(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)L Suresh welcomes you to an era where short-pitched bowling and tournament finals don’t scare us anymore.
The year: 2010. The venue: BCCI HQ. The large neon outside screams out the famous BCCI motto, ‘One for all and all for one – we’re the one’. (An adaptation of a quote by Jagmohan Dalmiya, the Patron Pope of Indian cricket.)
The game has not changed much. Australia is still the world's best team. England is still on the lookout for that elusive Ashes win. (The last one was five years ago, in 2005.) Coach Inzamam-ul-Haq is still trying to sort out Pakistan's 'running between the wickets' problem. However, as Richie Benaud once used to say, it's all happening in India.
2008 was a watershed year for Indian cricket, when the Board became extremely conscious that the game was losing not just its glitter, but also all that gold it used to mint a decade ago. To arrest this slide, it formed a committee comprising two icons who didn’t know much about fast bowling, but were experts when it came to money-spinning - Karan Johar and Ekta Kapoor. While Ekta recommended that cricket matches start being played as episodes rather than as a series, Karan Johar suggested that a song and dance be created for each match to attract sufficient NRI funds. But both of them agreed on the point that with Saturn having changed its position from 2006, the name ‘cricket’ wasn’t lucky for the game anymore and hence suggested the new name ‘Kkkricket’. The Board wasn’t exactly kkkicked with the idea, but has sent it to the ICC for approval.
The captaincy issue has finally toppled water shortage and unemployment as India’s biggest concern. For almost six years now, the Board has been saddled with the problems of dislodging a captain, especially when he is backed by certain heavyweights in the administration. To solve this issue, a two-member committee comprising Sourav Ganguly and Dalmiya instituted a captaincy clause in 2008 that the team will have a separate playing and non-playing captain for both Tests and ODIs. (That makes it four in all.) This will ensure that Powerplay will continue to imply fielding restrictions for five overs and not a tussle between the captain and his detractors.
The team will also have individual captains for batting, bowling and fielding as this format had worked well for the team during the 2003 World Cup, where we reached the finals. Add to this list a vice-captain and one has five captains and a vice-captain for each version of the game. And to put an end to the constant demand for the best player to be made captain, the Board has wisely decided to select the captain from match to match, with the highest run-getter or wicket-taker in the previous match made captain for the next.
Meanwhile, Rahul Dravid, Chief Consultant to the BCCI, has stressed on the need for players to look well-groomed as opportunities were a lot more in modelling than in cricket. Hence it has become mandatory for coaching camps to have individual training sessions on fashion, personal grooming, ramp walk and acting.
To facilitate this exhaustive agenda, individual coaches have been appointed for each - Manish Malhotra for fashion, Javed Habib for personel grooming, Milind Soman for modelling and Naseeruddin Shah for acting (the last after his success as a coach in one of his earlier movies titled Iqbal). These are in addition to the chief coach, Lance Klusener, the batting coach, VVS Laxman, the bowling coach, Jason Gillespie and the fielding coach, Herschelle Gibbs. (Gibbs' appointment became a sticky issue as the CBI still wanted to question him on the match-fixing scandals of the last decade, but things were cleared after he submitted a medical certificate stating that because of old age, he had forgotten what had happened so long back.) As a result, when the Indian team lands at the airport, it takes two coaches to transport them to the lounge - a coach for the players and a coach for the coaches. (The last time Mr. Nair got into a controversy when he was searching for a coach at the airport, he clarified that he was just ‘looking for the damn bus.’)
India has also made an invaluable contribution to cricketing jargon with a euphemism that means that a player was gently (or rudely, as the case may be) ejected from the team.
So these days, when one says, “He was tennis-elbowed”, what one means is that the selectors showed him the door. The phrase has caught on like wildfire, across all the cricket-playing nations. We have also replaced the word juggernaut – originally an Indian word meaning the unstoppable force – with Jagmohan, another Indian word.
The Board has also been working hard to keep the spirit of cricket alive in the country. Considering the fact that we have been playing terrible cricket for almost a decade now, the BCCI has decided that India shall henceforth be touring only non-cricket playing countries. This move highlights India’s stellar role as a goodwill ambassador of cricket around the world. It also keeps fans happy with impressive scorecards from our successful tours of France, Austria and Spain in 2008 and their return tours of India in 2009. Finally, the stands are getting filled up again, the sponsors who were ignoring the game for some years now have returned with renewed vigour and the television channels are battling it out for telecast rights (Followers of the game will remember how all the sports channels backed out in 2006 due to the poor performance of our team and left Doordarshan holding the can.) More importantly, effigies are no longer being burnt, slipper garlands are passé and the cricketer's homes aren't being stoned.
Despite these changes, there are some of you who feel that things were better in the ‘good old days’ when Sachin was playing. In which case, don’t raise your hopes if you’re hearing a nation chanting Sachin ala re. You are just listening to a remix.
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