The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Move over men in blue, gully cricket is on

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Aug 04, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Move over men in blue, gully cricket is on

Zubeda Hamid

— Photo: R. Ragu

ALWAYS GAME: A ‘Chennai 600028’ team with other participants at the launch of the Gully Cricket Cup tournament.

CHENNAI: It doesn’t matter that India’s demi-deities disappointed their fans at this year’s cricket World Cup. The appeal of the game goes beyond television screens and stadia. Streets, playgrounds, beaches, backyards and any space where a ball can be hurled are used by cricket’s many aficionados to play for hours, sometimes a whole day. With no helmets, gloves or fancy bats, innovation reaches new heights in devising stumps, rules and what constitutes a run.

The men in blue can move aside - ‘gully cricket’ rules.

Suppressed excitement filled the air at the YMCA Nandanam grounds on Thursday as 32 teams gathered here to play for the ‘CFW 6060 Gully Cricket Cup,’ an event organised as part of the celebrations marking 100 days of the film ‘Chennai 600028’. It is a film about gully cricket and the lives of its players that took the Tamil cine scene by storm this year, becoming a huge success.

Three of these teams were from the companies sponsoring the event, while the rest were gully teams of amateurs who had been selected on a first-come-first-serve basis through an SMS campaign. Practice games were under way before the actual event began and laughter and shouts accompanied the whiz of balls in the air. Team names were, to say the least, creative. ‘Seahorses’ and ‘Criminal Boys 1’ competed with Spectacular Boys and Phoenix 11. The participants were from all over Tamil Nadu — some students, some working. The winners would receive a cash prize of Rs. 25,000 and also get to play against the team of ‘Chennai 600028.’

Minister for Environment and Sports T.P.M Mohideen Khan and Chennai Corporation Mayor M. Subramaniam inaugurated the event and tossed a coin for the first match between the Seahorse team and the Men in Blue.

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