Jayati Bhola
There’s the swish of a ball, a tinkling sound, the crack of a bat and pandemonium. Deepak Malik, 22, has played the final shot that wins the Blind Cricket World Cup for India. Draped in the Indian flag, the men take their victory lap around the half-empty Sharjah stadium in Dubai. “Everyone had tears running down their faces, you know, happy tears,” says team captain Ajay Reddy, 27. “It was emotionally overwhelming to win the world cup and defeat Pakistan.”
Later on, at the hotel, the team had a celebration. “We danced and ate a lot,” says bowler Jafar ‘Jaffy’ Iqbal, 29. “Sunil Ramesh scored the much-needed 98 runs. Reddy guided him really well and they had a great partnership,” he adds.
This was the team’s second ODI World Cup win since the tournaments began in 1998 (there have been five Blind Cricket World Cups so far). The 17 men on the team are all technically blind. Some have blindness in degrees; some are categorised as partially sighted.
So who are these men? What drives them? What does it take to go from a blind teen who’s never been on a plane, to a globe-trotting international player with a claim to the ultimate prize in his sport? Reddy remembers crying a lot in the months after he damaged one eye in a household accident during a power outage. He was 4, and he had lost vision in one eye completely and faced declining vision in the other.
Growing up in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh (AP), where his parents farmed and delivered milk for a living, Reddy was determined till age 12 to join the Armed Forces. “When my brother explained to me that being blind, I could never join, I refused to study any further. It was a horrible time,” he says.
It was at his blind school, though, that he rediscovered cricket. By Class 10, he was playing at the national level, for Hyderabad.
He began to dream again. “I loved sports. I loved cricket. I began to dream of playing for India and beating Pakistan. I learnt a lot from the senior blind players. They made me believe even I could play for my country,” he says.
Those dreams came true, and so did others. Back in AP, he has a home, a wife and a two-year-old daughter. He also has a job with a bank in Hyderabad, but we’ll come to that later.
Iqbal, on the other hand, was born blind, in Odisha. “In my school, there was cricket everywhere,” he says. “We did our own commentary and played all the time, even during Ramzan.” He lost his father, a government servant, at 12, and became determined to build a career. “I did not think of taking up cricket professionally, I just enjoyed playing it,” he says.
In 2010, he was made captain of the Odisha blind cricket team and the game became his career. He played in the first world cup in 2014 and works as a procurement officer with the state government.
Also on the World Cup-winning team are a call centre worker, a farmer, a postman and a teacher. Blind cricket still doesn’t pay in India. The World Blind Cricket Council (WBCC), which organises the World Cup, was established in 1996 and has 10 full members — Australia, England, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, New Zealand, South Africa, Sri Lanka and the West Indies.
South Africa beat Pakistan to win the first World Cup for the Blind, in New Delhi, in 1998. Pakistan won the next one, in 2002; and won again in 2006.
India is the only other country that has won twice (its first win was in 2014).
Pakistan got official recognition from their government as a result of the 2002 win. This means the players get salaries, government jobs and rewards when they represent Pakistan internationally. The England team also has support from their cricket board.
In India, blind cricket remains a largely voluntary enterprise. All team members have full-time jobs because playing earns them less than Rs 5 lakh in a good year.
Some state governments give cash rewards to their players for big wins.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), which governs the sport in the country, has been awarding prizes for big wins since the team’s T20 World Cup win in 2017, but offers no steady pay as it does for its sighted players at this level.
So most players have jobs, and take leave without pay in order to make it to matches.
“The difficulties my team and I face have nothing to do with sight,” says captain Reddy. “We’ve played with broken bats, on rough fields. It hurts that even the Pakistan team has backing from the Pakistan Cricket Board. We’ve won twice, and we are still surviving on sporadic funding.”