The Game, that hates me back

The dream (Saturday, D day)

He could hear the sound of the sirens coming nearer. The cops were onto him. They must have already alerted the hotel security, which meant that he needed to act, and fast. There was a knock on the door as he finished clothing himself. He chose to overlook the knocking, making them second guess their assumption that he still might be in the hotel room.
“Hotel Security” they introduced themselves in between their incessant banging of the door. “Open up” they said.

He had time till one of the hotel employees goes to fetch the master key. He hadto use this to his advantage, by finding an alternative exit. He quickly moved to the dining table and picked up his twin desert Eagles. The Eagles screeched when he tried to holster it. Poor things lost a couple of feathers. The screeching of the Eagles alerted the security outside that the high profile criminal was still in his hotel suite. Their hypothesis was correct. The time had come to use force.

The man was a bit confused looking at the feathers. However, he did not get to ponder on it much, as a huge thud on the door jolted him out of his thoughts. The second thud on the door rattled the hinges and he knew it would give in at the third impact. He turned the table to its side and, hid behind it. The waited for the collapse of the door and, as soon as he heard it, he fired. The Eagle screeched, pecked his head, and then flew off to perch on a high post near the ceiling.

“No Ball”, cried someone from behind.

He looked behind so fast that he cricked his neck. There stood a man in his early forties, with a field hat and a badly groomed moustache.

“Who the hell are you? The man asked “and when did you sneak up behind me?”
“I’m the Umpire!” the umpire said incredulously “I always stand here”

When the man tried to shoot the umpire, the gun in his hand was replaced with a soft tennis ball. The twin eagles perched above near the ceiling, made a peculiar sound, one which can be attributed to laughing.
Unfortunately, that was not when I woke up from this hideous dream. It went on for a while more, wherein the umpire banned me, because the eagles kept taking his hat away to reveal his bald pate.

Back, to the story. Because of the hideous dream I had, I woke up at six in the morning which, made me realize that, there is a box-cricket tournament organized by the organization (eh?) I work for.
It was to start at nine in the morning and was to last the whole afternoon. Our team had decided to meet up at seven, to have a bit of practice before the tournament.

The fact that I had got up at six in the morning (the tea helped), entitled me for a bit of bragging. I called everyone in the team to let them know that the great me had woken up before the masses and that people should re-consider writing me off as a late comer.
To put the story in perspective, let us go back two days…

Deutsche Premier League, aka DPL (Day 1, Thursday)

No. this does not pertain to Football (read Soccer), rather it is to do with Cricket. Before your Tendulkar fouled minds run riot, Germany was not starting a cricket league. I mean they already have football. They are not round the bend or miserable enough to start a cricket league. This is due to the very contagious fever of IPL (Indian Premier League) currently affecting India. The cricket enthusiasts at the bank decided to have a box-cricket tournament and, lacking any ingenuity, the tournament in question was christened Deutsche Premier League or in short the DPL.

The enthusiasts got a gargantuan response to their idea. A fairly accurate total of sixty four teams registered themselves with tacky names called ‘winners’, ‘Spartans’ or ‘warriors’. Not to mention we ourselves had the tacky name of Winners. We differentiated ourselves by inserting the ellipsis of our department as a prefix.We had already formed our team filled with Box-Cricket veterans when, someone in the team decided that reading the fine print would be helpful. This is when we realized that our team was not quite finished.

Any lack of creativity in naming the league, the cricket enthusiasts in the bank made up for it in the rules. The important rules stated that the game of cricket would be played in a rectangle of x metres x y meters (or a box). The match would be of a total of two overs. Seven players in each team, out of which, one of the players should be a girl.
The subsection to the ‘girl’ rule stated that the said team not having a member of the opposite sex will have five deliveries an over. This meant that, our team would have two less balls to play with*.

*I dare to write this as most of my readers would be rightfully thinking of it in Cricketing terms, rather than the perverted thoughts crossing your mind right now.

We already have a tomboy in our team, to whom we laid the offer of playing with us guys in the DPL.

Our assumption was that all we Indians love cricket. Well mostly guys playing cricket. Women cricket although present in India, does not have a following. So for an offer to be made to a girl to play cricket with us, even in a small tournament such as the DPL was a mouth watering deal. We also knew many girls in the office loved cricket.This was a good deal for the girls. Rather than sit in the sidelines and cheer, they had a chance to prove themselves playing. Many of them were signing up for this. The rule makers were geniuses, I realized or just nerds.

WE however were abandoned. The tomboy said that she had prior commitments (which we later realized that the commitment in question was to discuss commitments). Other girls in our team, we came to know, loved watching cricket but not necessarily playing it.

Mosquito in the reckoning (the same day)

We were knocked for six. There must have been some bug in our calculations. It could have been a mosquito, given the state of malaria in this city.

Our team’s miscellany, or should I say the lack of it led to our downfall. Our cricket team was bowled out at its inception. We currently have enough players for a proper cricket team including myself, yet we could not complete a seven member team. We realised how the Greeks must have felt, when Helen was taken away.

Not unlike the Greeks, we did not let this dampen our spirit. We may have one less member in the team (and about four in reserve), but we can always be strategically superior.We ensured our calendars were clear and, sent a meeting invite to all the members of the team to discuss and, come up with a Trojan horse.

Strategic Congregation...(Day 2, Friday)

A motley crowd gathered at the reserved meeting room (they pulled me in as I entered the office from my coffee break).So, the ones gathered were (as per their personalities), the Impulsive, the Suave, the witty, the Incredible (me), the Cool and the Jester. The rest were absent from the meeting as they had work to be completed.

The guys sitting around me were veterans of box-cricket. Not that I am bad at playing cricket, I am used to bowling sharp out-swingers and Yorkers at breakneck speed. And with the bat, I’m programmed to clear the fence. I am not however used to this version of cricket. Not my cup of orange juice.
Box-cricket always triggered a mental image of Sreesanth plucking lice off Dhoni’s hair, in a cage in a zoo with people pelting peanuts at them. So I decided to have someone authenticate what it was all about.
“Impulsive, could you just take us through what box-cricket exactly is? I asked. This started the meeting.

“It is simple” said Impulsive and, at the same time drew a rectangle on a piece of paper. “Common rules of cricket, except there are no sixes, only fours. And,” he pointed at the rectangle he just drew, “whatever you hit, if, pitches directly outside the box, from the bat, you are out!”

Okay. The batting needs work. I thought
“There are areas in the box, and if the ball you hit passes through these areas, you’d get two runs. There is also the boundary the opposite end of the box which you are batting from and you can score by running between the wickets.”
“What about bowling?” I asked hoping for the over the arm version.
“The bowling is under the arm”, said Cool. This crushed my hopes of bowling sharp out-swingers and yorkers thoroughly.

“So?” asked the Jester. “What is our strategy?” The jester was smiling impishly, as if he knew a very discomforting secret about all of us sitting in the room.

“As we do not have a girl in our team,” Impulsive started

Cool interrupted him and mentioned a girl’s name. “Did we ask her?” he enquired.

“There is no use. She has already agreed to be in another team, as she wants to get to know them better when she moves from her current work” said the Jester.

How in the world does he know about so many girls? I thought to myself.

“Okay then,” Impulsive continued in the stern tone he had picked the last time before he was interrupted by Cool. “As we do not have a girl in our team,” he re-drew the rectangle on the other side if the page, within it drew the pitch. I sat straight.

“We are going to field well!”

I was still focused on the drawing of the box he made, expecting him to make field formations, when he said;

“Do you guys have any Questions?”

What the f*ck? That’s it?


“Very well that concludes it” said Impulsive “We will meet at the ground at seven to have a bit of practice before the matches start at nine. And YOU” he pointed to me” make sure you are on time. We don’t want you late”

F*ck you. You wasted ten minutes!


The Game, that hates me back.(Saturday, D Day)

Cricket is a game that I have grown to detest. The reason for the same can be summed up in the below points;

a. The number of fanatics of this game, in this country is so great that, other sport avenues receive little or no support. A sense of nationalism in this country creeps in only when the cricket world cup is being played.

b. India is a country that has immense talent in other sports. However, cricket is this cancerous tumour that eats up all the beneficial funding. The other sports do not even have proper infrastructure to thrive upon.

c. I like football (read soccer) more.

I was the first from my team to arrive at the venue of the very first DPL. I had a bat and a ball with me. So, I asked a guy who was missing both, to bowl to me. Like a well executed program, I hit the ball hard, high and distant. As he bowled, my mind created sub-programs to control the power and improve my timing of hitting the ball, so that it would not fly off.
When the other members of the team arrived, we started fielding practice. This involved throwing the ball around as each one of us was pulling of spectacular saves. In once such ecstatic moment, one of the guys threw the ball at me hard, imagining a run-out opportunity. I realized how hard the ball was when I caught that throw. I was not able to complete the catch as my hand went numb from the impact. The blood flowed back to my palm sending signals of shooting pain to my brain. Although the pain subsided, it shot occasional bouts of pain.

Whilst the preparations were being done, the other teams arrived at the venue. We had become the veterans of practising. We played textbook shots, bowled well and fielded superbly making ourselves an opponent not to be taken lightly. We heard one or two comments from the other teams corroborating this fact which, helped in boosting our confidence. In fact, it boosted our confidence so much that it went over.

Even when the matches had started, we continued practising. Some of the team members had gone to spy on the other teams playing, to gather intelligence with regards to their playing style etc. at that time member from other teams had joined our practising group. One person was trying to bowl a high speed leg break to me. Due to the high speed the spin did not take effect and passed wide of the batsman to the leg-side. He tried a different spin; I would knock it off and asked him to do the same. That last taunt might have riled him up a bit when he decided to reduce the speed of this leg break by a small margin. Overconfident, I stood in the batting position assuming that the ball would go harmlessly to the leg-side, I did not move, in doing so to hand out one of the greatest non-verbal insult a batsman could give a bowler. This ball however, pitched, hit my toe and bounced right up to hit my face, cutting a lip in the process.

With a throbbing right hand and toe, bit of swelling on the lip I took up the fielding position for our first match in the DPL, which we lost. I rested out in the next match which they won, and played in the third, which we lost. I did not get to bat or bowl in those two matches. We congratulated ourselves in this brief stint in DPL, blaming the two ball handicap to be our downfall.
The team was about to leave after the lunch that was organized by the bank when, one of the cricket enthusiast came up to us to tell us that we were still in the running for the Gold championship on account of a high run-rate.



Go for the Gold.(the same day)

In the Gold championship matches, we exited in the first round, with Jester stealing what was my only chance to bat. I succeeded in pulling a muscle in the leg during fielding. This had to happen after years of inactivity, the sudden impact of playing cricket was too much for me to handle.

We watched a couple of games, posed for some of the pictures(I had brought a camera), some idle banter and flirted with girls. The flirting part was done by Jester or at least what he thought was flirting.
Poison, one of our teammates that we had loaned to another team, got to bat and bowl. He also managed to find another team to do all that, again.
Lucky bastard.

I returned home after a day of practising, with a bloody lip, a throbbing hand and toe along with a cramped thigh, all to the amusement of my brother, when I mentioned I did not get to bat or bowl.

I was right. I hate this game! Clearly, this is one game that hates me back.

Back from a Hiatus

Would you believe it? I suffered a 3yr long writer's block?

Not to forget the 'I don’t have anything to write about' and the 'uber effective' spells when I was not suffering from writer's block also helped the 'It's troublesome to type' spells... Promises made but not kept.

And for the people who have asked me about a new post and gone insane waiting for the same, Thank you! You just have a wait a little more.

Rob.