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Lessons from Sharjah

Watching the finals of the Coca Cola cricket tournament in Sharjah last weekend I noticed a few curious things. Some infuriated me. Some were heart warming.

The first thing that was obvious to any lover of the game was the inability of our team to cope with failure. We lost the match long before we were actually trundled out for a measly 54 runs. We lost it when Sunil Joshi dropped the catch that could have got Sanath Jaisurya out at 93 and that one mistake changed the entire course of the game. After that, it was a straight run downhill as far as India was concerned and Saurav Ganguly's body language showed that more eloquently than anything else could have. The game turned away from us at that precise point.

The Indian cricket team is without doubt a good team. With some gifted newcomers like Yuvraj Singh and Zaheer Khan having come in, it is now that much younger, that much stronger. But what it lacks is the capacity to cope with adverse circumstances, to hang in there when things are going wrong. It is not capable of winning back a lost match.

Unfortunately, cricket is all about winning back lost matches. One can cite countless examples where a losing team has actually come back from the edge and won the match. In fact, the Indian team itself has done this time and again in the past. Under great captains, who could lead their teams out of the dark conundrum of despair and defeat. But we have now lost that skill. Once we start losing, we immediately give up the ghost. That is why, when India had barely scored 25, I got up and left the stadium. It was obvious to even the blindest supporter that we had no hope in hell of making a comeback in the game. The road outside was crammed with Indians going home. They, too, had figured out the inevitable.

The second thing I noticed at Sharjah was how easily we jump to silly conclusions. There were at least twenty strangers who walked up to me at different stages of the game to ask why we could not do anything about such blatantly "fixed" matches. When I asked these people how they had figured out that the match was "fixed", they gave me a look that made me cringe.

In other words, not only are we incapable of turning back a match from the edge, we are also terribly bad losers. At least, as watchers of the game. We are not ready to acknowledge the fact that we are not good enough to win the game. Instead, we immediately attribute motives to our players. We are ready, without the slightest evidence, to hang them for selling out matches to others.

The fact that Sri Lanka was playing the game far, far better than us was lost on these people. Instead of accepting defeat gracefully, instead of admitting that the Sri Lankan team was in superlative form and had outplayed us in every possible aspect of the game, they were busy trying to dig out imaginary skeletons from the closet. This obsession with scams and scandals has already cost us dearly, as a nation. But we still refuse to learn. We persist with our suspicions instead of conceding the simple point that the better team won.

The third thing I noticed is that, for some inexplicable reason, nationalism appears to have taken precedence over our sporting spirit. Sri Lankan supporters clapped wildly every time their home team hit a four or a six or claimed an Indian wicket. The Indian supporters unfortunately had little reason to clap after Jaisurya reached his century but, till that happened, they went wild each time we got a wicket or stopped a ball from reaching the boundary. Ofcourse, since no one apart from Robin Singh reached double digits in the Indian innings there was no reason to clap for our batsman. But, by and large, Sri Lankans only clapped for Sri Lankans and Indians only clapped for Indians. No one gave a damn for the game as such. Patriotism was at a precedence. Not who or which team actually played well.

But there were nice things as well, I discovered in Sharjah. The Indian taxi driver who drove us back to Dubai, a young Muslim boy from somewhere remote in UP, was furious that we were losing so shamefully to Sri Lanka. Our boys are capable of thrashing any team in the world, he told me. These Pakistanis are just a bunch of thick-headed, religious bigots, he went on. They can never play as well as we Indians do but they are so afraid of being thrashed back home that they play as if their lives depended on it. I heard the same argument from two Bihari Muslims the next day, ardent supporters of the Indian team who were in tears criticising the way we played. I had gone to this food court where they were running a hamburger counter.

So much for all those who believe that only Hindus back the Indian team and Muslims root for the Pakistanis. Nothing can be further from the truth. All Indians out there, be it in Sharjah or Dubai or anywhere else in the world, irrespective of their religion, caste and community are first and foremost Indians. They stand together as one community under one flag. That is what has built the Indian diaspora. That is what explains our huge success overseas. The fact that NRIs, irrespective of their faith and caste, stand up as one and yell for India. Now, if only we could do that here, imagine how much stronger we would be as a nation.

Pritish Nandy

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