Cheer up, India - things could have been worse

www.GOcricket.com - http://www.gocricket.com/Cheer-up-India-Things-could-have-been-worse/Telford-Vice/columnshow/40386961.cms

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

DO not fuss, India, this too shall pass. Besides, it could have been worse - imagine if you were Zimbabwe, the land of nope and gory.

Or New Zealand, where cricket is meaningful only between rugby matches, of which there are enough to clog the consciousness for months on end.

Or South Africa, where everything on all sides of every divide is refracted through a racial prism.

Or West Indies, where those cursed with wearing the maroon cap have been marooned in a downward spiral for so long that the venerable Tony Cozier, 74 and counting, is probably the only remaining witness to when they were halfway decent.

Or Bangladesh, who simply do not matter in cricket’s greater scheme of things.

Or Sri Lanka, who are still wondering how the hell they managed to win a 50-over and a T20 World Cup and have no idea how they are going to win anything else what with Sanga and Mahela on their way out.

Or Pakistan, where cricket needs only the shooting to look, sound and feel like war.

Or even, dear India, your colonising conquerers, England, where this silly game has degenerated into a reason for pasty-faced pathetics to feel better about not having the co-ordination to kick a football in a straight line.

Only in Australia is cricket better off than in India. Perhaps. Indians, after all, do not have to put up with nutters like David Warner or the fascism that refuses to allow a man not wearing a collared shirt to cross a few metres of the Members’ Enclosure (the capitals are theirs) on his way to somewhere else at Adelaide Oval.

Look behind cricket’s picket fences in any country where it is played with seriousness and you will see social conservatives cowering from the modern world. Among the sports those land-thieving British exported along with almost every kind of prejudice, only golf is more anal in its outlook.

Seen through that admittedly dark looking glass, being thrashed does not carry shame - even if the hiding is handed out by as miserable a bunch of misfits as England.

Losing is what cricket teams do sometimes. This time is hurting Indians so much because, in recent years, their team has not often lost. That is an odd way to try and cheer you up, but it is the damn straight truth.

South Africans know this feeling only too well, having recently re-emerged into the gloom of mere mortality after their team’s first ever period of dominance of the world game.

Yes, South Africa are - officially anyway - again the best team in test cricket. But do not say so in Australia, where that assertion is a heresy that owes its existence purely to statistics and not at all to reality.

And, no, South Africa were not the best Test team in 1970. How could they even be considered for that accolade when the government at least some of the players probably voted for refused to allow them to play against anyone except all-white opposition? To argue otherwise is to keep appealing for leg-before even when it is obvious that the ball has pitched outside leg stump. Happily, that period is behind us and South Africa are now closer to selecting their teams on merit than they have ever been.

Even in this post-Sachin reality in which India have allowed MS Dhoni to overstay his welcome, far too much attention is focused on monsters like Narayanaswami Srinivasan and the glitzy vacuousness of the Indian Premier League is pushed to the front of every queue, things are not as bad as they might be.

South Africa, for instance, is lurching from one significant retirement to the next. In the past two years, Mark Boucher, Jacques Kallis and Graeme Smith have all gone, and Gary Kirsten has culled his coaching career. That adds up to 528 Test caps of playing experience alone.

As if that has not been worrying enough, except for Boucher’s forced exit the ends of each of those eras has been accompanied by conspirational whispers about the effect South Africa’s ongoing attempts to darken their teams have had on those figures’ decisions to call it quits - sometimes in the face of their denials of exactly that.

So, Indians have reason to be if not cheerful then not dire. Dangerous though it is for a foreigner to say so from a hemisphere away, you have plenty to be thankful for. There is also much that you do not have that you are better off without.

Sorry about the England thing. Believe me, no-one likes losing to them. Not just because of the history between countries like theirs and ours, but also because, too often, England are underserving winners.

And remember that you are do not have the problems of cricket in New Zealand, West Indies, Pakistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Australia or South Africa.

You do have Indian cricket’s problems. But, from here, they look as surmountable as Table Mountain on a clear day. By cable car, of course.