The ball escapes the fingers of the spinner and slices straight through the air before curving suddenly towards the batsman’s leg stump, rendering the slip useless. The batsman anticipates the spin, goes down on one knee and twists his bat 135 degrees in a sweeping maneuver. As the ball scampers towards the boundary, outside the diving reach of the leg slip, the batting team’s fans cheer as one. Alas, the ball is stopped just inside the boundary by the deep fine leg fieldsman, as the batsman comes back for the second run.
The entire play takes about 3 seconds but in those 3 seconds, a fan’s heart can stop beating.
This is the wonder of Cricket. For Sameer, Cricket always has and always will, come before any other sport. Growing up discussing the grass at Lord’s, Sunil Gavaskar’s batting test average, Jonty Rhode’s epic catches, Inzamam-ul-Haq’s broken English, Hansie Cronje’s match-fixing scandal and of course, the ups and downs of Boom Boom Afridi (Sameer can still recall his fastest century in just 37 balls against Srilanka in 1996), Sameer was converted into a die-hard fan. Evidence? From street cricket to fantasy leagues, Sameer has done it all.
No amount of Football or Tennis can possibly elicit the fervor in him that one game of Cricket does. Aamir’s attempts to make Sameer appreciate Roger Federer’s win in the 2003 Wimbledon backfired completely. Instead, Sameer triumphed and got Aamir inducted into night matches of Cricket in his gali (lane). Sameer’s friend from IBA, Ebad, actually managed to get Sameer to play football at the infamous Rahat Stadium a few Saturdays. But his stories of Arsenal’s surprising defeat in the 2006 UEFA Champions League Final, of Zinedine Zidane headbutting Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup or the recent 8-2 & 4-3 jokes failed to capture Sameer’s interest.
Sameer knows that most men today do not follow Cricket the way they used to in the 90s. He still remembers the Golden Age: tuning into the radio commentary in the school van because he couldn’t bear to miss Australia’s batting in the Ashes in 1997, the eerily empty Shahra-e-Faisal during the 1999 World Cup matches or simply screaming at the television set during a particularly intense game.
Perhaps, they have been let down by the fall from glory of the Pakistani Cricket team. Perhaps they have been disillusioned by the conspiracies that surround the game itself. Sameer doesn’t care. Even though Cricket is not the national sport of Pakistan (for those who don’t know, Hockey is our National Sport), Sameer thinks it should be, because the one thing that can irrefutably unite the divided masses of the country, is Cricket.
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