Out of Charge ! INDIA vs PAKISTAN -DAY -0
Howzzat !!
Picture the voice of the appeal in full cry …when not just the bowler ,but also the whole nation in unison appeals .Does that remind you of a hundred Eden gardens put together ? When was the last time your blood boiled when a Pakistani cricketer did well and you did Gangulian antics while watching a match against Pakistan? Does it seem like ages? If yes.. You would understand the depth of the emotions that somehow seems to have evaporated after the Governments mutually decided to play each other on a regular basis .
India Pakistan clashes are slowly losing the volatility of their clashes and watching them play nowadays is like drinking Pepsi, after warming it on the stove. You get what I mean? I find the extra charge and zeal, just not there .Lets rewind back to the past when matches were more like war between the two nations. All the world cup matches in which we defeated Pakistan bore a war, especially the electric atmosphere in the Bangalore and Manchester in 96and 99 respectively . Remember the moment when Aamir Sohail was bowled by Venkatesh Prasad, a whole nation rose up to celebrate, the fall of the wicket ‘with vicarious joy of as if they had bowled Sohail..or the moment Sachin smote Shoaib for six in the 2003 world cup. Today ..Whatever an Akthar or a sami does by showing glaring eyes and mouthing foul language adjectives .it still goes nowhere near creating that emotional repository of pent up feelings like what was there when India played Pakistan on a Friday …at Sharjah
Agreed we need peace to prevail between the 2 nations , but those peace and friendship initiatives have robbed the cricket aficionados of the jingoistic zeal with which we used to sit at home ,bunking school/college/office over the years. Nowadays India Pakistan test matches and one dayers seem to be highly predictable as they are played on pitches that are just venues for leather hunt, a good example being the first ODI match at Karachi ,last year when Inzy’s men almost created history chasing down 350. Gone are the days when we looked forward to matches with enthusiasm and fervor and fist punching when Pakistanis get out. Please do not think that I want people to be more vengeful when playing against Pakistan..it’s just that the special kick the two teams used to command not so long ago has vanished .Now its reduced to a mere question of toss and whichever captain wins the toss seems to take advantages of the pitch conditions and the game is reduced to a sickening one sided contest. That was how most of the matches over the year have been ,sans a few which were extremely high scoring thrillers with one side handicapped by factors like due , pitch becoming bad etc etc .
Now if the same standards are maintained , then I really doubt whether India-Pakistan contests would have any significance like the Ashes had recently. Importantly if we need to reinstate the same levels of fervour , then all we need to do is to play between long intervals and play on neutral pitches that offers no particular assistance to a home side and which plays true and making sure that other external factors like dew ..and other sundries do not affect the game. So I close this post on a sad note reflecting the actual state of affairs of Indo –Pak cricket which seemingly remains masked and shrouded under the so called media hype..which the media plans to
May the luckiest guy win ….. ( I mean the toss, that’s good enough to win the game in this series )
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