Just winning!

MUKUL KESAVAN set out to Chepauk with a simple two-point plan: to watch five days of cricket at a civilised venue and to watch India beat Australia. He succeeded on both counts. His report ...

THE earliest image I have of Chepauk is Budhi Kunderan beaten playing a forward defensive shot to Fred Titmus. He's at full stretch, looking back at his broken stumps, bowled 192, circa 1964. I wasn't there but Sport & Pastime was and it carried a black and white photograph of his dismissal. My first memory of the Australians at Chepauk has them two down for 19 and Mohinder Amarnath, just 19 himself, is the unlikely opening bowler. But this was 31 years ago and it's a radio memory. We lost that Chepauk Test which we should have won to square the series. When I flew to Madras to watch the last Test of this series against Waugh's Australians, I had a simple two-point plan: I wanted to watch five days of cricket at a civilised cricketing venue (basically any place other than the Feroz) Shah Kotla stadium in Delhi) and, at the end of that time, I wanted us to win. I was owed a win because Chepauk had been scheduled to host the second Test of the series before it was taken away and given to Eden Gardens. Laxman's double century should have been mine to watch in situ. I'd been robbed.

The first day it took me 10 minutes to get from the designated car park to my seat in the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association stand, and in that time I shook off 30 years. By the time Waugh won the toss I was 14 again as were most people around me. For the middle-aged, Test matches are time machines: it is axiomatic that cricket fans are younger than the men in the middle because seniority in sport is a function of experience, not age. You need to bring your son to a test match to be your age and I had left mine at home in Delhi.

The Aussies won the toss and batted so the first day was predictably dull. As a juvenile I was under no obligation to be open-minded: I didn't want to watch the Australians piling on runs. To be fair to myself, the Australian effort was not pretty. Matthew Hayden is a massively effective batsman but he bats in a muscle-bound style that I now associate with batsman from settler colonies - Kallis and Cullinan play in exactly this way. Apart from Mark Waugh's second innings knock, there wasn't one moment of magic from the Australian batting line-up.

I was predisposed to dislike the Aussies because they had destroyed us on our last tour there and, like a good whinging Indian, I had a whole catalogue of bad umpiring decisions that went against us lodged in my head. Through the first two Tests of the series, my prejudice had grown. The idea that the Indian tour was a tropical ordeal by fire for the touring team, the final frontier between it and immortality was exasperating. Here was a country that staged its national tennis open when the temperature was 45x Celsius on court and its cricket team was going on about designer tropical wear like iced vests! Straitjackets was what they needed. Already (and they had only lost a Test, not the series) the Australian journalists covering the tour had begun to pay tribute to the gallant endurance of the Australian fast men in the face of the weather. It was a matter of time before they began writing about weight loss: this was the Kasprowicz gambit, or how India extracts pounds of Occidental flesh as a kind of touring toll.

Armed with my son's binoculars and raging prejudice, I studied the enemy carefully and saw nothing but villainy. Gillespie with his hooked nose and Mephistophelean beard looked like an eagle arrowing in. McGrath on the other hand looked like a hunting bird of dyspepsia. Steve Waugh was dogged and unlovely and Warne, I noted with sour delight, was as clueless as he'd been on the last tour. For a man who once had the largest repertoire of deliveries of any spinner ever, Warne was reduced to one stock ball: round the wicket, wide of leg-stump, into the rough. In Mumbai and Kolkata, he had managed once or twice to turn it a mile; in Chennai, even the rip was gone. He was a magician with one trick which didn't work. For variety, he bowled bouncers! Tendulkar played two reverse straight drives off those legside deliveries past the wicket keeper to the long stop boundary. They were miraculous shots. Then he dabbed a sad bouncer through slips for four. Laxman got stuck into him, then Dravid. By the end of the match, that chin-in-hand end to every delivery seemed like a charade rather than an aid to thought. It was cruel: if it hadn't been Us creaming Them, it might have been hard to watch.

Such levels of prejudice were hard to keep up in the calm surrounds of Chepauk. I watched the match from fine third man surrounded by courtly TNCA members and excited children who were mildly partisan but made it a point to applaud Australian shots. It's a wonderful stadium at the pavilion end, shady, cooled by fans, its pillars strapped with television sets so you can test the evidence of your eyes against the infallibility of the camera. It isn't beautiful - they destroyed the old Madras Cricket Club clubhouse to build the concrete doughnut we were sitting in but it works. Anyone who has watched a day's play at the squalidly anarchic Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi will testify that a functional stadium is a wonderful thing.

The members and their families are out in force. They join in the Mexican Wave, they beat out terrible rhythms with plastic empties, they shout good-natured challenges to the knots of Australian supporters scattered amidst them, but they're quick to subside and they police themselves. The one time a rowdy throws a plastic bottle into the ground he meets with such hissed disapproval that he shrinks and then disappears.

Chepauk feels orderly. There are no No Smoking signs up but the word is out that you can't light up and so, with one or two exceptions, no one does. Behind the rows of seats is a wide curving corridor that houses the refreshments stalls. Pizzas, tayirsaadam, tamarind rice, colas are queued up for and dispensed. The crowd of people eating is dotted with cricketers you have seen or heard of: I stand respectfully at the fringes of expert discussions listening to W.V. Raman who opened for India, Ramnarayan, who spun off breaks for Hyderabad and Saad bin Jung who was a Test prospect when I was at university. There's some discussion about the legality of Harbhajan's present bowling action. The consensus is that he probably doesn't chuck any more. I don't mind if he does on the time-tested principle that if he is a chucker, he's one of ours and, at his speed, he can't hurt anyone. The relaxed matter-of-factness of these cricketers is disarming; their counterparts in Delhi would be speechless with self-esteem, dunghill panjandrums who commune only with their cellular phones.

Watching a test match in a stadium over five days is nicely exhausting. Your face changes colour, your eyes get set in permanent crinkles, you move quickly from depression to exhilaration, from lethargy to a strung-out alertness. Unconfined by camera angles and commercials, your enjoyment of the game is more leisured and expansive. You can feel the game changing its rhythm: time stretched out by dour defence, then time telescoped by a flurry of shots in a way that you can't on television because the commercial breaks divide the match into equal bite- sized pieces.

Two fifties by Laxman - he's taken the cramps out of Indian cricket by seeming boneless. Can he repeat this easy domination on foreign pitches? Perhaps he can; what an awesome thought! Tendulkar's 100 is wholly different from Laxman's shorter essays. Tendulkar is much the greater batsman but sometimes he labours because once he has set himself a task he won't let himself get into the zone lest he get carried away. This time he has ordered himself a century and genius being risky, he has put his on hold. Watching him play percentage cricket is fascinating because it's against his nature. Runs come in isolated bursts because he isn't Gavaskar and every now and then he has to have a go. It is a measure of his greatness is that he can suppress inspiration and still get a hundred.

The last half hour of the match after Laxman's dismissal is impossible to watch because I'm convinced they'll lose just to spite me. I watch till the bowler gets into his delivery stride, then shut my eyes and ask my friends what happened. It works most of the time because we don't lose all our wickets and in this way I help India win. There's a lull between Harbhajan's winning shot and the prize distribution. Politicians, officials and trophies are arranged in rows on a rostrum like ugly ornaments on a mantelpiece. Ravi Shastri, the master of ceremonies, dabs at his face and primps. Waugh strides out with his team to warm Chepauk applause. I clap too. Then Ganguly emerges to universal booing. I boo. It doesn't really matter ... we've won.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Power as object of ridicule
Next     : A tale of two cities