Friday, November 2, 2007

Grand Opening by MASTER BATTER!!

Hello to all the readers on thinkincell… This is Master Batter who would be writing all about cricket (and some other form of sports from time to time). Being an Indian, sports is almost synonymous to cricket for me. This is what I have played and enjoyed all my life, this is what helps me let go of my inhibitions.(as thinkincell put it… well sex helps me let go of a lot of things). As Mathew Hayden, an Australian cricketer, once said
“Cricket is a religion in India and Sachin Tendulkar is their GOD!!! ‘
For me there is no one who has put it better. He is truly a GOD when it comes to playing cricket, the best batsmen in the whole world and still a guy who doesn’t show the slightest arrogance, is the most humble cricketer ever seen and this for a guy who is probably the highest paid sport star in the country. Well if at this point you are rolling your eyes and going… not another guy who talks about cricket… then tough luck, coz I really give a rat’s a**.

I play for a cricket club in Edison, NJ which plays in the Cricket league of NJ. You might think this is just a bunch of cricket crazy people playing in the corner of a street. What would you say about a league which has 40 cricket teams with each team having a roster of more than 40 people!!! Surprised… don’t be!! With the Indian & Pakistani population down here, this was bound to happen. And to take it a little further… there are 4 more leagues in NJ, 15 more in NY, another 10 in DC and so on…. So see Im not the one who is outnumbered here!!!
The other day I was at my club’s annual get-together and the Mayor of the town, who was the chief guest, mentioned that he was invited to watch the Indo-Pak T20 Wcup finals at a local theatre. Even he was impressed with the kind of passion & excitement generated while watching the game.( yeah it was a cracker of a game !!). “Even I got so involved” he said. This was some statement coming from a guy who did not understand cricket and is from a country that plays a game which is cricket’s stepbrother… baseball. Came to office the next day and a few guys at work congratulated me for the win.
That’s when I started thinking about it…. Well baseball is similar to cricket…. Bat,ball, wickets ( ok bases), boundaries ( ok home runs)….. call it whatever u want but they are the same. But both these games have been around for a long time then why was it that people from a non-cricketing nation are suddenly interested in cricket. That’s when it struck me that T20 actually was almost like baseball…. The fast & the furious version if you will. The purists don’t like this version of the game….Australia don’t even consider this as a real game (sour grapes I say)…but India winning the World cup has gone a long way in promoting T20. If the richest board in the world (Indian cricket board for the maximus ignoramus people) wants it, they can get this format of the game even into the US. Coz when Money talks, nobody listens to the grammar.

T20, for me, can work wonders in promoting the cultures from cricketing nations in non-cricketing nations…. Promote tourism and all the jazz along with it!! Why am I writing all this… so that I don’t have to take a vacation to actually go and watch India play international cricket in a stadium. So that I can actually watch a WORLD cup on American television (not World series which has the US states playing against each other)….so that I don’t have a game which is so controlled by television that there are official breaks in the game meant just for TV ( come on how can the last 2 mins of a basketball game go on for half an hour)…. And lastly so that you don’t have to hear me rant about this again.!!

Adios Amhi… goes!!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

when money talks no one listens to the grammer and when horny fucks no one ignores the moan...What a great fuckin' saying that is!

Wannabe said...

great article. keep it up.