It is official.
I have become an international cricket star.
I always knew that it would happen one day. And now that I’ve had people recognising me in the streets and asking for my autograph I feel that it is as good a time as any to declare my newfound (but long overdue) public status.
As far as I’m concerned anybody who points out that it was only poor street kids in India who cared about me and that a few mediocre performances with the bat for a club side don’t justify my inclusion in the elite category of international cricket star is just jealous and trying to cut a tall poppy down.
Besides which, I can further back up my claim by producing Indian newspapers where my picture appears only a mere two column inches away from those of my fellow stars Tendulkar and Ganguly. Now if that doesn’t convince you that I’ve achieved my dream in life then I’ll just have to settle for believing it myself.
Meanwhile, back in reality….
I have just completed my much anticipated 3 week trip to India as part of a touring cricket team. I can happily say that it lived up to the high expectations that I had for it and turned out to be an incredible experience. I can’t say that it was all fun and games, because at times it was quite hard work, but then that’s part of the challenge of it.
The basic facts of the trip were:
The tour was in Rajasthan in the northwest of India. We went to Bikaner, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Jaipur, Agra and Delhi.
The team I went with was a local English club from Pagham, a small town on the south coast (near Brighton). Our touring party was made up of 13 players, all of who were English other then myself, my Aussie friend Matt and the Kiwi skipper who doubled as the star of the team and carried the team most of the time (yes, I have to admit I wasn’t the star player). The English contingent was a combination of older and younger players; with a couple of veterans supporting some younger guys (one even had his 18th b’day while we were there).
We played 6 games. We were scheduled to play more but we had two rained out in Bikaner (you can’t take the bloody English anywhere without them bringing their weather with them – even in the middle of the desert they managed to make it rain for the first time in 6 months!).
Our general routine was to spend a day traveling on the team bus to a city, play a 40 over game the day after, spend the next day touristing and sight-seeing, then jump back on the bus the day after to head to our next venue.
I’d love to be able to say that my presence as an Australian in the team inspired us to follow the Australian International side’s example and have a highly successful and victorious tour of the subcontinent. However I can’t even say that my presence as an Australian in the team inspired us to win even one game, as…well…we didn’t actually win a game.
Now I can give you a variety of reasons and explanations for this poor performance. Reasons like us struggling to even field a full team of 11 players let alone a fully fit 11 (given that we only had a team of 13 people we didn’t even have room for the odd injury let alone dealing with the ongoing battle with Delhi belly). Or what about how hard it was to acclimatise to the Indian conditions of the food, heat, hard grounds, etc. I could even bring up the fact that, as only an average level club side, we were simply outclassed by local teams that were stacked full of state level players so as to ensure that they put up there best performance in a highly prestigious game against an international touring team.
No, none of these are the real reason. The simple reality of it was we were just being polite. It would have been rude of us as guests to go around beating our hosts. It’s just not the done thing in a gentleman’s sport such as cricket.
Our presence there was a really big event for the local community. We were the first foreign team to ever tour Rajasthan so there so it created a lot of local excitement. For those of you who are not educated in the beautiful game, India is a nation obsessed with cricket. International cricket stars are virtually gods over there. They easily outshine even the biggest Bollywood stars. Everywhere you go the faces of India’s star players stare back at you from billboards - who needs scantily clad blonde bombshells when they can have batsmen and bowlers.
Even though we played nothing like their national cricketing gods, we were treated like them. When I said earlier that we were celebrities I was being completely truthful. Everywhere we went people knew who we were and wanted to talk to us, wanting to know where we were from, who our favourite players were and what county we played for (we let them believe this one once in a while : ). Kids always wanted us to play with them in the streets (we learnt not too after a while because they always showed us up). Adults wanted to be our best friends and be our personal guide. We even had write ups in the state papers and appeared on the local TV news. All the attention actually became quite overwhelming at times. The novelty off everybody wanting to be close to you wears off pretty quickly and after a while you just want to be able to walk around without being the centre of attention. I can only begin to imagine what the real international stars must go through.
I’ve never played in front of a crowd before so I really felt like a proper cricket star when playing our games (admittedly there were one or two hundred people, not thousands). The big highlight was fielding on the boundary and having kids calling out to you and asking for your autograph between balls. I’ll admit that it was a big struggle for me to be nonchalant about it and only give them when asked, rather then offering : ) Nobody in the team had the heart to tell them that we weren’t actually famous and that our autographs weren’t really worth anything. Besides which we were all enjoying the novelty of signing them too much : )
All the attention can actually be quite unsettling. One of the more unusual experiences for me happened at our first game. We won the toss and elected to bat first. I was given the honours of opening the innings so padded up and stepped out of our team enclosure in the pavilion onto the ground to do a few stretches and warm up. After a couple of minutes I turned around and looked back and was startled to see about 200 people staring at me from the grandstand absolutely fixated by my every movement. It’s quite unnerving to have so many people just staring at you. A photo taken of me just after this can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bc_melbourne/909476940/in/set-72157601025135166/. Although it doesn’t show the entire crowd, you can kinda see some of the people staring down in the background.
Being stared at was something we had to become accustomed to while we were there, just for being a foreigner if nothing else. The locals tend to watch you just because of the novelty of being different. The problem is that the locals’ way of watching is to stare at you with a blank look on their face – the kind of look that you would find highly unsettling in a slightly mass murder kind of way if it happened back home. The saving grace about it all was that if you smiled at them and said hello they would break into a big cheesy grin and starting waving back at you.
The hospitality we received while we were there was top rate. It would have been fit for an International touring side (even though we didn’t perform like one). We had welcoming bands, stayed in 5 star hotels, dined in palaces, were chauffer driven everyone and generally had our every need and whim catered for. If we needed something all we had to do was ask one of our hosts and it was sorted out. Whether it be riding elephants, camel safaris or driving tuk tuks, we got to do everything.
India is often described as a land of contrasts, whether it be between the cultures, people, landscapes, etc. I can say that they biggest contrast for me was the between the luxury and opulence we experienced compared to the poverty that we were surrounded by whenever walked down the street. We certainly saw the best that India had to offer and it was a stark contrast to the living conditions of the average person on the street.
Due to the prestigious nature of our presence and also because our main host who organised the whole trip was an influential member of the local community, we were welcomed into the upper echelons on Indian society. All the team dinners and functions were at the best restaurants in town. The people we were socialising with from the other teams were always members of the upper class (mainly because they were the better players because they could afford coaching). Such was the standard of living we were treated to I actually felt like I could have been an upper-class English gent enjoying the pleasures of the exotic subcontinent during the era of the British colonial rule of India.
Despite all of this, I can say that it was actually quite a bit of hard work at times. Just travelling and touristing while trying to deal with the inevitable bouts of sickness can be quite tiring, but when you have to play a game of cricket every second day as well it became a bit of an endurance test at times. It certainly made trying to perform well even more of a challenge then it usually is (here come the excuses again…).
Just for the record, my personal form on the tour was somewhat indifferent. While I didn’t fail completely, I can’t really say that I excelled.
With the bat I averaged in the high teens somewhere. I didn’t make any big scores, but as an opener I did manage to hold up an end for decent periods of time. The sad thing for the team was that, with the exception of our star captain who scored over 300 runs, I was the leading run scorer with just over 100 runs. If you can put two and two together you can start to understand why we didn’t win a game.
As for bowling, I can say that my career as a spin bowler is now over after I made my retirement official half-way through the tour. After some increasingly indifferent form with the ball over the last year or two, where I’ve struggled to even hit the pitch most of the time, I thought I’d put the effort in and try to find some form so that I could bowl on the notoriously spin friendly Indian pitches. Well, the simple reality of it is that pitches can only be friendly if you actually get the ball to bounce on them (or bounce just the once). One 20 run over was all it took to confirm that my fall from grace as a once strike bowler is pretty much complete and that my status as an all-rounder on the tour was unceremoniously reduced to that of batsman.
It was this point where I also came to appreciate the negatives of having a crowd watching. When the crowd started calling for one more over from ‘Melbourne’ I realised that being famous is not just all handshakes and signing autographs. Never mind, its all part of the learning experience.
That’s the best way I can describe the whole trip, a massive learning experience – both about cricket and life. I can now understand why for international cricket teams touring the subcontinent and playing well is such a hard challenge. I certainly found being to be part of a friendly touring side to be hard work so I can only imagine what it must be like for players trying to perform at the top level. I can also understand why Shane Warne brought with him large supplies of baked beans. I have to admit to taking the trusty old jar of vegemite with me just so that I could have a break from the local food once in a while.
I could also give the standard speal about how much seeing the poverty that people live in affected me and how much it made me appreciate what we have at home - but I won’t.
Finally, as a special treat (and due to popular demand) I’ve actually put some photos online for a change. Rather then subjecting you to the whole 600 odd that I took while I was there I’ve pulled out a smaller selection for your viewing pleasure. They can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bc_melbourne/sets/72157601025135166/