FULL CIRCLE

India has seen many Black Fridays and Manic Mondays, but many Indians believe that last Friday was the darkest and blackest of them all. It’s when our Great Indian Dream Team choked, once again. But is there anything new in this?
The Men In Blue are a band of chokers once they jet set to any other country. This too is nothing new. Perhaps, in Indian mythology, going to a distant land – saat samundar paar - was considered inauspicious maybe the reason for it was that India was a ‘Sone ki chidiya’, so there was no reason to set afoot in foreign shores. Our cricketers too follow the same rules. Exploit cricket on home soil as gold to the hilt. That’s it!
It was six months back when a senior cricket journalist, who has devoted his life to cricket more than what a cricketer would have, said that it might be an Aussie ploy to send Greg Chappell here and completely destroy Indian cricket before the World Cup. Well, I shrugged it off then, but conditions prevailing around us now make me think that there was some grain of truth in that too.
However, India’s loss has brought smiles among a small stratum of Indian society comprising few sports desk journalists and a lot more sportspersons who have always lived under the shadow of the great game of cricket and its demigods. For whom glory comes just once in four years, when they embark on a journey to either Asian Games or Olympics or the World Cup. That’s the only time they get their share of media pie.
For the desk journalists, it’s back to routine jobs meaning a lot more time to spend with their respective families, getting sound sleep and no more early morning drinks with colleagues on the parking lots of their offices.
For our cash-strapped sportspersons, India’s loss means a lot. They can live on hope that sponsors would turn to them for funding. Some of the world champions that India has produced in recent years in other sports (I won’t name them though), are without even a single sponsor. They can pray to God that they might be able to lay their hands on the sponsor’s booty after India’s world cup debacle. But, with crossed fingers.
“Nobody can say anything against cricket in India. It’s dangerous. All this madness and anger is transient. Within no time, India will forget them and they will be heroes again and darling of the sponsors,” said a shooter on conditions of anonymity to me. “They have mastered the art of luring fans, so performance doesn’t matter to them. They live for money and die for it. Fans won’t even get time to show their anger, when BCCI would change the captain and coach and soon the topic of discussion would be the current changes in cricket team rather than why they failed. It’s a full circle. It starts with India’s debacle in the World Cup and then consumes four long years of the build-up until the next cricket World Cup happens where India fails once again.”
Can you stop it?