At a fever pitch

The shame of the Ferozeshah Kotla match shouldn’t rattle us too much. Cricket, after all, must reflect India.

Cricket, as we know all too well, is a religion in a country that takes its religions very seriously. So when on Sunday the capital of the nation witnessed an international cricket match being abandoned — not because of unruly mobs in the stands stopping an inevitable Indian defeat, not because a sudden drop in temperature covered the Ferozeshah Kotla grounds with climate change-induced snow, not because Sri Lankan skipper Kumar Sangakkara thought he saw his Indian counterpart scraping the ball with a cap from a soft drink bottle, but because the pitch was unplayable. When the match was abandoned in the 24th over of the Sri Lankan innings, quite a few players had already been battered and bruised.

HT Image

It’s one thing to have the Bodyline legend being replicated. It’s quite another to find that the villain of the piece was the pitch. So much for India’s most popular game being given the star treatment — by none other than one of the world’s richest sporting bodies, the Board of Control for Cricket (BCCI) in India. The Delhi and District Cricket
Association (DDCA) has rightly been punished by Delhi being dropped from the itinerary of the February-March 2010 tour of South Africa. The fat cats in the DDCA have, on their part, blamed the chaps responsible for preparing (sic) the pitch. Who the pitch committee blames is yet to be ascertained.

As Delhi gears up for the Commonwealth Games, Ferozeshah Kotla provided a wake-up call — not to the fact that we have no clue about sports infrastructure, not to the fact that we are woefully backward in our sense of priorities, but to the fact that cricket in India under the BCCI is only a microcosm of India under our governments where everything that can go wrong goes wrong and much more too.