Kalamity Kirkit

Our aversion to reality is incredible. Few accept that we lost the semi-final to India fair and square. Most believe that it was fixed, else how on earth could they drop Tendulkar four times or Misbah get stranded at the crease for so long. The gem came when someone declared with the air of authority of someone who was there that our Prime Minister had told captain Shahid Afridi to lose the match because it would help relations between India and Pakistan.

Behaviouralists might say that sport is an alternative to war, but it has become close to war in some cases. Two South American countries actually did go to war once over a football match. India-Pakistan cricket is not too far behind in the emotions it evokes. Football hooligans are legendary, especially of the British variety: fans have actually lost their lives in matches. Though people of all types follow football, the proportion of yobs and racists in football are far more than in cricket.

Cricket is one of better legacies bequeathed to us by the British a legacy that our people pronounce Kirkit. I remember that at the launch of Cricket Life magazine in Lahore that I had started from London the stage secretary pronounced it Kirkit Life, raising smiles.

The Zoroastrians, popularly called Parsis, were the closest thing India had to the Gora Sahib. They first brought cricket to the natives, playing in Bombays Parsi Gymkhana. Second in the Gora Sahib hierarchy were the Anglo-Indians. They soon followed. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs took to cricket later, patronised largely by the local princes. Then cricket really took off. Soon it became a national obsession. The annual Government College-Islamia College cricket match in Lahore would draw large and vocal crowds. Most of Pakistans early cricketers came from these two institutions, and from Sindh Madrassah in Karachi that produced the legendary Hanif Mohammad. Some Indians were also included in the England Test team; then called MCC on tour. There was a Maharaja in the infamous Bodyline tour of MCC to Australia when Englands fearsome fast bowlers Larwood and Voce introduced leg theory, bowling round the wicket to a leg trap and creating terror, nearly causing a diplomatic rupture. That is how serious cricket can get.

Of course, no sport can match the obsessive global following of football. They actually kill players who they think have caused their team to lose, like the poor Colombian footballer that was killed because he mistakenly scored an own goal. Times were when players were deliberately injured by fans (which word is short for fanatics), like when Hanifs hand was cut with a blade at some Indian railway station. Or how, in the early days, we would feed rich, spicy dishes to visiting cricketers who would get a stomach upset and play badly or not at all. Of course, in India they didnt have to do any such thing: one automatically gets Delhi Belly or Bombay Belly just by being there. I would add Karachi Belly to it. One English Test team even brought canned food along.

Not that our players dont have a food problem in England. Most cant eat anything except their own cuisine and make a beeline for the closest desi restaurant. That was not all: there were some umpires who were either cheats or just plain incompetent. One Ganguly of India springs to mind: as a child, I remember a slogan that would go up in Pakistan Ganguly Badshah someone would shout and the crowd shouted back, Zindabad. And then there was the notorious Idrees Baig affair, a Pakistani umpire who was given a ducking in the Peshawar Club swimming pool by England spinner Tony Lewis and others who thought he had cheated. And the unedifying spectacle of England skipper Mike Gatting arguing with Pakistani umpire Shakoor Rana: it caused a breakdown in the Test match. Gatting was entirely in the wrong for losing it. In those days, the international cricket establishment wasnt so strict because cricket was still a gentlemans game and such incidents were few and far between.

Visiting teams would go by ship to far-flung places on long journeys. Such tours lasted months: one has heard of cricketers getting married during such tours, and in one case, producing an illegitimate child.

Cricketers were paid a pittance. All that changed with the Packer Series: with it came coloured clothing, white balls, day-night cricket and good money, enhanced by advertising. With satellite came worldwide live viewership. Entered greed. Most of the best cricketers of the world forsook their national teams and took the danger of ruining their international careers by joining Packer for enormous sums. Then came the one-day version of the game and lately the slap-bang baseball-type T20, both an insult to cricket connoisseurs. Businessmen took over and with television rights cricket soon became a billion-dollar industry. Top cricketers became millionaires. With ODIs and T20s, businessmen were only moving with the times, dictated by the paucity of time and patience for Test cricket.

India, with the largest population amongst cricket-playing countries and a large chunk of the advertising budget, soon started calling the shots. No cricket match attracts as much money as an India-Pakistan match. Invariably, corruption followed greed. Entered illegal gambling, headquartered in Bombay, with branches in nearly every cricket-playing country. Politicians got involved. When gamekeeper also becomes poacher, it means the kiss of death. Matches were fixed as was the performance of players, called fancy or spot-fixing. Boys from poor backgrounds whose families could hardly comprehend Rs 100,000 fell for Rs 10 million or more. There is now so much money in the game that occupying a national cricket board opens up incredible possibilities. The pressure by the influential to head their countrys board is enormous. Even board elections wont cure the malaise; for, in our countries, elections too are purchased and tend to throw up the worst anyway. The media and journalists also fall victim to the glitter of gold. Cricket as a sport and a gentlemans game is over.

God gave man hunger. Satan gave him money. Greed followed naturally. Hunger and greed make the perfect mix for perfidy corruption. There is greed-driven adulteration in everything today: water, food and milk. Genetically modified foods are playing havoc with peoples health. Medicines are adulterated, as is so much else. It is in this milieu that we expect cricket to be fixed sorry for the pun. Its no longer cricket. Its a Kalamity. But still, its fun.

The writer is a political analyst. He can be contacted at [email protected]