22 Yards Through 140 Characters: When Twitter Took Over Cricket

I’m in Dehradun and desperate. India is playing Pakistan in a World Cup match, and if am a cricket fan worth anything, I should be in front of a television set cheering for the two Delhi gentlemen in the middle of the biggest ever partnership in an India-Pakistan World Cup encounter.

Instead, I am languishing in bed, in a house full of strangers, nursing a nasty hangover, struggling to convince my body that sleep is not the most important thing right now.

And as is the case in moments of existential crises, I turn to Twitter.

My Twitter timeline resembles the live commentary page of Cricinfo. Only that it is generously wittier, full of memes and pop culture references about how Virat Kohli feels like Arvind Kejriwal as he gets another chance, after a Pakistani fielder drops a ridiculously simple catch.

I must admit, though, that it is also strangely pacifying to know that I am not the only one wading through an American idea of “social networking”.

Next door, I hear a bunch of kids scream in delight to a piece of misfielding by a Pakistani player. I want to be there, in front of the nearest television set, cheering and whistling, but I am stuck. I’m in an unfamiliar neighbourhood in a new city, and considering I look and (currently also feel) like a lumberjack, I’m utterly unconfident to knock at someone’s door and ask to let me watch the game.

Twitter, then, is the Bloody Mary of the morning; it will comfort the hangover, but not cure it.

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Watching cricket in Australia is an experience. Rahul Bhattacharya, in this evocative essay, describes the drill exceptionally well. If you are a cricket fan, you have to have a heart of diamond to not be affected by it.

Only that Bhattacharya’s piece now seems grossly incomplete. Because, of course, there was no Twitter in the 90s.

Real-time commentary was the business of retired cricketers – the always-sober Richie Benaud, the perennially-condescending Geoffrey Boycott, the soothing Michael Holding whose voice would have no crests or troughs. And, yes, Sunil Gavaskar: the ones should be converted into twos, and twos should be converted into threes (if you’re playing in the majestic Melbourne Cricket Ground, threes to fours).

No, I am not a nostalgic fool, unable to come to terms that Twitter is what makes for a rounded experience of watching a game of cricket. No, not at all. I’m a young web journalist, who understands how Twitter is the real deal and all that.

However, I am a little perplexed as to how it works out.

Imagine this: Rahul Dravid survives this really close leg before the wicket.  You breathe a sigh of relief and curse McGrath for being so annoyingly consistent. Then you lean forward to watch the multiple slow motion replays like you are putting a thread into a needle. And then there is closure – “He was lucky there, man” or “He hit that; Healey and McGrath go up for everything!”

Now picture this: Kohli is dropped. For the second time. Rameez Raja can’t hide his disappointment but he tries nonetheless to mask it with a “very good package, Virat Kohli” line. You fish out your smart phone; furiously produce a meme about how Umar Akmal feels like shite and a snarky one line to go along with it. Then you do it. You tweet. The phone vibrates with notifications of re-tweets. You check the phone; bask in the glory of coming up with such incisive wit so spontaneously. In the meantime, Kohli square cuts the next one for a boundary. The noise of the crowd going berserk wakes you up from your self-indulgent reverie. Nice shot. Where’s my meme generator? Like a boss.

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Culture is the new politics. Twitter is the culture. There’s a fascist government at the Centre, but so what. There’s a communist one in the capital. We will fight fire with fire.

What is the fun in Twitter if you are not binary?

On an India-Pakistan World Cup match though, you’re either a nationalist or a traitor. Or for that matter, good looking or not.  There’s war on Twitter again. Indian men think they are better looking than their Pakistani counterparts. I’m glad the women have no such illusions. Then there are questions about internalised conventional notions of beauty.

Amid all of this, Shahid Afridi, the heartthrob of many a woman, Pakistani and Indian, has miscued his slog. I’m finally in front of a TV, in a dive, watching the most pointless portion of the match as Misbah-ul-Haq reminds the Indian bowlers that they just had a lucky day.

It is all over for Pakistan. The crackers in Karachi are going to go waste again. Yes, that is what I wanted to tweet, but damn the wretched Dehradun 3G.

Ravi Shastri, you see, in the end cricket is not the “real winner”. Twitter is.