Read Online You Must Like Cricket? by Soumya Bhattacharya - Free Book Online
Authors: Soumya Bhattacharya
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superb, every ball a beauty. Restraint and understatement, never easy qualities to achieve, have been wantonly sacrificed in the pursuit of excitement.
And there are the casualties too. Now that so much cricket is broadcast live, we are in the danger of losing something precious, namely imagination â the gift that still enables us to visualise Stan McCabeâs 232 by reading Neville Cardusâs description, the gift that made me fall in love with the game, the gift that makes us all become fans.
However, there may be signs of a revival. The delicious paradox is that while technology was once responsible for imaginationâs banishment, technology may be responsible for its return. And it is cricket commentary on the internet that has made this possible.
Like radio and unlike TV, ball-by-ball commentary on the net manages to create the notion of an inviolable world. It requires the fan to invest thought; it demands of him complete engagement and intelligence for its full enjoyment. From the words that keep coming up on the screen â furiously typed, with a sense of urgency that comes with the commentator trying to keep the reader up to date all the time (more difficult even than radio: it takes more time to write than to speak) â the fan has to conjure up his notion of what is happening on the pitch.
Television tells it like it is in real time; what you see on the screen is what you get. When you are following cricket on the internet, the report is coming to you at a remove: not only is there a time lapse between the report and the events it describes but it is always filtered through the eyes, brain and hand of the guy who is writing it. Far more than watching cricket, listening to it (or reading a ball-by-ball) engenders a rapport between the fan and the commentator (or reporter). And if immediacy is, in a sense, sacrificed, intimacy is gained.
Intimacy is the common denominator between radio and the internet. But the net takes the idea of inclusiveness further. It expands on the idea of sharing between commentator and listener and creates a whole chat room full of cricket-obsessed people.
Intimacy, inclusiveness and imagination: for me, these are the things that make an obsession full-blown. I donât know how many six-year-olds are cementing their love affairs with the game by following it on the internet.
But they and I will be family.
* * *
In his absorbing book
A Season with Verona
(travel writing, cultural studies, analysis of mob psychology and football fandom all packed into a season watching the Italian team Hellas Veronas fight relegation from Serie A), Tim Parks reflects on the etymology of the word âfanâ. It comes, he says, from the Latin âfanaticusâ, which means âworshipperâ. The team becomes the god; the fans become, during matches, a sort of zealot, a âweekend Talibanâ.
By the time we returned to Kolkata from Bankura, I had become that sort of a Taliban, a full-fledged cricket fundamentalist. And as in London, my mother stoked the flames of this fanaticism.
She taught me fielding positions by sketching a rough approximation of a cricket field, pencilling in first slip, third man, square leg. She subscribed, on my behalf, to a weekly sports magazine called â unsurprisingly â
Sports Week
. My first scrapbook of cricket pictures â mostly in black and white, mostly rather grainy â was culled from this magazine. She helped me snip out the pictures (the only pair of scissors in the house were huge â you could use them as garden shears or as a murder weapon â and I was too young to be left alone with them), let me muck myself up with a pot of glue, suggested artistic angles at which I should place my clippings and finally wrote imaginative headlines and captions for each player page in variously coloured felt-tipped pens.
All the while, I honed my game. Batsmen were my idols. I spent hours impressing our
And there are the casualties too. Now that so much cricket is broadcast live, we are in the danger of losing something precious, namely imagination â the gift that still enables us to visualise Stan McCabeâs 232 by reading Neville Cardusâs description, the gift that made me fall in love with the game, the gift that makes us all become fans.
However, there may be signs of a revival. The delicious paradox is that while technology was once responsible for imaginationâs banishment, technology may be responsible for its return. And it is cricket commentary on the internet that has made this possible.
Like radio and unlike TV, ball-by-ball commentary on the net manages to create the notion of an inviolable world. It requires the fan to invest thought; it demands of him complete engagement and intelligence for its full enjoyment. From the words that keep coming up on the screen â furiously typed, with a sense of urgency that comes with the commentator trying to keep the reader up to date all the time (more difficult even than radio: it takes more time to write than to speak) â the fan has to conjure up his notion of what is happening on the pitch.
Television tells it like it is in real time; what you see on the screen is what you get. When you are following cricket on the internet, the report is coming to you at a remove: not only is there a time lapse between the report and the events it describes but it is always filtered through the eyes, brain and hand of the guy who is writing it. Far more than watching cricket, listening to it (or reading a ball-by-ball) engenders a rapport between the fan and the commentator (or reporter). And if immediacy is, in a sense, sacrificed, intimacy is gained.
Intimacy is the common denominator between radio and the internet. But the net takes the idea of inclusiveness further. It expands on the idea of sharing between commentator and listener and creates a whole chat room full of cricket-obsessed people.
Intimacy, inclusiveness and imagination: for me, these are the things that make an obsession full-blown. I donât know how many six-year-olds are cementing their love affairs with the game by following it on the internet.
But they and I will be family.
* * *
In his absorbing book
A Season with Verona
(travel writing, cultural studies, analysis of mob psychology and football fandom all packed into a season watching the Italian team Hellas Veronas fight relegation from Serie A), Tim Parks reflects on the etymology of the word âfanâ. It comes, he says, from the Latin âfanaticusâ, which means âworshipperâ. The team becomes the god; the fans become, during matches, a sort of zealot, a âweekend Talibanâ.
By the time we returned to Kolkata from Bankura, I had become that sort of a Taliban, a full-fledged cricket fundamentalist. And as in London, my mother stoked the flames of this fanaticism.
She taught me fielding positions by sketching a rough approximation of a cricket field, pencilling in first slip, third man, square leg. She subscribed, on my behalf, to a weekly sports magazine called â unsurprisingly â
Sports Week
. My first scrapbook of cricket pictures â mostly in black and white, mostly rather grainy â was culled from this magazine. She helped me snip out the pictures (the only pair of scissors in the house were huge â you could use them as garden shears or as a murder weapon â and I was too young to be left alone with them), let me muck myself up with a pot of glue, suggested artistic angles at which I should place my clippings and finally wrote imaginative headlines and captions for each player page in variously coloured felt-tipped pens.
All the while, I honed my game. Batsmen were my idols. I spent hours impressing our
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