable for research, it can also lead to some fairly moronic analyses.

The other day, somebody wrote in insisting that Srikkanth was only as effective or fast-scoring in ODIs as Rahul Dravid because they both had a strike rate of (if I recall) “71 per 100 balls”; and that by the strike-rate parameter, Sehwag was a greater batsman than Srikkanth. Since the person has obviously already made up his mind, how do you even begin a discussion on batting-bowling equations, pitch conditions, opposition bowling strengths, the evolution of one-day cricket from the 1980s to now?

Sehwag may well be a better batsman than Srikkanth – though that is a subjective call and surely all 10,000 or 50,000 people watching a cricket match have the right to see events their way and, in a sense, to watch different versions of the same game – but is a strike-rate enumerator going to decide that?