As usual, little excitement for Jamtha Test

Rohit Mahajan

Tribune News Service

Nagpur, November 23

The stadium at Jamtha, some 18km from the city, is the brainchild of Shashank Manohar. Manohar is the chairman of the International Cricket Council (ICC), which has been worrying over the future of Test cricket across the world. By all accounts, despite giving up his position with the Vidarbha Cricket Association (VCA), Manohar has a “decisive” influence in VCA’s operations. Insiders say that it’s his protégés or associates who are running VCA now. Manohar’s father was also a VCA president, and his son has been a VCA official, too.

Could Manohar, then, use his good offices with VCA to try and promote the Test that begins tomorrow? This, incidentally, would be the 50th international match organised by VCA. This includes 23 matches in the old stadium in the city. In the last nine years, 26 international matches have been played at the stadium in Jamtha. The attendance for ODIs and T20Is has been good; the Tests have been almost totally spectator-less. This time around too, sadly, only around 4,000 tickets have been sold. The 45,000 capacity stadium is going to be, yet again, a ghostly theatre. But wait, some 4,000 schoolchildren would be at the ground. “We’ll provide water and high tea to them, but the schools have to arrange for teachers to oversee them,” said a VCA member. “Also, the schools are responsible for bringing and taking away the children.”

Getting there

Jamtha was once a small village with a highway (Kanyakumari: 1737km down south) and a railway line passing through it; over time, as the city crept south, big residential and commercial projects have come up along the highway, closer to Jamtha than central Nagpur. We met students from a nearby engineering college who wanted to come and watch Virat Kohli practising in the nets, but the cops turned them away because VCA doesn’t want fans on non-match days. “We’d be at the ground when the match starts,” said one of them. “I wish we could have gone in to see the players practising.”

Now, too many unruly fans in the stands can be a nuisance. But surely, with a view to promoting cricket — Test cricket at the ICC chairman’s pet stadium, no less — something could been done to let these paying customers watch the practice?

Tickets please

Those who want to see action on any one of the first three days must buy tickets for all five days. Day tickets are available for only the fourth and fifth days. But luckily, tickets are quite cheap, starting at Rs 200 for five days. Unluckily, though, due to a variety of reasons, ticket sales haven’t shot through the roof. It’s a sad reality of our times — Test cricket, that too a game against far-too-frequent opponents Sri Lanka in the Ola-forsaken outskirts of Nagpur, isn’t going to set the fan’s imagination afire. Especially if there’s no visible effort to promote the game.