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Cricket’s place in the cosmos

When terrorism tests our very humanity, where should Test cricket feature in our priorities, asks Nirmal Shekar

ON the face of it, it may appear strange that seasoned professionals in the one area of human activity where success is routinely — and often to the point where it seems a disgusting banality — celebrated with war metaphors should, at the sound of gunfire a thousand miles away, suddenly deem bats and balls as safe as unpinned grenades and look for the first flight home.

Aren’t our sporting heroes the bravest of the brave? Aren’t the Flintoffs and the Pietersens and the Tendulkars gladiators who proudly wear their courage like a breastplate in the face of adversity? Aren’t these the indomitable icons we celebrate as bonny battlers?

But then, sporting wars are absorbing battles only because they aren’t really wars. Our sporting soldiers and Generals are celebrated as courageous gladiators always ready to fight only because they aren’t really fighters risking their lives but merely peace-loving performers aiming for athletic excellence.

A trivial pursuit

Life is sport’s ultimate reality check. Life, brutal life, bloodstained life — the very lottery of everyday life and its realities in concrete urban jungles — often shows up sport for what it really is: a trivial pursuit of little consequence in the larger scheme of things.

And who would blame Pietersen and Co. for packing their bags in a hurry and heading home? Who, with a human heart, would, right now, still be able to enjoy a day’s play from a cricket match on TV after having watched the horrors in Mumbai on live television?

When terrorism tests our very humanity, where should Test cricket feature in our priorities? If the English cricket team did the right thing, then Lalit Modi, Vice President of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, betrayed extreme insensitivity when he announced, even as negotiations were still going on with the England Cricket Board officials, that the Test series would go on as originally scheduled. Surely, we cannot allow cricketing commerce to kill our humanity.

This is not the time to worry about the loss of revenue from cancelled One Day Internationals — certainly not in a country whose apex cricket body can boast of a bank balance that might match the GDP of a small-to-medium African nation.

Putting things in perspective

Seven years ago, I travelled to the United States to cover a Davis Cup tennis match two weeks after terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York on September 11. The tie had been put off by two weeks following the Big Apple outrage.

Speaking before the start of the match, the non-playing captain of the U.S. team, Patrick McEnroe, said: “Something like this (9/11) puts things in perspective. You suddenly realise that sport is such a small thing.”

Yes, small and mostly irrelevant.

Sport is a world of illusions. In times of relative peace, we tend to get carried away on its wings of fantasy. We constantly feed sport’s sense of self-importance, seeking to promote it to the front pages of newspapers.

And in the high-noon of commercialisation, when greedy agents and promoters unabashedly work up tidal waves of hype vis-À-vis sports events and sport’s superstars — and quite often television commentators too become indistinguishable from PR personnel —it takes something like the tragic events of 9/11 in New York and the multiple strikes in Mumbai to bring us back down to earth in the world of sport.

Back on track, soon

Of course, in a short time, the curtain is bound to go up on Indian cricket’s next big show. But this is neither the time to worry about when that might be nor is this the right hour to ponder where that could be.

On the other hand, the Mumbai terror attacks may have serious long-term implications for the game of cricket in this part of the world. Five-star hotels are generally thought of as safe havens by elite visiting sportsmen from the western world. Now that the security at the Taj and the Trident has been breached with impunity by terrorists, this may no longer be true.

I-could-have-been-there-when-it-happened, might have been the thought in every English cricketer’s mind while watching the television images of fire engulfing a section of the old hotel building and firemen evacuating a lucky few.

In the best of times, players from England, Australia and New Zealand were reluctant tourists in this part of the world. Now, at a time when all the cricketing goldmines are to be found only in the sub-continent — and particularly in India — the Pietersens and Pontings may be debating if the financial rewards were worth the risks.

Of course, there is no place on earth where it is one hundred per cent safe to play sport — or do anything else, for that matter. Yet, for a country that will be hosting the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010 and the cricket World Cup final in Mumbai a year later, the security concerns vis-À-vis sport and sportspersons are pretty serious. I cannot even begin to diagram the dimensions of the challenge.

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