In India, most people would give an arm and a leg to have the job of a cricket journalist. Since only eleven men take the field and only fifteen are part of the squad, the closest one can come to living the dream is to follow the fortunes of the team day in and day out - and what could be better than to do it as a profession? I have lived that life for two years, and in many ways it is a dream job. The one downside is that it tends to push the 'fan' in an individual to the background and bring the more objective observer to the foreground. The fan can wear his heart on his sleeve, can dance when his team wins, can yell when his team does well, and can curse when his team fails. The observer is not supposed to have a team.
This World Cup has seen the Indian team get off to a stuttering start, find its groove and then roll like a Mercedes into the final. Through it all, for the most part, the observer was able to do his job. And then came the semi-final. India versus Pakistan. A match that could possibly have TRPs, viewership and hype greater even than the finals.
I had thought that the observer would continue to hold sway, but at the toss itself, he beat a hasty retreat, and the fan took over. Firmly and decisively. I realised it when I had a disproportionately angry reaction on hearing that MS Dhoni had dropped R Ashwin for the match. R Ashwin - who had been our best bowler after Zaheer? R Ashwin who was a better batsman and fielder than any of Munaf Patel and Ashish Nehra? R Ashwin at the expense of Harbhajan Singh who's figures and stats were much worse?
That Pakistan didn't pick Shoaib Akhtar, in what turned out to be the final time they could have picked him, passed by only as a fleeting thought. Clearly if the career of a man such as Akhtar was ending, it demanded more attention. It got very little though.
The realisation sank fully in when the game started, and when Virender Sehwag teed off on Umar Gul. Gul had been Pakistan's best bowler in the tournament along with Shahid Afridi, and the sight of India's destroyer dismantling the opposition's strike bowler was exhilarating. The immediate anger at Ashwin's exclusion was forgotten.
For six overs, Sehwag ran amok, and visions of a 350-plus score started swimming hazily past. There were more than 44 overs (or about 90 percent of the innings) left, but when you're immersed in the situation only the previous ball counts - and when Sehwag was batting, the previous ball had been just fetched from the boundary most of the time.
It was obviously too good to last, though this time Sehwag couldn't be accused of 'throwing away' his wicket with a bad shot. True, he probably would not have got out if he hadn't looked to score off that particular ball, but then he wouldn't have been Sehwag.
His departure seemed only a momentary blip though, with Sachin Tendulkar easing into his game. One particular wristy hit to the mid-wicket boundary was tiramisu for the eyes.
But then the script seemed to go wrong. Saeed Ajmal came on and Sachin Tendulkar couldn't read him properly. An lbw appeal was over-turned, a stumping chance survived. And during one of the over-breaks, somebody must have run out onto the field and applied butter to all the Pakistanis' hands. Catches were spilled off Tendulkar as if Pakistan had started to believe the myth that if had scored a ton, India would lose!
No matter. The fan was happy. Who cared how the runs came, as long as they came. And who cared how scratchy an innings this was as long as he was still there?
And then suddenly it did seem to matter. He was still there, but the others started leaving in droves around him. Gautam Gambhir seemed to have played himself in, but was stumped off Hafeez. A part-time spinner had got one of India's best players against spin out. Virat Kohli then came, but did not last long. Wahab Riaz got his second wicket when Kohli's tentative prod to a ball that bounced a lot more than he expected flew straight to point. The cue to panic happened a ball later. Yuvraj Singh had strode out, looking every inch the man that had rescued India so many times in the World Cup, but even a man in good form and high on confidence wouldn't have survived the first ball that Yuvraj got. Riaz sent down a fast, swinging ball that sneaked past bat, evaded pad and body and homed in on the stumps. Where do Pakistan unearth their army of world-class fast bowlers from? They clearly have a limit-less supply.
India were left with Tendulkar, still standing and still being dropped, and an out-of-form Dhoni along with a Raina who hadn't played too many matches.
It did seem odd that Tendulkar, of all people, was playing this kind of innings. The start had been Rolls Royce like. After that, it was like an Ambassador on a pot-holed road, with a leaky fuel tank who just happened to find a fuel station everytime the gas ran out.
The Pakistanis too were surprisingly lax. After all, this was the man who had been man-of-the-match in two of their four previous losses to India in World Cups, and more than that, this was the man who held out hope for the entire team by his very presence. And yet, they kept dropping him. The fact that Tendulkar gave so many chances, and that Pakistan fluffed so many, was a good indicator of the nerves that had accompanied this match.
Eventually, he gave one chance too many. The fan groaned. Tendulkar's scripts were supposed to be written from up above. If he had been dropped so many times, wasn't it ordained that he would get to his 100th international ton against India's arch-rival in the biggest match of his life? Even after he hit the ball to Afridi, who caught it and immediately gave his now-famous Christ-like pose, in the split second during which Tendulkar stayed at the crease in disappointment before turning off, there was the thought that he might not be out after all. It might have been a bump ball, a no-ball. Only when he walked back did the suspension of disbelief end. And the fan mourned.
85 runs for the champion out of a total of 187/5 - how many more times would we have to see him wage a lone, losing battle? It was supposed to be a 300-run pitch and the Indian attack was supposed to be about 10 good overs (Zaheer Khan) and 40 average ones (the rest). MS Dhoni hung around for a while, but not long enough to hark back to the 2005 vintage, but Suresh Raina fought gamely. Even though Wahab Riaz was giving over after over of solid demonstration of why had been preferred over Shoaib Akhtar, Raina held firm. Eventually, Riaz got a richly deserved five-wicket haul, but Raina stayed unbeaten. India were guided to a respectable, but not threatening 260/9.
It is a quality unique to fans that when things fall short of their expectations, they expect the worst. Consequently, I thought Pakistan were the strong favourites heading into the break. And of course, the mutterings about team selection re-surfaced. Pakistan's opening stand did nothing to allay those, until an ordinary ball from Zaheer accounted for Kamran Akmal. Faint hope was rekindled, but I'd spent a decade watching India lose before they recently started winning, and what hope there was, was kept firmly bottled up.
And then Munaf got into the act via a self-destruct shot by Hafeez. Hope started tapping gently on the door. It apparently had enough of tapping, and with the entry of India's man for the moment - Yuvraj Singh - it neatly knocked down the door and barged in. Two wickets in two successive Yuvraj overs and India was right back in it.
This was the key phase of the game. Misbah ul Haq and Umar Akmal had been Pakistan's men in form, and they were together with Pakistan on the backfoot. In a brief 36-run stand, the younger Akmal showed why he is such a highly rated player, smacking Yuvraj Singh around and threatening to put Pakistan back on a footing from which they would be favourites.
The stand was broken by Harbhajan Singh, with a ball that left Umar completely unsure of how to play it. The result was he ended up looking lost, and the ball ended up crashing into the stumps. India was pumped, Bhajji even more so. The team - and indeed the nation - believed that this match was now headed only one way. The observer would have probably thought that even though Harbhajan had bowled well, Ashwin would have probably done better. The fan simply rejoiced, and joined in the full-throated cheering of his team.
Umar's dismissal did indeed prove to be the key wicket, and after that Pakistan were always playing catch-up. Abdul Razzaq came and went, done in by a Munaf Patel leg-cutter. Shahid Afridi had purpose in his eyes, but no form in his bat. For the rest of the batsmen, the ask was too much. Misbah ul Haq did stick around, but sticking around without scoring runs has not won sides limited-overs matches, and Misbah was not scoring enough runs.
That the Indians won didn't come as too much of a surprise after that. And even then, it was the cue for much rejoicing.
In the preview to the match, I had mentioned the less significant battle - between India's bowling and Pakistan's batting - could be just as crucial, and it did prove to be so. The bowling was the best it had been in the tournament, and it chose a perfect time to peak. Ashish Nehra and Munaf Patel - who had been considered weak links - returned combined figures of 4/73 off 20 controlled overs. A success by any yardstick.
MS Dhoni's captaincy was spot on, and the way he rotated bowlers was superb. Each one, it seemed was given a spell for just the right amount of overs, and the only time a spell appeared not to work was when Yuvraj was hit around by Umar Akmal for a second successive over. One over wrong in fifty is not a bad record though. Curiously enough, Dhoni admitted at the end that the pitch had been read wrongly and that three seamers might not have been the best idea. But he had backed his gut - as he has done often - and his gut had delivered.
It had been strangely liberating in a sense to kick back and let the fan take over. So liberating, in fact, that I suspect he will be in residence till April 2, 2011.
Source: http://www.cricbuzz.com/cricket-news/39303/the-fan-and-the-observer
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