Just as we thought sport could return to its days of relaxed intensity, the virus has crept back into reckoning and wrecking of schedules. Express reporters list out their wishes for what 2022 can potentially unveil in sport, while keeping fingers crossed, hoping matters of life and health don’t again get calamitous.
Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!
Bill Murray’s hyperbole in Ghostbusters may very well have been about the uneasy marriage of video games and ‘Big Sport’. Esports makes its debut at the Asian Games this September. And many are expecting sparks to fly between the perceived monoliths of get-off-my-lawn boomers and I m-allergic-to-grass-anyway boomers. Realistically, it will come, and pass.Esports is an established industry with no need for legitimacy. And expecting the Twitch-watching crowd to magically switch to the Asian Games (and, in the future, the Olympics) is expecting the bustling pizzeria to go bankrupt because the buffet next door has thrown slices of Margherita in the mix.
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Not what or why, the intrigue is in the who. The historic first batch of Asian gamers. The Asian stars who left their homes to live in cybercafe ingesting chips and soda and racking up kills all through the night. Closer home, the gamers who are still confused for online gamblers, who have had tournaments spoiled by power cuts. A few of them will suddenly find themselves atop a podium, adding to the country’s tally, doing their best medal bites. How cool would that be? Wanted: Air fresheners with freshly-cut grass scent one of my unforgettable days at cricket was at New lands in Cape Town on the 2019 tour. Watching Rohit Sharma and Cheteshwar Para face Steyn and Philander sitting square off the wicket on the hill with the AMLA Army – the laughing, singing boys and girls with fake beards and floppy hats – was a riot. You could see bowlers bending their backs, batsmen going up on their heels, the balls screaming past their noses, the slip cordon letting out a loud ‘ooh’ and those on the banks lending chorus. Catching live sports from home is a sad substitute for the stadium experience. Don’t trust the broadcaster, television can never give you any idea about the speed of a cricket ball, the urgency of a busy football mid-field, the power of a baseline winner, the brutality of a shuttle smash or the fury of an F1 race. You can be a Zoom meeting fan and relish WFH but please don’t get used to being a ‘Watch From Home’ fan. Pray the virus gets cornered and killed in 2022 and , the beaming fans once again race through the turnstiles. The cricket season will soon start and we will be stuck at home. Do they have air fresheners with freshly cut grass fragrance? Year of the successor?
In May 2019, the morning after he’d led Mumbai Indians to their fourth I PL trophy, I asked Rohit Sharma what he felt about calls for him to get the India white-ball captaincy. He’d just become the country’s most successful T20 franchise captain. “That is not in my hands… that is for you guys to judge, whether I am prepared or not,” he’d said. In his own mind, he has possibly been prepared for a long time. He will certainly bring the rigor of analytical planning to the job, plus that instinctive ‘feel’ for limited-overs cricket. These are givens. What we are going to find out is how he will handle the great batsman who was controversially dumped as ODI captain and who is still racking up big away wins as Test captain. And whether India will do better at the 2022 T20 World Cup than they did in 2021. And, of course, how Rohit’s iffy fitness will hold up.
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