Tailors for men in blue, a sea of cops at Jamtha

Rohit Mahajan

Tribune News Service

Nagpur, November 24

Before and after practice, the Indian players are sought out by a couple of men who've flown in from Hong Kong. "How's your shirt, is it all right?" one of them asked Rohit Sharma yesterday. "Does it absorb the sweat well, and how does it feel when you dive on the ground?" the other asked Shikhar Dhawan this morning.

These men are here to take the cricketers' measurements for their customised clothing. They would try to include the suggestions of the cricketers in the new clothing that they'd get stitched in Vietnam.

The cricketers have it quite good in terms of what they're given to wear by the gear and merchandise partners of the Indian cricket board (BCCI).

It's quite different for, say, people like Abhinav Bindra or Sushil Kumar, who are arguably greater achievers than our greatest cricketers.

After Bindra won the gold medal at the Beijing Olympics, he appeared on the podium wearing a huge tracksuit -- he's slight of build, but the clothing he had on seemed to be borrowed from a discus thrower. Last year at the Commonwealth and Asian Games, the Indian contingent seemed to be given their India clothing randomly -- some of the judo guys had jackets two sizes too short, a table tennis player had India shirts too large. And they were given just two changes of clothing. The contrast with the cricketers is quite stark.

Fears of Paris

There are several hundred security men (and a few women cops) at the venue at Jamtha, some 19 kilometres from the city. They belong to different species of security -- there are the regular cops with batons, regular cops with self-loading rifles, and regular cops with AK-47 guns. There are men from the Bomb Disposal squad. There are men also from the Riot Control Squad. Then there are the experts of the Quick Response Team. There's the Dog Squad too, sniffing around. To top it all, there are several plainclothesmen present.

This is probably the easiest venue to secure in India -- it's in the middle of nowhere and the perimeter is completely free of population or buildings. Yet it's crawling with cops. It's not certain how many cops are guarding the venue. To be more accurate, they're mostly gawking at the cricketers or trying to take selfies with them. And to be very fair to them, they’ve got nothing to guard the cricketers from for now, because the fans haven’t been allowed in as yet.

"I think there are around 500 of us, from different squads, here," guesses a young policeman.

Is there a threat perception in Nagpur? "Oh no, none at all here," he laughs. "Things are different in other parts of Maharashtra, like Mumbai, but things are quite cool here. No problem. But the security has been raised after the terrorist attack in Paris."