Popular: ICC rankings | Bangladesh Premier League | A Zia
Different Strokes

« Better read than watched | Ponting pulls ahead of the rest »
January 13, 2010
Posted by Samir Chopra on 01/13/2010 in Samir Chopra
Gods no more

As a sub-teenager, cricket players were, quite literally, giants © Cricinfo Ltd.

Cricket fans, like pitches, change with time. Where a devotee of the game might once have spent his youth waking up early for radio commentary from distant lands, he could move on to spending those morning hours playing with his little children; where an ardent lover of the numerical aspects of the game might have spent hours calculating the fluctuations in his hero's batting averages, the only number with decimal points he might care about in his thirties is likely to be the mortgage rate on his city apartment.

In my case, the most significant change was the realisation a few years ago that I was older than anyone who currently played Test cricket. That slowly developing shift in my perspectives on the game's players has been enlightening in more ways than one. This change has occurred at the same time that I have had increasing access to the players via the media: their spoken words, their writings, their antics in the many-splendoured television coverage that is now ubiquitous.

As a sub-teenager, cricket players were, quite literally, giants. They looked bigger, they did adult things. They looked like my uncles (and these were just the Indian players). When it came to cricket players from other countries, the distance was even greater. They looked different; they were names in books, faces in photographs, flickers on television screens. They weren't real, really.

When I finished high school and started university, I realised with a start some of the young men I was friendly with were potential international stars. [Syed] Saba Karim was a college mate, and he played for India (years later at Kingston, I called out to him from the boundary line and he stopped and chatted briefly; he invited me back to the hotel for a chat with the rest of the team, but alas, I had a flight to catch the same night). It was the first time I realised the pitches out in the middle of a large cricket field were not on distant planets. They were just a few dozen yards from the boundary ropes.

At the same time, I saw more, read more and heard more, about the players. Their aura, once carefully constructed by my temporal, psychic, and physical distance from them, crumbled rather easily. When I had run across Kapil Dev outside a Delhi restaurant in my final year of high school, he had seemed a giant; when I met Chaminda Vaas at Melbourne's airport in 2003, I realized with a slight start that I was speaking to a young man who, had he been in high school with me, would have had to give up his school bus seat had I demanded it.

But it was their ever-increasing presence in the media that did the most to make me realise that cricket players were rather more easily worshipped when I had less access to them. They had cricketing talent, but that didn't necessarily translate into superior moral qualities or intelligence. Any projection of these attributes on them (and the resultant disappointment when they failed to uphold my standards) was more a reflection of a felt need on my part, than any failure on theirs.

I had grown, and the players hadn't. They formed an abstract grouping; one whose positions were occupied by a revolving cast that came and went, going about entertaining and performing. My perspectives on them, modified irrevocably by the passage of time, could proceed in no other direction than that of the markedly less hagiographic.

Nothing reminds me of this shift over the years better than when I go to see an international game at the grounds (as I did at the MCG and SCG these past couple of weeks). It's a game, and some men play it really well. And we like watching them go about their work. The rest of the romance is our doing, more easily sustained by younger, less jaded versions of ourselves.

Comments (4)
Posted by: Brendan Layton at January 13, 2010 12:01 PM

A very well written article Samir. Glad to see you've picked up the writing again!

It is an odd feeling when national players start coming in younger than you. I'm only a young man, but Phillip Hughes is three years younger than I! A truly bizarre feeling.

Posted by: Colin Linley at January 13, 2010 3:28 PM

How true are your reflections Samir. Like you I had that hero worship glint in my eyes as a youngster. However great the achievements by the star cricketers might be, they are only human and have such short careers in the cricket arena.
Still it sure fired me up as a youngster to see, hear or seek an autograph from a star cricketer and I revered the ground on which these famous cricketers strode upon (in my case the West Indias), and may it always continue with today's youngsters......

Posted by: Bipul Keshri at January 13, 2010 3:56 PM

Well said Samir. I can relate to that :)

Posted by: Prasanth at January 13, 2010 6:18 PM

Players loosing their Aura – through constant exposure through media, realization of their mortality by our growing awareness, or just plain increase in our access to them- does tend to de-romanticize the game of cricket. Any game for that matter, but I thought much less in cricket where the variables to the outcome are far more than talent (. It's a game, and some men play it really well. And we like watching them go about their work.)

It shouldn’t be like reading a beatific work of poetry describing the beauty of flowers, and all you see is an assemblage of words that forms the digital make up of them. Once we look past the physical aspects of the game and see the drama behind it, we should be able to hold on to the romance.

When Brett Lee steams in to bowl a scorcher that just swings away at the last moment at 150 KPH and Tendulkar changes the angle of the bat at the last possible moment to let it go, we witness the greatest talents of the game at work. But the feeling that it giv

Name: Email Address:
Comments: characters left
Shanaka Amarasinghe
Shanaka Amarasinghe Shanaka Amarasinghe Possessing the best disguised googly in Sri Lanka (because no one has ever really seen it), Shanaka is the finest legspinner to never have played top-level cricket. He is a popular cricket analyst and host of The Score, the No. 1-rated, if slightly infamous, sports show on radio in Sri Lanka. While in England playing rugby, he earned his LLM at King’s College and is a lawyer by training if not inclination. He is also an actor, a journalist, a writer, and thinks he is a comedian.
Mike Holmans
Mike HolmansMike Holmans, a database consultant by profession, has spent thirty summers (and a few winters) going to the cricket. Brought up in one and working in the other, his dearest wish is for a season to end with Yorkshire winning the county championship by beating runners-up Middlesex by one wicket with five minutes to go. If it’s also a summer when England win the Ashes, so much the better.
Michael Jeh
Michael JehMichael Jeh Born in Colombo, educated at Oxford and now living in Brisbane, Michael Jeh (Fox) is a cricket lover with a global perspective on the game. An Oxford Blue who played first-class cricket, he is a Playing Member of the MCC and still plays grade cricket. Michael now works closely with elite athletes, and is passionate about youth intervention programmes. He still chases his boyhood dream of running a wildlife safari operation called Barefoot in Africa.
Saad Shafqat
Saad ShafqatSaad Shafqat takes special pride that his cricket-watching life began during the three-month interval between Javed Miandad's debut Test in Lahore and Imran Khan's 12-wicket haul at Sydney. Although a practicing neurologist based in Karachi, cricket has never been far from his activities. He has co-authored Javed Miandad’s autobiography Cutting Edge and has been a contributor to Cricinfo since 2005. His regular column Reverse Swing appears fortnightly in Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English daily.
Latest News
Specials
Sitemap  |  Feedback  |  RSS  |  About Us  |  Career  |  Privacy Policy  |  Terms of Use
© ESPN EMEA Ltd