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SPORT

The World Cup, he explains, wasn’t merely a cricketing disaster; it affected lives, defeated purposes and dented economies. The angst of the average West Indian-Calypso singers rendered voiceless with instruments banned, members of Pickwick Club forced to relocate from Kensington Oval and online ticket booking for a region with little access to the Internet finds its rightful place. The ICC’s biggest failure was its apathy towards the local Caribbean culture, which turned the sporting event into a soulless exercise.

Majumdar is at his best in the chapters involving the Caribbean. These portions are well-researched, if not consistently supported by fluid prose. West Indians have a fascinating relationship with the sport; one driven less by nationalism and more by its past. Cricket for them is a bygone era of excellence, common to all the Caribbean nations.

The legacy of the World Cup, he writes, is deeply mired in contradiction. While most agreed that it was a monetary disaster, breweries and a few others experienced profits. Views differed on the figures, but as a cricketing event, it would go down as a disaster.

Each page has been constructed with a historian’s romance with West Indian cricket and an academician’s appetite for numbers to substantiate. A full-blown account of a failure unprecedented in the history of the game has an academic and a curiously perverse appeal. Majumdar takes his time before bringing India’s exit into his study (barring the trite usage of a ‘billion expectations’). The World Cup reaffirmed that the two sub-continental nations (India and Pakistan) were largely responsible for advertising, tourism and other sources of revenue.

India and Pakistan aren’t just nations that command a passionate following, with financial muscle; but nations shaping the future of the game. Though stating the obvious, Majumdar is armed with numbers, percentages and figures that reflect ill health. Advertising and tourism, erstwhile peripherals of World Cups, were controlling the event itself.

He brings in the common man’s anguish, with one forced into selling his property to compensate for losses, large-scale hotel cancellations and restaurant owners reduced to tears. India’s exit, it seemed, had far-reaching consequences beyond what was understood. Cricket in the sub-continent wasn’t just a game, but one of the two (cinema being the other) unifying factors for Asians everywhere; only, cricket’s inconsistencies were a lot more disturbing.

There are portions in the book when he digresses and portions when you wish he did (one would have liked a little more on Calypsos and his rendezvous with Bob Woolmer). On the other hand, the chapter on minnows is too extensive, dense and with details of little relevance beyond the academic; but he salvages it with the tailpiece. “However, while we know that the ICC is flush with funds, we hardly know how much of the booty will be distributed among the associate member countries. More, we know little or nothing about how these countries will then spend the money. In the absence of such knowledge, the minnows will continue to remain minnows even after World Cup 2011. Or like the Kenyans who had made the semi-final in CWC 2003, they might slide further causing cardinal damage to world cricket in the long run,” he writes.

Majumdar’s book will have an academic appeal, and will find its place in the cricket fanatic for whom West Indian cricket is a symbol of simpler times in the sport. The pace might bog the reader down, since the author packs in too much too many times; but the effort that’s gone into it will find its way to the reader.

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