From Apoorv Singhal, India

A bilateral series? Enough is enough © Associated Press

Is it a coincidence that the recently concluded World Cup produced many more close encounters than the countless never-ending bilateral one-day tournaments do? Well the answer is fairly obvious. It was a World Cup. Even if a group stage match is not of much consequence, a loss hurts. And the media and the fans climb the captain’s back about how ‘the team is shaping up’ and how ‘this is probably the best chance of winning the World Cup’. Ravi Shastri is somewhere in the vicinity, pointing out how ‘the players should pull up their socks’ and how ‘a loss was just what the doctor ordered’. So if the ageing cricket experts didn’t make it clear enough by now, the recent results are now shoving the evidence down our throats. One-day cricket needs context to flourish.

Holding ridiculously long bilateral one-day tournaments after the World Cup will restore the situation back to its boring best, and we will once again start questioning the future of the one-day format. Domestic Twenty20 tournaments have been successful in garnering significant amounts of revenue for cricket boards, and so there is no need to hold 58 one-day matches between India and Sri Lanka every year under the excuse of generating revenue for ‘developing the game at the grass roots’, and then have the BCCI explain after a series defeat why India doesn’t have any fast bowlers that can keep a batsman rooted to the crease.

Imagine playing for your country. Imagine standing alongside your team-mates, not listening to but feeling your national anthem envelop your senses, with your fingers tinkling with anticipation as you wait to play an important match in the World Cup in front of a roaring crowd. Or imagine walking out to play yet another match against a team whose wicketkeeper you have come around to knowing better than your neighbour, with the series winner already determined, and two more matches to go before you can see your son whose face you can’t quite recall. Ask the English, they would know. You wouldn’t be surprised to see Andrew Strauss starting to hallucinate during a match one of these days and start stroking Daryl Harper’s head, softly singing ‘Sleep away, my angel’.

How many great one-day matches can be traced back to bilateral one day tournaments? Not many. How many times have you seen Munaf Patel throw himself to stop a boundary in one of those innumerable one-day matches against Sri Lanka? Well, that is an unlikely case even in a World Cup match. However, the point is, more matches will be close if more is at stake. If India play Pakistan after a gap of a year, with no injured players and the best eleven representing each country, the interest and revenue the match would generate would not be far behind the same achieved in a five-match series against the same team after having played them just three months ago.
Someone explain it to the managers and administrators analysing bar graphs and pie charts on their smart phones. I didn’t share a room with Dennis Lillee when he was playing the Ashes, but I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar he used to wake up with a spring in his step, his hands itching to get hold of the ball and bowl his heart out. And though I don’t share a room with Ashish Nehra either, I don’t think I would see him jumping around the room in the morning in anticipation to play yet another match against Sri Lanka.

We can’t only have the World Cup for one-day cricket, but we can certainly eliminate many redundant bilateral tournaments. The question of revenue generation is a ridiculous one. If you hold a 15 match one-day series between India and Australia in India, each and every one of those matches will generate a great deal of revenue, but that does not mean that we start doing that. If we would leave it to the businessmen cum administrators to decide the cricketing schedule, the cricketers’ sanity could be in trouble. Let the poor blokes get some rest.

From Alan and Philip Sutherland, Australia

Associates apart, the journey's been difficult for several other 'elite' nations as well © Getty Images

The decision by the ICC to remove the Associate nations from the 2015 World Cup has generated considerable debate. While the majority of comments have been against the move, some have been supportive and this support has mostly centered around the view that the emerging nations cannot truly compete on the world stage. It is, unfortunately, true that emerging nations will find it hard to reach the consistency that marks the truly elite. Yet, it is worth remembering that the cricketing elite were not always so; with perhaps one exception – England.

As the founding member of the international game, England’s position is, at the same time, privileged, unique and somewhat awkward. It is privileged in setting the rules and style of the game in motion. It is unique in being the national cornerstone from which the game spread. And it is somewhat awkward in that it was doomed to, at times, being regularly beaten by those that followed – eventually. The first to follow was Australia. It is a well-known point of cricketing history that Australia won the first Test in 1877 by 45 runs, co-incidentally the same margin with which they won the Centenary Test one hundred years later. Australian sides, however, weren’t always winners. A succession of English touring teams sailed Down Under in the 1860s and 1870s. These teams were not national teams in the current sense, but rather private affairs for which profit was not an inconsiderable motivation, yet they did contain a number of the best players of the day. The legendary WG Grace was one such drawcard.

The Colonial teams that were drawn to play the Tourists varied. Some were 15-strong, some pitted 18 against 11 Englishmen. Ultimately, it was only by combining under an “Australian” banner that the Colonies could hope to win on even terms. The regular tours also helped, along with developing local competitions. Yet, when New South Welshman Charles Bannerman scored 165 to propel Australia to that maiden Test victory, another part of the English legacy rose to the fore. In the 1860s Surrey allrounder Billy Caffyn had toured Down Under. He eventually decided to stay and took to coaching. His star pupil was Bannerman. Despite continuing Australian success though, England still won the majority of Tests before 1889.

That year, South Africa joined the fray. Like their southern hemisphere counterparts, South Africa enjoyed some early wins, particularly in 1906. Yet, even by the 1920s South Africa had hardly developed into regular world-beaters. They had some fine players but perhaps lacked the special quality that makes a team greater than the sum-of-its-parts. It is a recurring problem for emerging nations.

The Caribbean islands combined, as West Indies, suffered a similar fate, at least against Australia. Two early Caribbean cricketers, George Headley and Learie Constantine are among the game’s greats. West Indies, however, were thrashed by 10 wickets or an innings in their first four Australian Tests. They did, however, bounce back to win the fifth.

India, too, began the hard way. When Frank Tarrant took an unofficial Australian side there in 1935-36, India had already lost a Test series to England both home and away. Opportunities to play were still few and far between, yet the situation in India had improved markedly since the days when the great Ranji had to bat for England. Players like Vijay Merchant were doing well. Eventually, India progressed as a team and, in 1983, won the World Cup for the first time.

Pakistan also won the World Cup nine years later, and like India, their success had been gradual in the making. A successful series against New Zealand in 1955-56 had punctuated losses and draws. New Zealand’s road to the cricketing summits was particularly long.

History undoubtedly shows us that all “emerging” nations go through a period of difficulty where they adjust to the demands of elite cricket. This is only natural and is not necessarily grounds for limiting the growth of the game. Sri Lanka is the latest success story to emerge from a “minnow”. Two World Cup finals in a row and a win in 1996 is a fine achievement. Maybe they will be a force in the next one too. It wasn’t that long ago though, that Sri Lanka were in the same position that Ireland find themselves in now.

From Oindrila Mukherjee, USA

For the expat, with victory comes the realization, stronger than at any other time, of being away © Getty Images

Trying desperately to find a live stream for the World Cup final on the Internet that won’t buffer at key moments turns out to be an impossible task. Buffer, wicket. Buffer, six. Buffer, India wins the World Cup. Yes, it’s true that I missed some of the most special seconds of the historic final. But thanks to the illegal streaming from just one or two sources, I was able to catch most of the tournament online for free, either on a small window or a full screen with blurry images. Squinting my eyes, cursing at the buffering video, sitting alone in my darkened room on a Saturday morning in Atlanta, Georgia, I watched India reach its ultimate goal.

In the hours leading up to the final, throughout the actual game, and of course immediately following it, I found myself almost involuntarily switching between Twitter and Facebook, sharing status updates and tweets with friends and strangers. It made me feel at once part of a community, and also incredibly alone, as news of celebrations poured in from India. Scenes at the Wankhede, traffic jams in Mumbai and Delhi, party at the India Gate, crowds of people on the streets of other cities, all through that night, parties I wasn’t invited to. So near, and yet so far. The exile’s crisis in the age of the Internet.

Away from the communal environs of university, it is hard even for a dedicated sports fan to keep track of cricket in the U.S. where the World Series is played between domestic baseball teams, and where college football and basketball drive fans to partisan frenzy. While English soccer fans who live here can follow their Premier League teams in select sports bars on Saturday mornings, it’s a lot harder for cricket fans from the subcontinent – let’s face it the only cricket fans here are from the subcontinent – to find a place where a cricket match is being broadcast. It’s usually upto desi communities to organise viewings, which then become hubs for communal socialising much like religious festivals.

This year, the World Cup was available for a decent fee to subscribers of Dish or Direct TV, both satellite cable providers. For those of us without satellite dishes, the only legitimate option was to go online and pay Willow TV for live streaming. And for those reluctant to dish out (no pun intended) the fee, let’s say for a student, there’s always the option of illegal streaming from a few sources.

Of course online streaming means putting up with frequent buffering that causes the video to freeze, often at crucial moments. Still, with higher Internet speeds these days, the buffering has improved in recent times, and watching matches streamed online is better than not watching them at all. So there you are, up at the crack of dawn, hunched over your Mac or PC, trying to catch up or tune in, not only to a game, but to a cultural experience which was once your very own. When the crowd begins to roar during a bowler’s run up, it sounds just like a time capsule has arrived to transport you to another place, another time.

The moment of victory was greater than cricket, greater than sport © Getty Images

The time is childhood, or adolescence, or whenever it was, the innocent age, before you left your country, before you became an expat. The place is your high school, college, street corner, local haunts, Eden Gardens, Wankhede, Feroz Shah. Wherever you sat on the bleachers or got special tickets to the clubhouse. Wherever you were with friends or family.

Since following cricket on a regular basis is so difficult in the US, I often find myself feeling like Rip Van Winkle when I do watch a game. When I’m vacationing in India every couple of years for instance or, as happened this past month, during the World Cup. I was a little bewildered by the DRS, the Powerplay, the hype around some cricketers I hadn’t actually heard of. As one who used to be an avid sports quizzer once upon a time, this ignorance is embarrassing to admit to. However, it is a fact. Cricket and I are no longer close friends. We’re, at best, acquaintances who meet only occasionally, and have to start over again.

And yet. And yet. When Dhoni hit his by-now famous six, the six that, like Miandad’s against India, will pass into cricketing legend and will be retold to future generations just as our parents, aunts, and uncles went on and on about Kapil’s unbeaten 175 against Zimbabwe in 1983, the moment, quite literally, froze. The video buffered the shot. One second India needed a couple of runs to win, and the next players were embracing and crying on the field, an anti-climax that was so predictable that it didn’t even hurt. Because that moment was greater than cricket, greater than sport. When the crowds in Mumbai erupted, when Facebook exploded into giddy exclamations of joy and shock, the tears I found myself shedding weren’t all of joy. With victory comes the realization, stronger than at any other time, of being away. My friend, Prerona, watching the match from Edinburgh, exchanged notes with me online after the match, in between updating her status. “There is,” she said, “no one to hug.”

At exactly the same time, from another corner of the world, another friend, Sandeep, reported his experience of watching the final with Sri Lankan and Indian fans at the Selangor Club in Kuala Lampur. “If someone hit a good shot half the crowd cheered as it neared the ropes, and when it was fielded on the boundary the other half cheered.”

Exile is a double-edged sword. On the one hand you feel alienated and removed from your people, and on the other you feel connected more closely to the rest of the world, to all the world. You belong nowhere, you belong everywhere.

Through the years spent watching cricket in different cities around England and the U.S., with Australians, South Africans, Englishmen, and Pakistanis, at various times, on screens of various sizes, with different results, through the ecstasies and agonies that are a part of any sport lover’s life, through it all, these memories from further back suddenly become clearer. Huddling around a black and white TV with a lot of grown ups as a little girl in 1983, watching my parents and their friends celebrate something I wasn’t quite able to comprehend the magnitude of. Playing para cricket in Calcutta with a group of boys before being dismissed SBW – Skirt Before Wicket. Going for a spontaneous drive to the Eden Gardens with the family on the eve of the 1987 World cup final to catch a glimpse of the floodlit stadium, and discovering that the entire city had had the same idea, thereby causing a traffic jam outside the stadium in the middle of the night. Gossiping with friends in high school about Wasim Akram’s good looks. Looking on from red-cushioned seats in the clubhouse in 1996 in disbelief and humiliation as a few crazy fans hurled trash onto the field to disrupt India’s semi-final against Sri Lanka.

They say nostalgia is the refuge and also the somewhat pathetic crutch of the exile. But forgive the sentimentality, for the memories have nothing to do with cricket. They are about the foods we miss, the sounds we once heard, the colours that fade. They are about family, and childhood, and innocence. Because in the end, for an Indian expat, watching cricket is like going home.