The Eleven

I wanted to post this on 11th of January but due to lack of time and resources I am posting this today. Hope you all like it.
 
The Eleven

Today being a special day (11-1-11) I attempt to bring in on memoirs, those wonderful moments of a Game, which is loved in each and every part of the Country. After all, Cricket is a game played by eleven players a side, isn’t it? Nice coincidence to start this topic I must say. I know most of you, like me, are obsessed with Cricket. For a few it is just another game played by eleven fools and followed by eleven thousand fools (as said by John Bernard Shaw). For the rest, they just ignore it. Cricket is a passion especially in India and nobody dares to deny this fact.

We started watching Cricket when Kapil, Gavaskar, Pataudi, Ravi Shastri, G Viswanath and the likes were at their final stages of their Cricketing career. Most of us were born either a couples of years before or after the Glorious World Cup triumph. Then we grew up watching Sachin, Manoj Prabhakar, Srinath, Prasad, Raju, Azharuddin etc in action. Some of them were the reason for our motivation to play this great Game. We loved batting all the time, didn’t we? More than bowling, batting was a matter of Pride for us. We wanted to hit the ball all around the park.

Most likely most of us would have started our playing Cricket with the tennis ball. When the ball was new we loved to bowl Pace bowling with it and when it was considerably old, one or both sides of the canvas was torn, we used to bowl spinners. We started learning to hit the tennis ball only on on-side. Off side runs were prohibited those days due to space constraint/players constraint or weather constraints (due to wetness in ground on one side). We learned the trick to hit the ball out of the park even when the ball was bowled wide outside off stump, the very scene would have made Azharuddin, G Viswanath and Laxman proud of.

When there were too much of water in the ground, we would fight against local fellows to get some space in the Basket ball court. Even the Basket ball players would be obsessed to play with us instead of playing their game. We drew stumps using the slippers of players, piling one over another. The scene, the drama would be so amazing. Two teams hardly a meter away from each other would be playing so close to each other and cause chaos. Most of the hits which are so important would be prevented from crossing the boundary by someone from team ‘A’. And he would throw the ball to his team’s bowler, who would wonder who hit him like that and throw the ball further down the line to some other guy who is waving his hand 10 meters away for his ‘B’ team mate to throw the ball for a run out. Apparently the ball would take a 360 degree round trip and come back to the original team ‘X’, by which time the batsmen from team ‘Y’ would have run more than 6 runs.

It would be fun to watch the strategy when people play using rubber balls instead of tennis balls. The bouncers that they bowl would keep any batsmen under threat. People would think even Aussies or Proteas can’t handle our bouncers, such fierce bounce they produced using the rubber balls. Moreover, with rubber balls the pace bowlers would seem faster than B Lee, even fiery. Batsmen would run to the offside when the ball is bowled on the leg stump to prevent the ball from hitting their butts.

Back home, at 4 o clock children would gather around their streets to play Street cricket, popularly known as Gully Cricket. Children would play so interestingly that any disturbance in the form of Vehicles movement would be severely dealt with. Either the motorist would be hit or chased. Apparently children prefer playing with tennis balls here; it is the best for the tar road pitch. At least the chances of breaking the glass windows are less when tennis ball flies. When the climate is not conducive to Gully Cricket, Children played Cricket inside their house in a room. Yes in a room, if your memory takes you through, good, else I will project that also in the coming paragraphs.

We used ping pong balls, tennis balls, softy balls, paper balls. Each one was best in its own way. Play with ping pong balls when you are planning for a one-pitch catch mode of dismissal. Play with tennis balls when you are playing in a relatively bigger hall or something and with your brother or sister. Play with softy balls when there are babies around. Play with paper balls when you run out of all the above options. Paper balls were the best innovative finding I have seen so far. So innovative which my mom thought me :). Take some old news papers which you consider as useless, take say 3-4 pages and then crush them between your hands making a round shape. Once done, take one plastic cover and put this paper rolled ball inside and make the round shape and burn one end with fire in order to make the plastic cover stick over and prevent the paper from falling outside. Your paper ball is ready in less than 2 minutes. Even noodles preparation would lose in front of paper ball preparation.

If there were no company to play with, we used to take a tennis ball and dash it against the wall in the room and with a bat in hand. Our reflex action needed to be amazing. Between the time the ball is thrown over the wall and it returns, you were supposed to clasp your bat with both hands. This was one way to keep us occupied and increase our forearm strength also. You would speak Cricket, play Cricket, discuss Cricketers and emote cricketing events like Four, Six, and Out etc whenever you are bored and playing alone. And when we grew, we bought our own Cricket bats, specifically Oil bats those days and seasoned them using Cricket ball inside a sock hung by a rope in your verandah or balcony.

Those were the days, we lived and breathed Cricket. This great game has come of age, new inventions in the form of IPL, T20 have evoked heavy fan following all over the world. The tradition may age, but the passion for the game will never age. We will still be finding innovative ways to make Cricket interesting and one day we will all watch only Cricket in Olympics events. Such is the charm of Cricket.