My earliest memory of cricket is of watching the opening ceremony of the ’99 World Cup followed by the first game between England and Sri Lanka. My parents, sister, and I were sitting on our living room sofa in our Mumbai home. The sofa had been moved closer than usual to the TV temporarily as there were renovations going on at home. In hindsight, watching a neutral cricket game like that feels like an odd family activity to do, especially since up until then, only Dad was the serious cricket enthusiast in the family. Is it odd that it’s also one of the earliest ‘family’ memories I have ever?
Cricket reminds me of childhood, of memories with Dad, as watching it was one of the few things we did together. He grew up listening to matches on the radio, rejoiced when black-and-white television entering the family home, and was over the moon when color television appeared. I’m also reminded of my Nana (maternal grandfather) who was very fond of cricket himself. I remember the soft tiles in Nana’s room, as if they’d had baby powder sprinkled over them. I’d walk into his room and he would be cradling his bad leg, watching a game on the television with a frown, and when he saw me, he would animatedly beckon me to come over, sit next to him, upon which he would begin to explain the match situation. While Dad watched cricket recreationally, Nana was a serious follower of the game. It was from him that I learnt about rules, facts, stats, the legend of the fearsome ‘3 Ws of the West Indies,’ the ‘83 Indian win, the genius of Imran Khan, the ‘98 Desert Storm, and the hearbreaks for Indians that were the ‘96 World Cup and the ‘99 Madras test.
And then, I have a whole host of cricket-related memories with my cousin. We are similarly aged, grew up to learn about and love cricket together, but he started to follow the game a little before me – something he found to his great disappointment only recently when he learnt that I did not catch ‘98 Desert Storm live on television with him, and that it was ‘before’ I started watching cricket in life. I think this robbing of what he thought was our first shared experience — and what an experience those games would have been — twenty three years later has hit him a bit like a personal betrayal, and I know I’d feel the same way if the roles were reversed.
I spent a lot of time growing up at his house, where armed with our first bats and sponge, tennis, or ’crazy’ balls, we proceeded to make every room of that house a cricket pitch for ourselves. The living room was by far our favorite, mostly due to how long it was, but also due to a dent in the marble tiling at a good length spot that we tried to hit. Living rooms also had the most valuable items per square inch in an Indian home, so we played ‘league’ games in other rooms, and were allowed the living room only for the ‘finals.’ House help, sisters, other cousins often became additional players with us when needed, but mostly it was just us having the best time together.
As kids, there obviously was a lot of cheating and name calling and trying to do better than each other, but I remember us having a strange kind of competition — on who is the ‘bigger person’ of the two. For instance, he would argue about how he genuinely dropped a catch off my bat and that he wasn’t trying to give me a life after I had lost a string of games, or I would question how dare he call my misfield off his bat staged; a ‘slip’ that gave him a free boundary on a day when he returned home with a ‘C’ in a math test. It was a weird relationship where we wanted to have each others’ backs but were also offended to find the other doing the same. The most serious of these incidents would usually end with the most offended party leaving the session and slumping on the couch muttering ‘biggest cheater’ under their breath. It was a strange sibling relationship, where we couldn’t bring it upon ourselves to cheat with each other in the conventional way (although we didn’t mind doing it with others when we played with them), and so we cheated in this ‘bending-over-backward’ kind of way. It was a weird flex, like a ‘see how much I value our relationship more than if I win this game’ thing but this is one of the vivid memories of us that I’m fond of. Real fights did happen too - disappointments, real cheating on both sides - but ultimately we were always looking for a chance to play a 5-over game, or a 1-over game or a 3-ball game or a 1-ball game any chance we could, depending on how much time our mothers allowed us in between studying.
That first world cup remains a strong core memory, and some of the associations my mind made back then surprisingly still remain in my subconscious to this day. One such thing was the ‘personification’ of a team. The ’99 World Cup teams were not ten teams, but ten individual ‘persons,’ each with a face, characteristic, behavior, and ‘sound’ of their own. It was as if every team that India played against was also a new ‘friend’ I was making in life, and I came back from each interaction with the silliness and randomness that 8-year olds have. South Africa as a country was a new concept, and to me, having two words in their name automatically meant they meant business and were a force to contend with. Who can forget the image of the aggressive, yellow crosses on their ’99 world cup jersey and their strike bowler Allan Donald with his scary white stripes, spitting fire at batsmen. Of course, our team were no match for them, and lose to them we did, as I had feared. Zimbabwe was another scary African nation. A ‘z’ in a name is brave I thought, and a ‘z’ and a ‘w’ meant certain fear. Plus Henry Olonga. And he got Tendulkar out. It was the right thing to lose to them, I told myself, and we were lucky to even get so close. In the same vein, I wound up with no respect for Sri Lanka, Kenya, and England, who we won comfortably against. And in my head, of course it was because of their meek names, dull colors, bugs on their jerseys, tear drop shaped countries. . . meh. So just like that, I dismissed three entire nations with centuries of history behind them because we beat them. Make sense?
I was also watching other teams’ games, not just India’s, and I was beginning to see how strong or weak each of them were. Australia seemed so sure of themselves – they were clearly the senior guys on the ground and I was frankly surprised they were even letting other teams play on the same turf. And of course, if you’ve grown up in India in the 90s, Pakistan were the guys to beat. The World Cup game between India and Pakistan wound up bang in the middle of the Kargil war between the two countries, although of course no one knew at the time this was the case. Anyway, it’s never just a game between the two countries even if it’s on the cricket pitch, and the war only electrified things further. Fortunately for us, we won, otherwise I don’t know what I would have done with myself.
Outside of the World Cup, another obsession was forming, this time with record keeping, stats, and numbers, all of which my cousin and I had a keen eye for. As we slowly grew obsessed with the game, we started documenting matches by cutting out scorecards from newspapers of important games, and maintaining a mini-diary to paste them in, as well as physically jot them down in. The diary was a spiral bound one, with a glossy Sachin Tendulkar montage on its front cover, a birthday gift from my sister. Old newspapers were kept in the balcony and we spent hours there trying to document as much as we could of the game we were growing to love so dearly.
I remember we didn’t discriminate – we saw India-A vs. India-B and India Red vs. India Blue games as passionately as we followed an India vs. Australia or a Pakistan vs. Scotland or even an India women vs. England women’s game even though women’s cricket in India wasn’t huge then. All the games’ stats found their way into our diary. Till one day, when the whole cutting of newspapers was getting out of hand (parents weren’t impressed with the mess), we had to take a serious decision to prioritize certain games over certain others. We stuck with the documentation of just the international games as a sort of company policy. After a point, school became busier, and the documenting became rarer until one day, it stopped completely. I remember feeling guilty about it, as if we were being disloyal to the game, and I still rushed to document an occasional brilliant game, but overall, the record keeper in us died well before we hit our teens.
To this day, an India loss has the capacity to ruin my evening(s), but as a kid, this was out of control. I was over the moon when we won, and a picture of abject despair when we lost, with Mom hurrying to keep pace with my extremely volatile emotions. Dad’s attempts at “it’s-just-a-game” were in vain, and it was tough to stomach the loss to NZ in the Super 6s in ‘99. Then a year later, Chris Cairns would go on to deny us even the Champions Trophy. Man, these ‘z’ countries . . .
Overall, the ‘99 World Cup had been a disappointment in some ways, but it had been a great success in making me love the game. The period that followed involved a lot of cricket, both in actual playing with friends in building compounds, to playing games on the computer, or to playing “trump” cards where my cousin and I competed for who remembered stats well.
I think about my earliest memory of cricket and I still remember that opening ceremony of the ’99 World Cup from our sofa as the workers went about their jobs behind us, and the series’ theme music and the blue-red logo of the bowler in mid action. I have memories of that house, my cousin’s house, our building compounds, the trips we took to a nearby massive playground, all those hours spent in the small balcony of my cousin’s house cutting and pasting and writing up stats in our diary, the unending games of cricket we rushed to play in between our tiny study breaks and in pretty much any square foot area we found, the video games and their cheat codes, the handheld cricket video games, the playing cards…cricket has just been such an enormous part of my growing up. And although I’ve seen hundreds of games since then, the record keeper in me, to this day, still occasionally remembers a game and digs up the Cricinfo scorecard for it, where I go through the FoWs or the commentary when available, and re-imagine that moment, or look at past players and their profiles, and they all take me back to those memories of the late 90s, when I started watching and loving this beautiful game.