Forget culture shock. It’ll be more extreme coming home. Forget the heat and the dust and the noise. Forget jet lag and homesickness. Forget anonymity and privacy.
Forget the thirteen hour train journey from Mumbai. Forget the idea that it was spent in a glorified luggage rack. Forget that the hotel I’d booked online had turned out to be closed. Forget the slightly grotty alternative.
Forget the Lonely Planet guide to India. Forget that, in a book thicker than David Warner’s bat, a quick turn to the index finds Rajkot is only afforded pages 720-22. Forget that “Rajkot is a large, hectic commercial and industrial city that isn’t easy to love with it’s heavy traffic, lack of open spaces and scant worthwhile sights.”
Forget meat and alcohol.
Forget the beggars. Forget the stray dogs. Forget the sacred cows rummaging through not so sacred piles of rubbish. Forget the puddles of piss and the smell of sewage. Forget eye-stinging traffic fumes. Forget BEEP BEEP BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. Forget crossing the road.
Turn a blind eye and a deaf ear. Turn whatever the equivalent is for a nose.
Forget 2016. Forget heroes dying and villains gaining power. Forget Brexit and Trump.
Forget Modi.
Forget the wallet full of obsolete 500 rupee notes. Forget the 320 usable rupees to my name. Forget that banks are closed. Forget the Cashless Society. Forget how I’m getting back from the ground. Or what I’m going to eat.
Forget the suspicion that I’d paid way over the odds for travel and hotels. It will save a lot of ball-ache down the line. It really will.
Forget diminishing supplies of toilet paper.
Forget that it might not go five days. The Test, that is.
Forget it all.
Because if an unforgettable month in India taught me anything it is that watching cricket remains a necessary and welcome refuge.
This wasn’t the conclusion I was necessarily expecting to draw. If I was looking for any story, it was one of discovering for myself a nation of cricket obsessives – something that immediately took a blow when my taxi driver from Mumbai airport claimed to not like cricket.
In an excellent piece, Michael Atherton hailed Mumbai as the real home of cricket, and, to me, Oval Maiden is at its very centre. On my return to Mumbai for one night before flying home, I realised how modern and relatively un-hectic it is compared to pretty much everywhere else I visited – there are pedestrian crossings! – but during that first few days I kept finding myself gravitating to the peace and shade of Oval Maidan. Countless games of cricket is my kind of hectic. I even got to bat.
If Oval Maidan and the Saurashtra Cricket Stadium in Rajkot sowed the seeds of this idea of cricket as a refuge, it was in a hotel room in Agra that it really flowered. It was the toughest couple of days of my trip, and began with my train from Jaipur being delayed for the worst part of five hours.
The best part of those five hours, incidentally, was when I was approached by an official-looking fellow who turned out to be the station manager. Perhaps in the future, I will return to Jaipur station and take pride in the clarity of the new signage, because the station manager, on a comprehensive tour of the station, was eager to get my valued opinion on where I’d expect to see what. It was almost as random as the Jaipur tuk-tuk driver, on hearing I was from England, launching into an Alan Partridge routine. Perhaps there was something about Jaipur. My hotel was somewhat euphemistically named Amer View. The view from my window was diametrically opposed to the stunning Amer Fort, but afforded me an early morning sighting of an elephant taking a drink from a water tank. Later on, I was to see a camel do the same, but the incongruity didn’t stop there. Later that night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I became aware of an approaching sound of music. Really loud music. A mobile disco, as it turned out, a throng of dancing bodies in its slow wake.
But forget all that.
Forget delayed trains. Forget feckless taxi drivers. Forget that I’d finally got to sleep at a little after 3am. Forget that I was woken at sunrise by the call to prayer. Forget that the Taj Mahal is closed on Fridays. Forget my only full day in Agra is a Friday. Forget being down to a single crisp new 2000 rupee note. Especially forget getting change for it. Forget walking for miles in the heat of the day. Forget lunch.
Forget all that.
The day-night Test from Adelaide is on TV. It’s fine. And Peter Handscomb, who I played with at Camden a decade ago, is scoring a fifty on dayboo. He was 15 back then and who could have said he’d be playing for Australia in ten years, but he was obviously a special player. It wasn’t just that he had a great eye and natural ability, he also knew how to score runs – more so than anyone I’ve ever played with or against, I suspect.
I got to marvel at Taj Mahal at sunrise the following day, and for all that it was jaw-droppingly magnificent, I will remember Agra as much for Handscomb’s 50. Agra was also the place where I wasn’t too ashamed to accept the offer of tourists going to the front of the queue at ATMs. Hitherto, I had entertained the locals telling me “tourist first” by replying “first is first” and insisting on queuing up with the rest of them, but life had gone on while I’d been indulging in some cricketing escapism and I was as desperate for money as I ever hope to be.
India is hard work – even before what seemed to be universally known as “money problem” I would have had to have plenty of down time; it just happened that watching the cricket made it somehow more justifiable. Never more so than that Friday in Agra.
As an aside, there were a few times when my hotel TV didn’t work and I ended up watching it on a stream on my iPod. Star TV, the rights holders, let you pay to stream live or allow you a free, 5 minute delayed streaming service. Why couldn’t Sky offer something similar? It still makes money from advertising revenue, I’d have thought, and allows the casual or poor fan access to their national game.
The first Test – the historic first Test in Rajkot – will be remembered for Stuart Broad’s 100th cap, Haseeb Hameed’s debut, hundreds for Joe Root, Moeen Ali, Ben Stokes, Alastair Cook, Murali Vijay and local hero Che Pujara, and a dramatic finish in which England were the only team trying to win. But what of the experience?
That Rajkot is not somewhere I’d have gone had it not been staging a Test match was a double-edged sword. With few English speakers and even fewer landmarks to help navigation, it was quite challenging, but there was also the sense that it was a more authentic Indian experience. I was certainly ready to move on by the end, and Udaipur didn’t half provide a stunning contrast, but I’d also grown to love Rajkot in a funny kind of way. It was interesting to hear more seasoned travellers than me speak positively of the Gujarati people. The consensus was that there was no edge to them, no sense that they were out for the tourist rupee – just a genuine warmth and pride that an Englishman had visited their home. The kind of warmth and pride that more often than not has to be captured in a selfie.
Prior to travelling, I tried not to have too many assumptions about India, but I definitely didn’t envisage spending quite so much time in ATM queues or posing for selfies. I first experienced the latter at the Gateway of India. Unacclimatised as I was, I decided to sit down and take a breather. It wasn’t long before I was approached with a selfie request, and it was to open the floodgates. It never failed to make me laugh, imagining all the “and here’s me with a sweaty and bemused-looking white man” explanations as these photos were shown off to friends and relatives.
Back to Rajkot. Each day began with a cold dribbly shower before making my way down to reception. There, I had to wake the staff sleeping on the floor (something I would later experience for myself when arriving in Udaipur at 3am with a midday check-in) in order to be let out for the five minute walk to the bus station. Which bus we’d be taking and where it would be leaving from was a mystery, and the price seemed to vary each day, but it was never more than 20 rupees and was always great crowded fun. The irony of an elderly local gentleman complaining that our impassioned cricketing discussion was too loud had us in stitches. Too loud? In India?
No buses at the end of play, however. In fact, no idea as to how to get back into town. And, on day one, no money to pay for it. In my desperation, I looked around to see the beacon of an MCC straw hat. “How does one go about getting back into town?” I asked. It turned out the owner of the straw hat and his wife were expecting a driver and we – Nick, who I had met two days previously when buying my ticket, and I – were welcome to jump in. Full of gratitude, we jumped out at their hotel and had to walk for an hour in the dust and the fumes and what remained of the light, relying on Nick’s reading of google maps. I have rarely been so exhausted by the time I got back to Hotel Shivang. Hungry, too. I took my day’s spending to 75 rupees (91p) with a roadside omelette.
That I had managed to get anything to eat and drink during the day was down to the good nature of a steward, and possibly my own powers of persuasion. It resulted in Nick and I being issued with yellow VIP Invitee wristbands which gave us access to a delicious buffet lunch. Childlike grins and knowing looks all round for those others who had managed to blag the same racket. Increasingly tatty and faded, those wristbands would work for all five days.
As if attending all five days of a Test match in a far off land wasn’t enough, the currency problem really made it a shared experience, the sense that we were living through history and we were all in it together. That we’d have a singular story to tell.
There was talk on the morning of day two of being able to use 500 rupee notes at the ground, and it was something I was eager to find out for myself. It was an odd situation. Fans wanted to buy and vendors wanted to sell, but there was an obvious obstacle. It turned out that, later in the day when they had change, vendors would take a 500 if we spent 200. Fair enough. Four ice creams might be a little excessive, but I could now afford something more nutritious than an omelette. I could afford to go to Moris, the restaurant where I went to eat great thalis and listen to colourful tales of previous tours. The rhythm of going to all five days of a Test was a great way of acclimatising and overcoming jet lag, and I soon got into a routine of which Moris was an integral and tasty part.
Day three could have been a really dogged day. Broad’s early dismissal of Gautam Gambhir proved to be a false dawn as Vijay and Pujara batted for what felt like forever. Two late wickets really changed the complexion of the day, however, underscored with a madcap tuk-tuk ride back into town. Knowing he was on to a good thing, the same tuk-tuk driver met us at the end of day four. I’m not sure what was wider, his grin or his moustache.
Another owner of a fine moustache was the police officer who sat down and, after the initial pleasantries in broken English, started to show off his commentary prowess in near faultless English. Seeing me record his efforts on my phone, a number of colleagues came to do the same. He ended up doing quite a stint.
Along with the constant requests for selfies, one thing I will never understand is the hero worship of Virat Kohli. Great, compelling player, sure, and he was to go on to have a staggeringly good series, but it was like Beatlemania or the hysteria around David Beckham. Each Kohli touch in the field was met by a shrill cheer, and there was the curious occasion of Pujara, the local hero, don’t forget, being given out and then reprieved by DRS and the crowd being disappointed that they would have to wait to see their one true hero bat.
Perhaps it’s part of a wider cultural phenomenon – the cult of the individual, and, in Indian cricket, the cult of the batsman. It’s certainly a big part of the IPL and there is the need to fill the Tendulkar-shaped hole in the national psyche. I had the misfortune to catch a bit of the Indian Super League football on TV, and was slightly offended that games were advertised as player versus player (Malouda v Forlan, for example).
It didn’t help that much of the Rajkot crowd was made up of school children, bused in to help make the ground look less depressingly empty. The nail-biting final session was played out to the surreal chants of “We Want Four; We Want Six.” No. No you don’t. You need to survive, something your hero is doing in a highly impressive manner. No, it really doesn’t matter if he gets 50.
Rajkot seems a long time ago now that England have lost the following four Tests. Maybe I should have gone to the others, but I suppose I should be grateful that I got to see England compete. If nothing else, this series has highlighted just how miraculous the win in 2012 was. That win was based on the spin of Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar, the only two world class spinners that England have had in my lifetime. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Moeen Ali and Adil Rashid, never mind Zafar Ansari, Gareth Batty and Liam Dawson, struggled, or that they are not of the level of Swann and Panesar.
Rashid, in fairness, bowled well in Rajkot and went on to be England’s leading wicket taker in the series. It was good to see him finally gain Cook’s trust, but, once that was established, there was no need for a third spinner – something England only caught up to for the fifth Test and then only to pick a fourth seamer for spin-friendly Mumbai instead of the specialist batsman the team were crying out for. Hmm. That two of the batting options, Gary Ballance and Ben Duckett, were unselectable, and the other was the reserve wicket keeper (albeit one with a phenomenal white ball game that suggests he could be a star at Test level) only went to highlight the errors in selection. The missed opportunity of picking Hameed in Bangladesh was apparent from the moment he nonchalantly dropped his hands and swayed back to avoid his first ball in Rajkot, and Duckett did nothing to suggest he yet has the game for these conditions. Before that, what had Ballance done to warrant a recall?
England are fortunate that a top of four of Cook, Hameed, Keaton Jennings and Root looks like it is emerging, but further down the order it becomes less clear. The situation is complicated by England having so many all-rounders – a team of sixes. Stokes, the sixiest of England’s sixes must bat at six. Less certainty surrounds the question of whether there should be any reason other than tradition for thinking a wicket keeper cannot bat at five and a batsman at seven. Bairstow, after a record breaking year with bat and gloves, shows no sign of wanting to give up duties behind the stumps, but he remains the obvious choice to bat at five. Jos Buttler is a more natural seven, it seems to me. If it works, then fine, but I wouldnt object to Buttler taking over the gloves. Alternatively, Moeen could bat at seven and play as a second spinner behind Rashid. In the subcontinent, maybe, but the need for two spinners won’t occur too often elsewhere and do England really need six bowlers?
It seems harsh on Moeen, but it’s most likely he’ll find himself back at number eight – Chris Woakes, Stuart Broad and Jimmy Anderson as nine, ten, jack. Yes, it’s too low for Moeen, but it’s arguably for the good of the team – as Cook giving up the captaincy may well be, or Buttler taking over as keeper. There are some tough decisions to be made.
Cook got a fair bit of stick for a conservative declaration in Rajkot, but I remember being quite surprised and even fearful of a successful ODI-style run-chase. It was surely an indication of my low expectations for the tour. Nobody gave England a chance – least of all whoever was responsible for the schedule. But winning four out of five tosses should have helped. As should scoring 400 and 477 in the first innings in Mumbai and Chennai. And India had their own passengers. They also had some VIPs on board. Kohli and Ashwin were the main men, but at times Pujara, Vijay, Ravi Jadeja and Mohammad Shami, as well as KL Rahul and Karun Nair in the fifth Test, were too good for England.
India was good for me, too.