Cricket - is it for real or just theatre?

By Ajay Jacob Truman Burbank: Was nothing real? Christof: You were real. That's what made you so good to watch... – The Truman Show, 1998 Earlier today, when I pulled my Team India shirt out of my cupboard and pulled it on, it was with a soft, lingering sense of wistfulness. The last time I wore the shirt, India were the newly crowned champions of the world. Mumbai was hosting the mother of all parties, and everything seemed right with the world. I remember walking around for days after that game with a lightness of step, frequently replaying the precise moment of triumph in my head. I discussed it with anyone who would care to listen. I wrote an impassioned piece about it on my Facebook wall; it had about 50 comments in the space of one hour. I have always been proud of being Indian, but for those few glorious days I felt just a little bit prouder. I suspect I was not the only one who felt this way. Today, however, it was different. Today, Team India prepares for a major cricket tournament under a cloud. An altogether different sort of cloud, not your regular British Summer (an oxymoron if ever there was one) type of cloud. One of the players who just over two years ago held the World Cup aloft, is now incarcerated and awaiting trial on the charge of spot-fixing. Other players’ careers appear to be over before they have even properly begun. The board is in disarray, the BCCI president has just 'stepped aside' while an investigation into his son-in-law's involvement in the corruption is carried out, and an interim president has been appointed, who himself is no stranger to controversy. So what? Is the question I hear you asking. Surely this is just another garden-variety drama being hyped by the media, played out between politicians and administrators, all eager for a slice of the Great Indian Cricket pie? In a few weeks, the dust will settle and normal prime-time service will resume. Heck, maybe India will even win this Champions Trophy malarkey and the balance of the universe will be restored even sooner than expected. Maybe, maybe not. I am a little sceptical this time. Again, I suspect I am not the only one who feels this way. The first time match-fixing reared its ugly head, many were shocked. There were those who thought they could never feel for cricket the same way again, a certain innocence had been lost. The first time match-fixing reared its ugly head, a certain innocence had been lost. Their beloved game was forever tainted; some vowed to never watch again. Others were more pragmatic, and looked at it as a normal, almost expected, chain of events in the evolution of a lucrative, global sport. After all, it was not just India, and it wasn't even just cricket. The game must go on. And so it did. Investigations were carried out, some players were banned, others were elected to parliament. Through it all, players like Tendulkar and Dravid continued to play the game with class and dignity, and India became the undisputed power centre of world cricket. And then came that genius idea - IPL. The Indian Premier League took all of the country's biggest, most popular institutions - Cricket, Bollywood and Politics - and mixed them all into one heady cocktail. It spawned Knight Riders, Daredevils and SuperKings. Suddenly, an exciting new variant of India's number one sport was being beamed through not just through the plasma screens of the cities, but also the slightly less-flat screens of the hinterland. Players went from small-time to the big-time overnight. With every ball that disappeared out of the ground, the cheers grew louder, cheques got bigger, cheerleaders skirts got smaller. And of course the stakes got larger, which meant there was loads more to go around. Oh, and there was the small matter of winning the World Cup too. What could possibly go wrong? Everything, evidently. Suddenly everything seemed to be collapsing like a pack of credit cards. There was money coming out of every corner and crevice. Even kit bags. The cricket was no longer about bats and balls, but about people making calls. Every day a new detail was revealed, a new significance attached to minute things like a towel tucked into a player's trousers. For the Indian cricket fan, history was repeating itself; their worst nightmare was being played out in broad daylight by masked and hooded villains. Some say that spot-fixing is really not that much fixing at all; a no-ball here, a mis-field there. You can't really affect the outcome of a match, not in any real sense. The overall integrity of the game is still maintained. But the fan knows that this misses the point completely. For the game of cricket is almost always played out in moments, it is the minutiae that makes it so compelling. And when the game is done and dusted, it is always the moments that stay with you. Moments like the one back in April 2011 when MSD sent that ball, along with our hearts, into orbit. when Sachin played that glorious pull shot in Sharjah; or when Balaji, smiling under his helmet, straight-batted Shoaib Akthar back over his head in Lahore. Those are the moments fans watch the game for; the ones we want to believe are conjured up by magicians right at that moment, and not planned by a voice on the phone the night before. The euphoria and the pride those spontaneous moments evoked is what we fear we will never experience again. Not this time. In a way, the pragmatic ones who reacted with a shrug of the shoulders back in 2000 were on to something. After all, when you have a cocktail as potent as this one was, there was really only one way it was going to end. Of course it's just a game, who really cares about this stuff anyway? It is entertainment, ultimately. Enjoy it for what it is; don't think about it too much. Real life happens outside the stadium. Inside, it is just like a movie theatre, except here you get to see your favourite cricketer AND your favourite actor at the same time. What could be better? That's the question, and it's repeated often. The answer, of course, is simple. Watching something real. Ajay Jacob is an instructional designer, blogger, poet and cricket fan. He lives in London.