Don’t be so gentle

TEARS of pain trickling down the cheeks are no pleasant sight for anyone unless you are so heartless or horribly wicked, and when the wet cheeks in question happen to be those of some pretty little girls who are taken to the depths of despair in a split second by some heart-breaking turn of events, you might perhaps check your own cheeks to wipe out that invisible tear. It happens for some people when watching a Bollywood love story that seldom defies the conventional wisdom which proclaims that the course of true love never runs smooth. This is no review of a Bollywood potboiler; rather, this is a recollection of a moment of heart-ache of a different plot. The glimpses of a joyous group of beautiful girls cheering on their heroes were spicy side dishes of a mouthwatering main course, but when the candid camera froze their moment of agony for the viewers across the subcontinent and, perhaps, beyond, as Mushfiqar Rahim failed to catch a Shahid Afridi mishit at long-off, it wet the eyes of not just the girls but people like me who sat hundreds of miles from the scene of action. That, to me, was an Asia Cup 2014 moment that’s going to linger a bit long in mind.

Now that the Asian quest for regional supremacy well and truly over at least for the next couple of years, with a Sri Lankan triumph, it’s time to look back at the 2014 event hosted by Bangladesh to search for and relive the big moments. And then you realise the Asian showpiece this time around had few defining moments or awesome heroes. That’s quite sad for cricket as a whole.

There was perhaps just one hero. In a cast of more than 50, that was too little for comfort. But, more than that, what makes you still disgusted is the fact that the lone hero in the Asian script was an ageing, faded star. True, Afridi established his star credentials long before the Dhaka showdown with India or Bangladesh, and no one had any doubt about what he was capable of, but when you realise that cricket in the subcontinent has now no new heroes to cheer on, you might feel uncomfortable over the pretty bleak prospect that’s lying in wait. What’s a sport without a fair number of heroes or fans who are ready to shed a few drops?

The subcontinent bid farewell to arguably its biggest hero when Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar walked into the sunset a few months ago in front of an emotional crowd at the Wankhade stadium in Mumbai. Long before that, a few other heroes too either quit the stage on their own or were made to go backstage. Players like Sanath Jayasurya and Virendra Sehwag were heroes who defied our narrow patriotic boundaries. No matter whether you are Indian, Pakistani or Lankan, you always found time BEYOND THE BOUNDARY to catch a glimpse of them live at least on the mini screen. This is what heroes of the Kohli kind could not perhaps do: get people to like them across the borders. Kohli is a hero just as the same way, or a shade better than, Lahiru Thirimanne or Fawad Alam are, but neither Kohli, nor Thirimanne nor Fawad, judging from what I’ve seen of them so far, will make me drop an invitation to an evening get-together to watch their exploits on the field. That was something I had done — dropping the evening party — when the likes of Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis or Jayasuriya straddled the 22yard and beyond. The centuries posted by both Thirimanne and Fawad were good for their teams, but if you think outside the patriotic box you might admit that you took frequent breaks when watching them bat — and that’s surely something you rarely did when the real heroes of the subcontinent had been in action.

The need of the moment is to mould new heroes. This is true not just in case of the subcontinent but the rest of the cricket world. The days of Shane Warne and McGrath are behind us. Kevin Pieterson has been shunted out for not “thinking in the same direction”. What’s left on the cricket horizon are a few old, fading stars whose twinkles are few and far between. Which is why I welcome what Australian Test captain Michael Clarke termed as “banter” (soon after his team’s third Test in South Africa this month) and what the rest of the weaker world dubbed as “sledging”.

Cricket has never been a gentleman’s game, though some people are hell-bent on giving it the most unlikely moniker of all. For that simple reason, I would love to go some 22 years down memory lane to bring alive that moment again. It was about a hero creating a funny but refreshing moment that, unfortunately, many in India at that time denounced as comical, but which to me was the other side of cricket that was as much entertaining as the Sharjah six hit by the Pakistani legend.

And the moment? Well, it’s about those jumps in the air that came free with the big ticket in Sydney in 1992. Javed Miandad doing those show-stopping jumps in the middle of the game against India soon after Kiran More’s aerial appeals on taking the bails off well after Miandad safely completed a quick single off Sachin Tendulkar was the sort of stuff that spiced up cricket. Then and forever.