If cricket were recognised as an official religion in India, it would almost certainly dominate the landscape. It’s everywhere. And you can understand its appeal—with its refined rules, precision tactics and gentlemanly values, you have to give credit where credit’s due: cricket looks classy. Some matches have built-in tea breaks, for goodness sake. However, if I have learned anything over the past couple of months, it is that cricket is, in fact, cruel; cut-throat; brutal. So, perhaps it is with valid reason that the people who play it well are treated like gods in this country. They have earned this respect.
This isn’t the first year I have dipped my toe into cricket. Some of you might remember that I accidentally signed myself up for a tournament last year, held on the small field inside our apartment complex. That experience gave me a taste of the cricketing lifestyle and, despite being initially reluctant to commit all the necessary hours to training, I found that overall, I quite enjoyed it. So this year, I signed up again and, what’s more, I paid Dylan’s entry fees before he could come up with an excuse not to play. What I was forgetting, however, in all my enthusiasm to participate, was that I am not very good at cricket. And when I am not good at something, I get very, very frustrated. And when I get frustrated, I get much, much worse. Which probably explains how I secured and retained the very bottom spot in the bowler rankings for this year’s tournament. And I mean, the VERY bottom: across all categories, all age groups and all matches. Septuagenarians and children bowled better than my 6 wides, 2 no balls and a final tally of 25 runs handed out to the opposite team—all in one 6-ball over. The commentators even gave up commentating because it was just too awful to make light of. Someone please remind me of this next year when I tell people that cricket is fun.
My bowling wasn't pretty.
What I did revel in this year, however, was the training, which took me deep into the heart of Mumbai’s cricket culture: a place I doubt I would ever have stumbled across were it not for the marching orders of my team owners and captain. Mumbai, I now know, is littered with cricket pitches. No, ‘pitches’ isn’t the right word. Mumbai is littered with pockets of land on which a group of people can reasonably set up a wicket. Some of these pockets also double up as roads and intersections but others are more specialised. It’s a good thing there are plenty of the more obviously cricket-oriented grounds, because with sixteen women’s teams from our apartment complex alone all looking for places to train, they were in hot demand. And being let in on the secret of where they all are made me feel like a proper Mumbaikar.
Mumbai street cricket.
In the six weeks between the players’ auction back in November and the start of the tournament in January, cricket training took over my life. For the first few weeks I was still working full time and so only offered up my evenings and weekend mornings, but once I retired from my job (more on this another time), I was able to fit in some afternoon sessions too. None of this did anything to improve my bowling, as time would tell, but it certainly honed my ability to play one game while being aware of several others at the same time. A crucial thing to know before setting foot on a public cricket field in India is that you will be far from the only people on it. A maidaan, as the larger fields are known, can play host to around twenty cricket matches at a time. The matches overlap, with deep fielders from one game standing inches from another’s wicket. Sometimes a club lines up four or five sets of stumps next to one another and then sends off volley after volley of projectiles. Cries of ‘watching!’ from men with arms raised and waving above their heads means that somewhere up in the air is a ball, hopefully not a hard leather one, hurtling towards someone whose attention is elsewhere. The right thing to do then, is to clutch your head with your hands and hope you’re not in the firing line. Less panicky shouts of ‘bol, bol, bol’ ring out when a team needs their ball back with some run-rate-related urgency. A lighter, more surprising way of attracting attention to rescue a stray ball when it’s not time sensitive seems to be by blowing kisses. It’s remarkable how well the squeak of air being sucked between pursed lips can cut through the noise of twenty animated cricket matches.
I struggled on these fields in the evenings because the floodlights offered patchy coverage and seemed to be positioned directly behind the line of the ball being bowled to me, no matter how we angled our pitch. I couldn’t judge distance and I couldn’t predict the trajectory of the ball. Sometimes the floodlight blinded me completely. Fortunately, my batting is considerably better than my bowling and so a swing, even a blind one, often resulted in contact between bat and ball. But knowing I could hit a ball without seeing it didn’t make it feel any less like I was playing in a war zone when the maidaan was busy. One thing I hadn’t expected was the number of young children present on the pitch, long after Jasper was tucked up in bed. Street smart and strong beyond their stature, barefoot primary school-aged children would whip their bony little arms back to send a ball half way across the field. One particularly small girl joined the practice match we hosted with the only other women’s team we encountered on a maidaan in all our weeks of training. Assuming she was not unlike Jasper in being enthusiastic to take part but slow to move out of the way of danger, I started out gently until I was told, in no uncertain terms: ‘Don’t go easy on her. She’s five and she plays with a leather ball normally.’ She took no prisoners. Given the choice, I would choose being humbled by a child in a cricketing warzone over the oddball parade of spectators we attracted elsewhere, however. At a smaller, walled yard of orange dust, rocks and a muscle gym, hidden away on a residential street, we were accompanied by sleeping dogs, a huddle of dull-eyed young men smoking weed and a group of youths burning who-knows-what on bonfire— because, at 22 degrees, the December evenings were ‘cold’.
On Saturday mornings we somewhat boldly commandeered a corner of the rather grandly named Worli Sports Club. And I suppose it was grand, in that there was some grass rather than just the ubiquitous red dust we found elsewhere. Arriving early in the morning meant tip-toeing through the previous night’s debris of bottles, takeaway containers, dog poo and chewing-tobacco to find a patch of field we could claim as our own. I found it mildly less stressful playing in daylight because, although we stood more chance of seeing an incoming missile from a nearby game, the better visibility seemed to bolster the batsmen. At the end of each two hour session, I headed home with mild heat-stroke, painful muscles, ankles caked in orange dust but also a deep sense of gratitude for having had the opportunity to lift the lid on Mumbai’s cricket culture: far beyond the socioeconomic bubble of our apartment complex, and despite my growing increasingly embittered by my inability to bowl a straight ball.
For Dylan, taking part wasn’t so much about playing in the tournament as it was about accessing a cricketing community with whom he could organise a nets session or a casual game outside of tournament time. What better way to say ‘I play cricket’ than to do so and have it live-streamed on YouTube? To Dylan’s horror, the tournament organisers talked him up ahead of the players’ auction and as a result, he sold as the most expensive player in the men’s league. This pressure did not sit well on his shoulders, unfortunately, and while he did achieve the underlying aim of being invited to play with a team outside the apartment complex, he did not win any trophies for his contributions in the tournament. The issue wasn’t his commitment, or his skills, it was his ability, or lack thereof, to play small. And some degree of resentment towards the strictly controlled format. The field where this tournament is held is about a tenth of the size of a regular cricket field and therefore requires batting and fielding fine artistry that’s not required when you have acres of space to wallop and chase down boundaries. It also calls for a lot of extra rules. Still, he looked the part, dazzled the crowds with some moments of brilliance and, before long, the invitation to join a leather-ball team on a full-sized pitch came in.
Someone won a trophy, but definitely not for bowling.
Since moving to our current apartment complex, Dylan has been missing cricket. At our previous place, there were cricket nets among the facilities and at least once a week, Dylan would hire a bunch of semi-professional U-19 players to come and clobber him with pace and spin. I could hear the thwack of ball on bat from our 21st floor apartment with the windows shut, so intense was the barrage. He would return home exhausted and dehydrated but triumphant, sometimes with a broken bat, and we would admire the bruises he sustained as they evolved through all the colours of the rainbow—like badges of honour and grit. But where we live now doesn’t come with a cricket net and because Dylan works long hours and most Saturdays, his cricketing opportunities have all but dried up—until now.
His first match took place while Jasper and I were in the UK getting me a new retirement visa but, as with all cricket matches great and small in India, it was streamed on YouTube so I kept Jasper informed by dipping in and out of the live feed. Once we came back to India, however, Jasper and I were keen to ramp up our support, pitch-side if possible, but watching online if timings and traffic weren’t going our way. On Valentines’ Day evening, Jasper and I were there: cosy and comfy with a takeaway pizza, match on the big screen, toasting to Dylan’s success, awaiting his turn on strike. And that’s when I learned the meaning of the term ‘Golden Duck’.
I’ll say it again: cricket is cruel. There is no redemption, no come-back, no digging deep or doubling down; no second chances to make it up to your team, to show what you’re made of, to shake it off and try again; no regaining control, no making up lost ground, no clawing your way back onto the scoreboard. When it’s over, it’s over. And as your executioner runs around like he’s being chased by a bee, there is nothing you can do but hang your head and walk silently off the pitch, swearing you’ll never return. Except you will, because you have to if you’re trapped into a league of any kind, and the next time the shame of your dismissal (or of your 6 wides, 2 no balls and 25 runs) will cloud your vision and give your muscles amnesia.
I used to say I’d like Jasper to become a cricketer. I used to say that he was well positioned for it: learn in India, train in Australia, cap for England. I used to say that I fancied myself as a cricket mum: travelling to exotic locations, drinking pints of Pimms in the players’ box, clapping knowingly and proudly in the way only a mother can as they watch their flesh and blood represent their country. Not any more. I can’t handle it. If watching my grown-up husband be bowled out before he had time to do anything at all made me feel as wronged as I did, I can’t even imagine how I would take the sight of Jasper being dealt the same fate. No. Cricket mum is not the role for me.
And perhaps I should stop worrying that Jasper doesn’t pay attention in his cricket class. He clearly has natural talent, he’s just not interested in harnessing or developing it, and as a result, won’t follow instructions. He’s impatient, distracted and cheeky, but maybe that’s okay. After all, he is only four years old and, as Dylan confessed at the end of his final match of his recent league: I just don’t think I like cricket.
If it's any comfort, your father wasn't any good at bowling either!