If you’re rolling in money in India, you’re either a Maharaja or a cricketer, but nobody would begrudge the vast amounts earned by the likes of Sachin Tendulkar or MS Dhoni. Quite apart from having to put petrol in the Ferrari (and Tendulkar is so fearful of getting mobbed he doesn’t take his out of the garage without putting on a false beard and dark glasses) they’re almost on the breadline after coughing up for the annual home insurance renewal.
It was all very well of David Lloyd to inform television viewers that the 22 cricketers should try to go out and enjoy themselves before the World Cup final, but Bumble never went into an England game — either as player or coach — wondering whether his house would have any windows left at the end of it.
No team is under more pressure playing at home than India, knowing that they’re either going to have their supporters — more than a billion of them — jumping for joy, or heading to the local quarry for ammunition. A goldfish enjoys more of a private life, and when former captain turned commentator Sourav Ganguly was asked the other day how he coped with all the attention when he went out, he replied: “Go out? I don’t.” So Dhoni’s match-winning innings was all the more special for him knowing the consequences of failure. When India were knocked out of the last World Cup a wall of his house was demolished. Then, when England eliminated them from the World Twenty20 in 2009, they burned effigies of him in his home town of Ranchi, and police were called to guard his house.
It was on this same ground, when England beat India in the semi-final of the 1987 World Cup, that Mike Gatting handed a piece of rock to the umpire, and it wasn’t the sort that came from a confectionary shop with ‘Bombay’ written right through it, or Gatt would have eaten it.
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“Pressure”, the Australian allrounder Keith Miller once remarked “is having a Messerschmitt up your arse”, but Miller never played cricket for India.
The game is such a national obsession that there is scarcely room for anything else in the newspapers when India are playing. Even before a game had been played in the 1987 World Cup, the Times of India’s front page headline — prompted by nothing more exciting than an update on ticket sales — read “Cup Fever Mounts!” Fair enough on a slow news day, but tucked away in a small corner at the bottom was another headline which read: “150 Dead In Indo-Pak Border Clashes”. In true Bill Shankly tradition, in India there’s cricket, and then there’s life and death.
Hardly surprising, then, that Dhoni looked tense even before the start. Sri Lanka’s first run of the game came from a routine leave outside the off-stump, and even though Dhoni’s wicketkeeping is modest, a passable imitation of a cymbal player in the Mumbai Brass Band saw the ball clang out of his gloves for a bye.
And it could only have been pressure again which made Dhoni, who has captained the side pretty well in this World Cup, so uncertain of his field placings and bowling options that the three and a half hours allocated to Sri Lanka’s innings expanded to four hours and 10 minutes.
That’s almost as long as the Sri Lankan national anthem, which is so interminable that, should you feel patriotic enough to stand to rigid attention right the way through it, you run the risk of contracting deep vein thrombosis.
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Even the toss took twice as long as it should have done, although this time it could have been a sign of nerves from Dhoni’s opposite number, Kumar Sangakkara. Invited to select either heads or tails as the coin was flipped skywards, we have to assume that nothing more than a croak emerged from his mouth, as the whole operation had to be performed again.
Even so, the pressure was nothing like as great on Sri Lanka, who can play their cricket safe in the knowledge that defeat doesn’t mean a call to the wife to tell her to get behind the sofa.
India’s fortunes, though, can always be measured by the decibel level, and when their two star batsmen, Virender Sehwag and Tendulkar, were out early in the run chase, there would have been more crowd noise yesterday at Fenner’s.
The hush when Sehwag was out to the second ball of the innings was nothing compared to the one when Tendulkar failed to expedite the script that had him winning the game single-handedly with his 100th international hundred, and anyone watching at home must have thought they’d accidentally sat down on the mute button.
It must have been tough for Dhoni to watch, which is perhaps why he promoted himself in the order. There was a job to do, and the captain decided to do it. Mind you, it shouldn’t have been difficult to motivate himself. It was partly through a burning desire to do it for Mother India, but mostly a determination not to have to get the double-glazers in.