Cricket Debut

Once upon a time, I was nuts about cricket. I used to follow the sport like a maniac. Then, I grew up.

Calendars changed, wheels moved and life was just chugging along when, one fine day, I was discovered by sports fraternity and the lost love was revived.

Sports fraternity is made up of more than just the sports persons. People from various roles are involved in it. There are people who enable sports; there are some who manage it; some who make money out of it, and then there are some people who just talk about it. I belong to the later category.

I debuted as a Cricket talks show anchor this month while England returned to India for a two test series. My personal history began with the historic M.A. Chidambram International Cricket Stadium or Chepauk. This is where India won it’s first ever test match, about 57 years ago, and that too against England.

England did manage to become the second favorites (there were 2 teams playing anyway) not just because of their hyped up ‘return’ to our apparently terror struck nation but also because of a few tremendous performances. Mike Atherton commented that “Mumbai saved England” and so spoke several unofficial-current-affairs-analysts who are found everywhere from tea-stalls to cafés and from passenger trains to celebrity parties. Some said that it’s only money that flies people across the globe. 

I can only say that all this is nothing more than ‘part of the job’. We, the people, make sports (or entertainment & politics) a much hyped profession. 

Understandable. 

Of interest here is Vishwanathan Anand’s simple and straight forward approach. When a journalist asked him about how much does Chess dominate his life, he replied “As much as Journalism dominates yours” 

That says it all. 

Back to Cricket and to England’s return – a bit of trivia is on order here. England was the first team to visit us for a full fledged tour after the riots in 1984. Apparently they waited for about nine days in Colombo while tension eased in our country.

More trivial and critical information from my experiences as a sports anchor is in the pipeline and would be coming up soon. 

For now, I am just wondering why there were only two test matches in the series and not three! Why does ICC do this? Either they don’t see the need of odd number of events as test matches are frequently drawn or two matches were enough to safeguard the sponsors’ investments. Whatever the reason was, for me the third match would have only meant more fun on air!