Tumultous year comes to an end

“The team left from this terminal a few days ago. And I will tell you something, these players were amazed at how cold we were towards them,” he went on. As we said our thanks and bid him goodbye, he interrupted us with an “Excuse me.” “Could you please pass on my good wishes to the team in Nairobi. Tell them, they should win this time!”

From numbness, disbelief and anger at the match-fixing scandal, to hope! Well, that was the mood of the nation in the millennium year.

That man at the airport was no prophet, but India came very close to turning the world upside down in Nairobi. A majority of tickets for the tourney may have been brought in advance by the huge expatriate Indian populace in Kenya, but who would have bet on India playing in the final on October 15?

Not many, not even the former board president Raj Singh Dungarpur, in the news these days because of his showdown with the great Sunil Gavaskar.

In Nairobi as a board nominee, Dungarpur’s return ticket bore the date October 8. But, he couldn’t fly back that night. He partied and partied into the wee hours, matching the young Indian Turks step by step on the dance floor at the Hotel Inter Continental. India didn’t need the Azhars and the Jadejas to beat Steve Waugh’s impregnable Aussies.

They had Yuvraj Singh and Zaheer Khan. And, India’s latest skipper Saurav Ganguly. Next match, against the South Africans on Friday the 13th, the Indians were glued to their TV sets, from Tirunelveli down South to Kathua near Jammu up North. The Indians were game, and doing it so well, we thought we didn’t need big names for our cricketing rennaisance.

Ganguly’s “boys” lost in the final to another outsider — New Zealand, but our trip was made. The same immigration officer greeted scribes with joy and must have wanted us to reveal some thousand anecdotes of the tour. He, and his colleagues would have surely drowned the team with their tears of joy had they not landed in Mumbai before flying off again, this time to Sharjah.

Well, it was a forgettable excercise. The Indians then had their Night Out with Shame, as their pin code-like scores added upto just 54 runs on the board against Sri Lanka in a game. The team plummeted to a new low.

This was one hell of a long year for India. Starting with their massacre in Australia and the visiting South Africans shattering the myth that “India cannot be beaten at home,” the defeats were many. Sachin Tendulkar, 27, said he would never lead India again.

We were also hit, below the belt, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare’s English, as the South African skipper Hansie Cronje, while admitting that he “had not been honest” with his board and friends on the match-fixing scandal, confirmed it was Mohammad Azharuddin who had intiated him into that murky world.

There were allegations and rumours all around with Manoj Prabhakar even naming Kapil Dev as another culprit, before the CBI report named Prabhakar himself, along with Azhar, Ajay Jadeja and Ajay Sharma as the “match-fixers”. This didn’t worry the team, and as the “guilty” were sacked for “playing games” other than cricket, the dressing room became a “nice little world” again.

It will be grossly unfair to judge the likes of Yuvraj, Zaheer, Hemang Badani, Shiv Sundar Das and Reetinder Sodhi, as also Ganguly’s captaincy on the basis of their performance against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, but surely after a long time the Indian team is bubbling with enthususiasm. Again, these are early days yet, maybe the Australians when they come calling in February will shed some cricketing justice, but we will be repeating the same mistakes if we hailed these youngsters as heroes already.

Remember what happened to the Devang Gandhis, the Vijay Bharadwajs, the Jacob Martins and so many other names who looked so promising before Australia exposed that myth.

Off the field, two good things happened to Indian cricket. The National Cricket Academy in Bangalore could be credited with hardening the young lads, who had won the Under-19 Youth World Cup in Sri Lanka in January and the appointment of India’s first foreign coach in Kiwi John Wright and a consultant in the Aussie Geoff Marsh suggests we are looking forward to the future with sense that comes with good vision.

Or maybe, our vision is distorted. Dungarpur’s war of words with Gavaskar will bring a sad end to an year which confirmed that cricket, the game, indeed was larger than any of the individuals who have become rich and famous by excelling in it.