India Thrashed, mixed emotions and future of South Asian Cricket

For those of you are serving time in a federal penitentiary and thus missed the India vs. South Africa cricket match, India got nostril raped by the South Africans. Chasing 248, India put in one of the most woeful displays of shrivelled testicle disease in the history of competitive sport, collapsing to 92 all out in time for dinner .

I went off to sleep feeling robbed of late night entertainment and nursing some mixed feelings.

I felt perverse joy watching India get whipped like cattle through an African market. Non-Indians from the Sub-continent cant help but feel this way. Each of our nations have been bullied by India and we have probably been personally bullied by Indians. The day after an Indian cricket loss, the silence from the Indians you know is deafening. Comparisons of Dravid/Tendulka/Dhoni to Jayasuriya/Mohammed Yousuf halt mid-sentence. The collective sound is that of an elephant recovering from a hunter's gunshot. A large powerful animal that just cant believe its luck. Its also like being best friends with a bully, part of you does a little dance when he eventually gets the shit kicked out of him.

Part of you also feel sorry for him, because in the end, he is you're friend. This sentiment makes up the flip side of my feelings. As I saw the gentler, more talented Indian elephant being tusked to pieces by the African elephant, aggressive and powerful in its musth, I felt a shudder for the smaller creatures of the jungle. I realised that the talented circus-bred Sri Lankan lion and the hardy and wily Pakistani Markhor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markhor) would also be no match for the African elephant in all its rage or the unbeatable boxing Kangaroos. I realised that the way South Asians play cricket stood no chance against the channelled rage of the South Africans or Australians. We still play cricket the way the British taught us to play the game, there are no words after a smashing four or well-aimed bouncer, no spitting at the feet of the batsmen, no heckling (in English atleast) from behind the stumps. We employ all kinds of tricks to motivate ourselves but none to demoralise the opposition. We also pick our teams in a gentler manner, giving people a chance until they truly prove that their talent does not extend beyond first-class level (Micheal Vandort, Suresh Raina and Kaneira among others), while the Aussies and South Africans do not shy away froms ending a bad cricketer back to his farm or trailer park.

South Asian cricket teams have two options:

1. Continue playing the game the gentlemanly way we do and depend on our awesome reserve of talent to win a few matches.

2. Change our style to become the bastards we know we can be (i.e. the aggressive and confrontational South Asian teams that won World Cups in '83, '92 and '96).

I dont really know which of the two I want to see, I just hope brown people start winning more matches. India can still recover from this debacle, Pakistan is playing well and SL faces a winnable series against the Kiwis. The spices have been thrown into the fire, lets hope they are cooked into a fiery masala and not just get burnt into brown powder.