It’s like the world of cricket just chose to turn away
Words matter. Actions, even more so. To have neither of the two, no acknowledgement, just play, is a hurt that will stay
It’s been a few days since the IPL’S 14th season was cancelled after a spate of Covid-19 cases inside the league’s biobubbles, but it still hurts. Not the abrupt yet entirely predictable suspension of the league, but the tone-deaf manner in which it carried on the way it did, even as India was sinking further into a terrifying humanitarian crisis.
Would a few words or a gesture of empathy have helped the desperate patients hunting for hospital beds in Mumbai or helped the hospitals sending out SOS messages for oxygen in Delhi? No, they would not.
Yet, acknowledging that the suffering exists is important.
There can be no excuse for turning a blind eye, for carrying on as if nothing is wrong. It is not enough to say that our cricketers were simply doing their jobs. And it certainly doesn’t help to say they were doing something noble, as the BCCI’S interim CEO Hemang Amin did in a letter to the players a few days before the league was suspended. “While you are professionals and will play to win,” he said in his letter, “this time you are also playing for something much more important .... Humanity…”
If that were so, why was this mission never expressed to the viewers of the Indian Premier League? There were so many ways the IPL could have stood in solidarity with the country’s suffering. Players could have worn black armbands. They could have observed a minute’s silence before each game. They could have dedicated games to doctors, nurses and other frontline workers.
Of course, there are a myriad ways in which the IPL, its teams, its players, its officials and the BCCI could be helping in real, practical ways too. But this is not about that. This is about basic humanity. About saying, “I see your pain.”
Instead, it felt like they just looked away. And that hurts because cricket, and by extension cricketers, holds such a special place, a place that exists for no other sport, in our hearts and minds.
It hurts because we follow every move that our cricketers make and share in their joys and sorrows. They represent so much more than a sport. When the Indian cricket team won their historic series in Australia
last year, it was not just another sporting victory but a cultural moment that transcended the cricketing field.
This felt, in some ways, like being abandoned.
In contrast, the Indian football fraternity has been actively involved in extending help to the pandemic-afflicted through on-ground work and social media initiatives. Bajrang Punia, one of our most accomplished wrestlers, has flooded his Twitter timeline, expressing his grief. Boxer Mary Kom has tweeted about the death, from Covid-19, of a person close to her.
To be sure, this is not about all cricketers. There are many who have expressed solidarity and grief and jumped in to help. Ravichandran Ashwin, the brothers Irfan and Yusuf Pathan, Ajinkya Rahane and Harbhajan Singh are among those who have been actively involved in various initiatives to try and help.
But as a fraternity, the stars of Indian cricket and the organisation that runs cricket in the country have done little to suggest that they are connected to the millions of fans and sports lovers who make them what they are.