Of cricket, cash crunch and a sports junkie

Rohit Mahajan

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Tribune News Service

Visakhapatnam, November 20

National Highway 16, which runs right up to Kolkata (some 832km away) from here, was unusually packed for a Sunday morning, overflowing with cars, buses, scooters, three-wheelers and cycles. All these vehicles, too, were packed. All of them were not going to Kolkata — they were on the way to the cricket stadium to watch India beat England. 

This morning, the possibility that the match would end today seemed strong, and thus some 22,705 people turned up at the ground. This included the schoolchildren allowed in free, and another stand full of older students who could walk in by merely showing their college identification cards.

“It’s a great initiative by the cricket association, to let in students free,” said Sathya Kumar, studying commerce in a city college. “We can afford the tickets, but these days the smaller currency notes are not very easily available.”

Cash crunch

Reports from some remote regions of Andhra Pradesh reveal that the people there are struggling to change their old currency notes. A tribal group, Chenchus, in the Prakasam district are very badly affected. In some cases, they have to walk 20km to reach the nearest bank; many of them don’t have accounts in any case. Many don’t have even the documents required to open a bank account. Compared to them, we city-dwellers seem very lucky. The luckiest among us are those who do not have to queue up at banks to exchange their old banknotes, or outside ATMs to withdraw money.

Top cricketers belong to the most privileged classes. They probably don’t know the pain of queuing up for up to six hours — or more —to change or withdraw money. Former India opener Virender Sehwag admonished India’s people with this post on Twitter: “Shaheed Hanumanthappa waited 6 days, 35ft under snow, in-45°C, in hope of being rescued. Surely, we can wait few hrs in line to rescue Our Nation.” Sehwag was ridiculed badly online by people who assumed that he didn’t have to queue up to get cash.

“Privileged folks like @virendersehwag sit aaram se in AC rooms and give us gyan when we stand in Qs,” responded a Twitter user. But, to be fair to Sehwag, he cannot stand in a queue outside an ATM or bank – he’d be mobbed and it would lead to disorder and chaos. 

War and sport

English fans in the stands were greatly encouraged by the resistance put up by Alastair Cook and Haseeb Hameed in the roughly 60 overs of their innings. Among them was Graham Bishop, a 46-year-old former armyman. 

Bishop is a keen lover of sport and follows cricket and football with passion. He’s seen action in Iraq and Afghanistan and retired after 23 years in service. He’s travelled to Australia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies and India to watch the cricket. But how did he keep track of sporting action when he was in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan or Bosnia?

“When I went to Bosnia in 1995-96, there was no internet,” says Bishop. “It was difficult to follow sport. In some areas we had to depend on the good old newspapers, which were sent by family of friends.”

Things changed after the advent of the internet. Even in war-like situations, armymen were able to follow sport. “There is social media and internet,” says Bishop, who hails from Wolverhampton. 

By 2010, he was able to see live broadcast of cricket matches. “I watched England win the Twenty20 World Cup in West Indies (in 2010) from Afghanistan on the telly!” says Bishop.