More than a game - Modi and India's cricket supremacy

[SaimFan]

It is a huge thing for a cricketer that the PM of their country is visiting them after a huge loss at the final of the World Cup and consoling them. Good gesture

It was just a PR stunt. He has elections to fight in a few months.

There are more professional people like former cricketers and team psychologists etc who can "console" a team after a defeat.

If you follow Indian media, you'd know Modi loves limelight, and he loves shaking hands. If he was really there to console, he should have asked cameras to be off and made a small pep talk, and leave filling the environment with good feelings.

You could see Rohit and Kohli were very uncomfortable with his gestures. No one got "consoled" by his shaking hands.

Australian team celebrations were also delayed with captain waiting on the stage because Modi wanted to shake everyone's hand. And it is a country where a pranam from afar is a cultural norm.

 

[BouncerGuy]

Whatever the reason for Modi's visit to the dressing room was, I think that it is something that most of the countries lack when their team loses. It may be a PR stunt from the start.

 

[cricketjoshila]

It was just a PR stunt. He has elections to fight in a few months.

There are more professional people like former cricketers and team psychologists etc who can "console" a team after a defeat.

If you follow Indian media, you'd know Modi loves limelight, and he loves shaking hands. If he was really there to console, he should have asked cameras to be off and made a small pep talk, and leave filling the environment with good feelings.

You could see Rohit and Kohli were very uncomfortable with his gestures. No one got "consoled" by his shaking hands.

Australian team celebrations were also delayed with captain waiting on the stage because Modi wanted to shake everyone's hand. And it is a country where a pranam from afar is a cultural norm.

When Macron visited the French team after their defeat, the camera captured them. No?

Rohit and Virat were down. Did you see how Virat was when he took his POTT Award?

 

[MP2011]

Shoaib Akhtar about Modi’s visit to the dressing room:

"Your PM gave a clear message that he is there with the players. It was a huge gesture. This was a message that India as a nation is standing beside the Indian cricket team. As simple as that. This is a really really emotional time for them. He took them (players) as his children, as kids and he lifted their morale to tell them that they played well. This was a great gesture by the PM,"​

Shoaib loves to pander India, doesn't he?

 

[deltexas]

Shoaib loves to pander India, doesn't he?

Has to get that YouTube views right? Lol..

 

[Cricket Warrior]

David Lloyd also get surprised by the unusual closing ceremony of the World Cup 2023.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1727400628866179236

 

[BouncerGuy]

The slow, saffron descent of the India cricket fan

We’ve been told enough times that cricket is a religion in India. As it stands now, cricket is a religion spiked with another religion, a political one: Hindutva.

Indian fans drive the global economy of cricket. On social media, they will pounce on anyone who dares say anything critical about Indian cricket. Chronically hyper-sensitive and hyper-nationalist, mean-spirited, intolerant and downright crude, the contemporary Indian fan is a sad spectacle in a beautiful sport. His passionate heart is in the wrong place.

To be fair, the partisan crowds were always there. In interviews, Viv Richards has spoken about how playing in India was never easy. People would come with mirrors and shine them in the opposition batsman’s eyes. If India was losing the match, the incensed crowd would throw bottles onto the ground and set the stands on fire. It’s what happened in 1996 at Eden Gardens, Calcutta. The semi-final between India and Sri Lanka had to be abandoned, with the match referee, Clive Lloyd, awarding the match to the islanders. The 1999 test match in Madras was an exception, with the Chennai crowd giving a standing ovation to the visiting Pakistan team; they even ran a victory lap.

While this kind of chaos is now thankfully in the past, we have found a way of sinking to new lows, an Indian specialty. Just look at what happened in the recently-concluded World Cup. In Ahmedabad, the Pakistan captain, Babar Azam, was booed at the toss. The match hadn’t even started. When Mohammad Rizwan got out, Indian fans gave him an earful of “Jai Shri Rams” as he walked back up to the pavilion. The PA system unnecessarily, and provocatively, blared the “Jai Siya Ram” chorus from the flop film, Adipurush. It pointedly didn’t play “Dil Dil Pakistan” (“Such a fair land, such a fair sky/ My heart is Pakistan, my soul is Pakistan”), a song by Vital Signs about flowers and clear skies, the unofficial anthem for sporting occasions. Mickey Arthur, the amiable Pakistan Team Director, said that the match “feels like a BCCI event, not the World Cup”.

In the final, when Travis Head scored a century and customarily raised his bat, he was greeted with an abrasive silence. (The Wankhede crowd was better, with a section gently applauding New Zealander Daryl Mitchell’s century in the semis). It was as if someone had tied the hands of a hundred thousand people behind their backs, and sewed up their lips for good measure. It was like watching a match during the Covid lockdown.

In Bangalore, when a Pakistan fan (the odd fan who’d actually managed a visa) tried to egg his team on with a harmless slogan, he was asked to shut up by a policeman. In Pune, a Bangladeshi super fan’s tiger mascot—a stuffed toy—was snatched from him, thrown around and ripped apart by Indian fans. When Mohammed Shami dropped a catch he was subjected to unprintable abuse on X.

All this, when the desi fan actually turned up. For they hardly came for matches that didn’t feature India. The truth is that we do not understand the true nature of sport anymore. All we care about is Team Bharat winning, which translates into the Hindu Rashtra winning. In a piece on The India Forum, Sharda Ugra writes about “the plan (later cancelled) to have the Indians wear a one-time all-orange uniform in the match against Pakistan at the Narendra Modi Stadium. India vs Pakistan, Hindu orange vs Muslim green, pick your team. Get it?” Meanwhile, orange is already the new blue in the dressing room, at least when the boys are not playing. It’s the new uniform for both the support staff and the cricketers. Team Bharat: The men-in-bhagwa.

Gautam Gambhir, a sitting BJP MP, had this to say in his Khaleej Times column: “I am not sure if Indian supporters have won hearts. Our turnout during non-India matches has been abysmal, making me wonder if we really love this game or we just love Indian superstars and the frenzy around them. We booed Babar Azam and shouted unnecessary chants at outgoing Pakistani batsmen. It is unthinkable that a society that gave the world the very thought of ‘Whole World Is a Family’ is sounding so parochial.”

The provincialism of a billion people

And what happened after we lost the final? The straggle of remaining fans, having nothing to do, booed the umpires (while they were accepting mementoes) for no good reason. Not to mention that the ceremony began an hour late. When the trophy was being handed over to Pat Cummins, the fans started shouting, “Kohli, Kohli”, just to spite the gora, the same firangi who, in 2021, had donated $50,000 to the PM Cares Fund to help India’s fight against Covid-19.

And what happened the day after we lost the final? We went after the wives of Aussie players—on social media, the first and last refuge of the patriotic scoundrel. Glen Maxwell’s wife Vini Raman, who is of Indian descent, responded: “Aaaaand (sic) cue all the hateful vile DMs. Stay classy...Can’t believe this needs to be said BUT you can be Indian, and also support the country of your birth where you have been raised and, more importantly, the team your husband and father of your child plays in.” Centurion Travis Head’s wife, Jessica, was also targeted with remarks she labelled as “disgusting” and “grubby”. The irony is that fans root for the same Maxwell come the IPL; it reminded me of the line from 3 Idiots: “Human behaviour ke bare mein hamne us din kuch jaana. Dost fail ho jaaye toh dukh hota hai, lekin dost first aa jaye to zyaada dukh hota hai.” (If a friend fails an exam, one feels bad, but if he aces it, one feels even worse).

The provincialism of a billion people was there for the cricketing world to see. A subcontinent had become a smalltown.

Ab aap chronology, sorry, hierarchy samajhiye

Now that it’s all over, we can all breathe. And think clearly. When I say “breathe” I mean it literally. Imagine the number of hoarded crackers that would have gone off simultaneously had we won, plummeting the AQI to depths plumbed previously by only the Indian fan.

There was a curious moment in the Narendra Modi Stadium after the match. As the teary players grieved and mourned in private, Narendra Modi himself sauntered into the dressing room. The men-in-blue stood in a semi circle, their hands clasped behind their backs. The stiff headmaster had come to commiserate, deliver a booster-shot and an informal invitation to tea when they were in Delhi next.

Lurking in the background was home minister, Amit Shah. His son, Jay, the BCCI chief, who’d spent the World Cup popping up next to celebrities: SRK, Rajinikanth, Tendulkar (the cameras, during matches, always looped back to where Jay was sitting), and walking precisely one step behind Modi in the stadium, head bowed, was nowhere to be seen in the dressing room. Ab aap chronology, sorry, hierarchy samajhiye.

Junior, anyway, hadn’t done a great job. There were hardly any foreign fans thronging stadiums in support of their teams. No effort was made to promote the event in participating countries, invite tourists to Incredible India. The tournament schedule came out on June 27, merely three months before the start of the event. Following this, a revised schedule with as many as nine changes, was announced with less than two months left. This caused great inconvenience to visiting fans and journalists alike, as well as State associations who didn’t know if they were hosting a game or not. In contrast, the tickets to the football World Cup go on sale a year in advance. Ditto for the 2019 ODI WC schedule held in England.

Taming the beast

Three points to end with.

One, you cannot but feel for the team which played unbelievably sublime cricket. The loss meant the most for them. These are players—the ultimate nerds— who didn’t have a normal childhood or youth, all their energies devoted to the single-minded pursuit of a game, the pinnacle of which is winning the World Cup.

Two, PM Modi’s obsession with Ahmedabad. We know he’s dedicated to Mother India, but within the motherland he has his own motherland—Ahmedabad. The city gets everything: bullet train, World Cup final, IPL final, maybe even the Olympics. Going by the crowd’s behaviour, it’s the last place to hold an elite sports event. Quoting again from Gautam Gambhir’s column: “We need to wear a more neutral outlook if we have to win the Olympic Games bid for 2036. Any deviation from this can invite a negative mindset towards India as a host for the Games.”

Three, saffronisation, like Suryakumar Yadav’s natural game, is a 360 degrees sport. The present dispensation has managed to tame X, Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video. Journalists and creative folk can be silenced. As The Washington Post reports, Anurag Kashyap’s (a vocal critic of the government) dramatisation of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City was dropped after being green-lit. The report also cites a former Netflix India employee as saying that “the company decided against releasing a Dibakar Banerji film about generations of an Indian Muslim family experiencing bigotry even though it was completed”.

A sport, though, is a different beast. The results of a cricket match are not pre-ordained. Players cannot be judged on the basis of religion, only performance. What can be gamed is the cricket fan. What can be rejigged are the slogans: “V vont sixer” replaced by “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”. What can be manipulated is the body that controls cricket in India—the BJP has firmly put the word “control” back into the BCCI.

And that’s exactly what’s happened. The results are there for all to see. We didn’t win. We lost, in more ways than one.
​

The slow, saffron descent of the India cricket fan

The Indian team could not bring home the World Cup, but its supporters have brought the nation ample shame.

frontline.thehindu.com

 

[BouncerGuy]

After reading this article, the question I want to ask everybody is whether the fans truly love the sport or if is it just the frenzy around Indian superstars.

For me, the sport should be the center of attraction, love for your superstar is natural but when it comes to sports and the win-lose situation then the sport should prevail.

 

[MenInG]

The ODI Cricket World Cup 2023 final was a heart-break for the Indian cricket team fans. After 10 straight wins, the Rohit Sharma-led Indian cricket team was the favourites going into the ODI Cricket World Cup 2023 final against Australia. However, the Pat Cummins-led side save their best for the last and trumped the hosts in Ahmedabad in all department. They first restricted India to a below-par total and then reached the target with ease. PM Narendra Modi was at the venue and presented the Cricket World Cup Trophy to Australia captain Pat Cummins after the final.

Pat Cummins' Australia teammate Glenn Maxwell recounted the World Cup presentation ceremony.

"It was quite funny watching the videos of the post-match presentation where he shook Modi's hand and was stuck there on the podium," Maxwell told theage.com.au.

"It felt like that lasted for about 10 minutes, him just standing there with the trophy waiting for the group to come on. But he actually dealt with it with class. He didn't make a big song and dance about it, [he] just thought 'you know what, I'll wait here, be respectful.' Not everyone would've dealt with that like he did."

NDTV

 

[The Bald Eagle]

Modi operandi: The politicisation of Indian cricket – Almanack​

On one level, the 2023 World Cup was business as usual, confirming the wealth, power and resources available to Indian cricket, and culminating in another title for Australia. But there was a parallel tournament, in which the cricket became a platform for the political ideology of the ruling Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party, with a sharp focus on amplifying the personality cult of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, in the run-up to 2024 general election.

The messaging was easily carried out: Jay Shah, secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, is son of the country’s home minister, Amit Shah; naturally, Shah jnr has a direct line to BJP headquarters. With the Indian team playing a thrilling brand of cricket, packing stadiums and grabbing eyeballs, the political messaging stayed on high beam – until the final, that is, when it gave way to a bad aftertaste.

Had the World Cup been merely about BCCI attempts to control what went out on the global TV feed, the muscle-flexing would have been familiar. But this was a different kind of BCCI command-and-control over what, in theory, was an ICC event. By disregarding first the schedules, then the consequences of doing so, the Indian board hijacked the World Cup, and used it – wherever they could – as a propaganda tool for the government. The ICC demonstrated neither the nous nor the spine to resist the takeover.

The BCCI have always had politicians in their ranks, from across the ideological spectrum. But a former board employee who had worked with figures from various parties said they had “no involvement in the direct administration of the game… Across parties, they never politicised the scene, or brought any political outfit into the administration.”

By 2023, though, the BCCI had changed. Piggybacking on the Indian team, they treated the tournament as a vehicle for jingoism and exceptionalism, repeatedly trumpeting the BJP’s pet tropes: hyper-nationalism, and anti-Pakistan and anti-Muslim sentiment. And behind the semaphore was Jay Shah. The World Cup was a test of his efficiency, an Indian victory his intended offering to the BJP – and to Modi, in the stadium named after him in Ahmedabad, his old power base when he was chief minister of Gujarat between 2001 and 2014. The tournament was meant to be the execution of a broader regime plan, to present a new assertive Indianness – not to the cricketing world, but to the party’s huge domestic constituency, and to the nation’s vast diaspora.

Political messages, both official and unofficial, had been tried out well in advance. Ahmedabad’s stadium, whose inaugural event had been a fawning political rally with US president Donald Trump in 2020, was officially named after Modi a year later, before the third Test against England. Then, in March 2023, on the morning of the fourth Test against Australia, the teams warmed up in the practice nets, because Modi and his Australian counterpart, Anthony Albanese, were enjoying a lap of the stadium in a golden chariot

 

[guard]

I disagree completely.

Those 11 players repesent the country.

When they win, it is an economical, political and moral victory for the entire nation.

Reverse this.

Had Pakistan managed to win the final at Narendra Modi Stadium, dont you think it would have been a political, economical and moral victory for nation of Pakistan?

Athletes all over the world drape the flag of their country when winning medals in Olympics.

They dont isolate as a sportsman and say they won for themselves or their field.

The honest and blunt truth is twofold.

The writer is an opponent of Modi regime so he is finding ways to undermine the World Cup.

Pakistani team performed terribly and now Pakistani fans are trying to find someone who conforms to their views (leftists), so that they can take solace in the fact that India was terrible at something in World Cup.

You know who is going to be most excited if NZ wins the semi final?

Not NZ fans but Pakistani fans.

That in a nutshell sums up our country.

And indians dont ever indulge in said behaviour??