View: The not-so-good, Ahmedabad, and the ugly India fan
cricket team ever to wear Indian colours. Nevertheless, the team that played so horribly at Ahmedabad last Sunday was definitely one of the best Indian XIs to play in a World Cup.
I would have backed this Indian team to beat this Australian team in a World Cup final in any other stadium in India, or in JoBurg, or even in Perth.
But like many others, I wasn't sure how they would fare in Ahmedabad.
There was a real sense of several different kinds of ugliness coalescing in Ahmedabad, some local and some not. There, in that over-bloated stadium still carrying the stench of Donald Trump's 2020 visit, was added the humiliation of the crowd behaviour during the Pakistan match.
There, in that stadium from which Sardar Patel's name has thankfully been removed, the cricket was always set to be diminished against all the other planned hoopla.
For an India player, there is always the huge pressure of expectation in any big Indian stadium. But in Ahmedabad, that pressure was both distorted and multiplied several times over.
The Aussies were there to play cricket — unusually as underdogs. But what the Indian team was being forced to play was some other game, one both lesser and bigger than cricket.
It is that game in which Rohit Sharma's men were slaughtered.
Over the last 15 years and more, there has been the relentless hollowing out of cricket, especially in India, an evisceration of this most subtle of games in the service of cheap spectacle, a coarse dumbing down carried out for an easy, immediate gratification poisonous for the sport. This money-gluttony has created fear in the administrators of the game as well as advertisers and TV channels.
All the crass circus-tamasha, (at one time) the dancing women from abroad, the
