Beyond the boundary - Loneliness at long-on (3 June 1999)

3 June 1999

Beyond the boundary - Loneliness at long-on

Shakil Kasem

Cricket is no longer the game it used to be. Gone are the red balls, the cream flannels and the billowing white sight-screens. Take away, too, the genteel, sedate crowds given to the odd ooh or aah and the very tongue-in-cheek "Well hit, sir," and the even more discreet clap or two.

Replace all these with white balls that swing wildly, erstwhile flannelled fools now in coloured pyjamas, sponsor's logo on black(!) sight-screens. Add beer-bellied rowdies stripped to the waist (if the weather is right) to pass off as spectators, painted faces (all weather) and raucous bawdy language to approve suitable bits of action, out in the middle. This is the spectacle that greets the eye at the ongoing carnival of cricket in England. England, you say?

Certainly this is not the England we knew nor is this the cricket that used to be played. Changing times, changed needs, more sociological dictat than mere cricket. We live and learn. One does not talk of buckskin pads or linseed oil anymore, the talk centres around speed guns and as such like. The gentle pace of English summer and the game it gave birth to, is now a misnomer. One is flying madly over the cuckoo's nest.

My only tenuous link with cricketing sanity rests with Mishu Kabir. Like me, I suspect, he too is struggling to come to terms with life after the Cowdreys, the Comptons, the Pataudis and the Bobby Simpsons. We do talk (somewhat surreptitiously) of the halcyon days of the Old Taverners, the Free Foresters or the Wagoners, but clearly we are the untouchables among the current crop of cricket aficionados. In keeping with the prevalent societal trait now very much in vogue, we constitute a very small, and even smaller silent minority. But Mishu does make my day every Saturday, as we try to go back in time that is now long gone, almost irrevocably, as it appears.

Memories die hard. To be able to indulge in the odd flight of fancy to keep in fleeting contact with such memories, is one of those small pleasures of life that one is reluctant to give up. Thanks, Mishu. But, you know it too, we are sort of aliens caught in a time warp. Beam us up, Scotty.

Then, what of Tawfiq Aziz Khan? Another of the lost brigade, a man who can spout cricket lore till the cows come home. He too belongs to an age that saw cricket quintessence at its flowering best. He was weaned on Cardus, Robertson, Mason or at worst Fingleton. His avid storehouse of knowledge of cricket history, its players, the grounds they played on and the records they set and broke, do not quite do justice to what is going on around him today. And worse, he has to find something complimentary about them to write about. It is a tough job, but some one has got to do it, I suppose. My sympathies, nevertheless.

Cricket in this World Cup has been, well, different. One maiden bowled over, has been my daughter, who, not surprisingly, given the present state of affairs, thinks the most good-looking players on view are the best ones. My cup of woe almost runneth over.

Source :: The Daily Star