The life of an Indian Cricket fan

There are fans and there are fans. Everywhere the Indian cricket team goes, they are followed by the full range of fans – from Heckler to Hero-Worshipper.

It takes a cricketer of great equanimity to understand this and at the other end, a fan of a patience, greater than the contemporary attention-span, to stay loyal to the team in what must be India’s worst performance in a decade.

Cricket in England is watched with often a respectful silence that helps umpires hear snicks and cricketers hear jokes cracked at their expense. Just after losing the second Test, particularly, one 'fan' in Northampton took it upon himself to pursue Praveen Kumar around the field and call names. Stewards moved the man away from the stand where Praveen was fielding and he strolled around the largely open ground and found his way back to wherever the fielder was to be seen on the boundary line. The man then returned after the game, as the players were leaving the ground and getting into the team bus. He leapt up to hammer on Praveen's window and continued shouting abuse at the cricketer. At one stage Praveen decided to confront the man, and had just got off the bus before he was hauled back inside by the team's security guard and Suresh Raina. According to one member of the touring party Praveen, “did not get to within 15 feet of the guy.” There were other versions of this story whirring around the internet, yet no photograph of the incident could be found. 

What has remained consistent throughout England is that fans have turned up everywhere the Indians have; tickets have been sold out for all the first four days of the three Tests as well most of India's two-day game, fans travelling from outside the county and some from outside the United Kingdom itself. Some sections of the crowd may hurl abuse particularly when strengthened by alcohol, others silently fret over the cost of their now not-so-happy holidays while the rest continue to dream of the turnaround. “What is the matter with them?” they will ask each other. “Why aren't they fighting?” Long after the Indians had left Edgbaston, a group of more-than-tipsy Indians remained in the ground, tunelessly singing schmaltzy film songs (“Yeh dosti” from the Bollywood film Sholay) and drowning their sorrows. It is a painful double life: Indians living in England don't want their bosses mocking them about the cricket: “Don't they know how we feel?”

The morning after the Test ended quicker than Lord's and Trent Bridge (is that a portent for The Oval?), a young man waited outside the team hotel. He was seen standing outside the Marriott when the players left and when they returned, he was still there - just a short distance away from main porch of the hotel for three straight days, doing nothing, just standing around the stone steps. He waited for players to step out of the hotel. Whenever they did, they were greeted with respect, words of commiseration and a handshake and then asked to sign an autograph book or a photograph. Every exchange would not have lasted longer than a few minutes and still the young man, a student of international business management, he said, waited for the next one. It is an inexplicable allure, detached from the humdrum reality of the fan's own life or the Indian cricket team's fish bowl. Yet it is very much a part of it.