OPENING emails can be dangerous at times. And I am not referring to the viruses that are sometimes transmitted through that medium. Check out this email that I got today, from a reader reacting to the match report we had put up yesterday about the Australia versus New Zealand game. Quote: Dear Mr Panicker, You had to rub it in, writing the way you did about the Black Caps, didn't you? I guess you were also bored of writing negative all the time, about India no doubt. The maiden from Larsen and the stop from Nash blurred my sight. I guess I needed the trigger to release the anguish from yesterday's defeat. Hey, Prem do you think that our players cry??? Do you?!! They need to cry, you know! They really need to! Right now I am feeling very good and upbeat. Crying can really do wonders for the mind! I wish I can find a big banyan tree somewhere here, so that I can hug it tightly and just cry my heart out for everyone of them. After all the harsh words and bad words I say about our players, I realise, at the end of the day, that I love them so much! I will pray tonight to the Almighty to provide our players with one good day of cricket, even if by his magic or something, just one good day Prem.... let them have a little confidence in themselves, a little inspiration, a sense of togetherness and belonging. Please pray for them, Prem. I know this is kiddish! but even then!! Pray to the Lord Almighty for one chance for proving ourselves, redeeming our pride! ::: Close quote Throughout that dreadful day when the Indian cricket team, tossing pride and self-esteem to the four winds, crumpled against Zimbabwe, I could stay dry-eyed and emotionally uninvolved. For why? Because my work forces me to forget the issues, the personalities, to focus on the minutiae of ball by ball description and analysis -- and that kind of tunnel vision, I realised later, is wonderful at times like this. But this morning, sitting here reading this bombshell in my mailbox, I felt my vision blur, felt a sickening tug at the heart. It is not the team that I feel sorry for -- by their actions, by the careless arrogance with which they squander the enormous goodwill that comes to them unsought, they have lost any claim to our collective sympathy. Rather, it is the Indian cricket fan's plight -- and I count myself in that number -- that proves a wrench. Wherever we turn, we see chaos: in polity, in the economy, in the complete breakdown of societal norms. It is, to use the trenchant phrase so favoured today, the complete, utter pits. And from that pit of despair, we look up, desperately hoping for one thread of light in the gloom, one silver lining to console ourselves with. And what we see is the Indian cricket team -- on which we invest our emotions, our hopes, our dreams, our hearts. There is perhaps no group of 11 men, anywhere else in the world, who have so much going for them. And what do they do with this immense wealth of goodwill? They brush it off their boots, like so much bird droppings picked up in course of a casual stroll in the park. Harsha Bhogle was telling me the other day that what he thought we needed was a hypnotist. I agree -- and if I were that hypnotist, I know what I would do. I would sit each one of them down and hypnotise them into complete impotence with bat and ball. When I am done with them, they would, all of them -- Saurav, Rahul, Azhar, Ramesh, Srinath, Agarkar, the whole damn lot -- retain their memory of their days on the cricket field. But when they tried to pick up a bat, they wouldn't know what to do with it. When they ran in to bowl, they would find they had forgotten how to. I would leave them in that state, for a month. 30 days of living with their memories of their own abilities, yet aware that they had completely, utterly lost it. Anyone who has lost anything precious will tell you that it is only when you lose it, that you really learn to value it. And to my mind, THAT is the problem with this Indian team. They don't value what they have. They don't value, they don't take pride in, their abilities, their talents, their unique position as the 11 men chosen, out of 950 million, to represent a grand country. They need to lose it, to learn its real value. And maybe then, maybe after a month of crying over what they had lost, if I were to hypnotise them back into being easily the most talented bunch of cricketers in the world, perhaps they will go out there and play with pride and with passion. Alternately, perhaps one day they will land up at the Eden Gardens, or the Wankhede, or the Ferozeshah Kotla, or the M A Chidambaram Stadium, or one of our other big venues, to play yet another cricket match. And they will walk out into the middle and look around and find the seats chillingly empty. Maybe then they will realise what they have lost, thanks to their own careless arrogance. One thing is for sure -- this team needs a lesson and it needs it now. Meanwhile, the arrogance of the English cricket establishment continues to astound me. When they go on tour, especially in the sub-continent, they spend more time whingeing than in actually playing cricket. Remember that last tour under Graham Gooch? Smog in Calcutta. Crumbly pitch in Bombay. Prawns in Madras. Crowds. Dirt. Noise. Bad umpiring, worse technology. No security. You name it, they complained about it. So now we are in the land of milk and honey, where everything is of the very best. So what do we get? Security that sucks -- already, two, three teams have had their players jostled by hordes of fans, mostly in advanced states of inebriation, running onto the pitches. Technology? Ha, tell me the other one. There was this huge hoo-haa about how thousands of pounds had been spent on putting in place state of the art technology to judge line decisions -- the runouts and stumpings. So what happens? In one game, the umpire calls for help from the third umpire -- and then they find out that the fixed cameras hadn't even been switched on! Bad umpiring? You ain't seen anything till you saw Ken Palmer, after watching a video that showed, clear as crystal, the ball going off Pollock's bat onto the ground, giving the batsman out caught and bowled. That is only one instance of many -- and remember, it is early days yet. But what really took the biscuit was what they did to Kenya the other day at Canterbury. First, they are forced to play in a steady rain so England could complete the game and get its two points. They protest that the conditions are not conducive and that the game should be stopped, but they are over-ruled. The match is somehow completed and England's lions get their two points, glory hallelujah! And then the tired Kenyans get back into the dressing room and find that there was no food laid out for them -- because officials of the home county, Kent, had 'forgotten' to provide for them. Who said apartheid is dead? It is alive, it is kicking, and its headquarters is England. Had this happened in India, to a touring England team, can you imagine the dust they would have kicked up? Does Prem Panicker need an introduction?
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