Sports that are named after insects...

If there is one thing I understand it is passionate sports fans. For all intents and purposes there is no reason why I should allow my temperament to be influenced by the success and failures of a North-London based soccer team on a weekly basis. But if Arsenal loses I am devastated. The same goes for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Raptors and Blue Jays. During the Olympics I am an emotional wreck. Sports that I pay no attention to for almost four years at a time can nearly bring me to tears. An Argentine grandfather is enough to make me vulnerable to heart break if Argentina underperforms at the World Cup.

I mention all of this only to make clear that I am not judgmental of the lunacy that often accompanies supporting a sports club. Being a real fan requires a level of irrationality I can absolutely relate to.

And yet, I simply cannot rap my head around India’s obsession with cricket. When I arrived in Chennai last week I had every intention of sitting in a coffee shop and studying for my GRE test. It took me exactly twenty minutes to realize this would be completely and utterly impossible. I had somehow managed to be unaware of the cricket test match being played between India and England. I say “somehow” because had I looked at the front cover of any Indian newspaper or taken notice of the hordes of men crowded around television sets across the country, this oversight would never have occurred.

Every coffee shop in Chennai was packed with people skipping work to watch England bat, while the windows of these shops were lined with people unable to pay for coffee but still wanting to watch the match. I am sure that an Indian arriving in Canada during our run to the Olympic hockey gold medal would have been just as baffled as I was, but a game of hockey only lasts three hours! A cricket test match is at least eight hours a day for five excruciating days. Imagine the sort of psychological damage that would be inflicted if you had to watch a forty hour baseball game. It would be absolutely intolerable.

Furthermore, one thing I have noticed is that almost all reminders of British colonialism are reviled in most areas of India. But cricket, the most British of all sports, somehow transcends this hatred. The British invented cricket, practiced for several centuries, and then exported the game to its colonies where they would prove their superiority by defeating the natives. Perhaps the importance of the match against the British can be traced to a need disprove the superiority of the former colonizers. If this is the case, then I will admit that this would be an acceptable explanation.

While trying to determine the circumference of a circle for the first time since I decided to study English, the rules of cricket were explained to me by a pleasant Indian fellow named Kumar. It turns out it’s really not as complicated as I had been led to believe. Basically, every team has ten batters and those batters hit the ball for as many points as they can. A batter earns points by running back and forth between two sticks (called wickets) once they hit the ball. Each batter bats continually and earns as many points as possible until the fielding team gets them out. A batter can become out by hitting a ball in the air that is caught, or if the pitcher hits the sticks with the ball when he pitches. As far as I can tell this is all that happens….for forty hours.

I should also note that the most traditional form of cricket involves playing five of these five day test matches. Therefore, you would play 25 days (or 200 hours) of cricket and I assume they would call it a super-cricket although I cannot be sure.

Kumar tried to explain what exactly he loved so much about cricket, and offered this theory (which is expanded on by me).While cricket is believed to be the second most popular sport in the world 90% of the worldwide cricket revenue comes from India. English and Australian cricketers are currently fighting desperately for the right to play in the Indian Premier League as the salaries are significantly higher in the IPL than in the West. Cricket represents the complete opposite of every other major sport. Kumar acknowledged to me that part of cricket’s appeal to Indians is that it is the one sport where India is most powerful. It is quite empowering for Indians to see successful Western athletes moving to India in order to make a living as it represents the fact that India presents opportunities that the West cannot. Cricket’s popularity in India has really exploded over the last twenty five years, and it could be said that India’s rise to power in the cricket world echoes the rise of economic opportunity for India. It is the only sport that accurately reflects India’s improving position in the world. This theory doesn’t necessarily explain how anyone can actually overcome the tedium of watching cricket for eight hours, but it does offer a frame of reference for why the game itself might hold some attraction.

Whether you buy this theory or not I am going to keep on exploring the inner Indian psyche in an effort to figure this cricket thing out. I can’t promise any conclusive results and it seems unlikely that I will become a cricket convert. However, to give cricket its due I definitely don’t think it is as stupid as golf and that’s got to count for something.