Brat and ball

The shocking Yuzvendra Chahal revelations show that a lot of cricketers are adolescents through their playing careers, and often well beyond them.

One problem is that in some cases, excessive liquor addles the mind — the inner prankster-adolescent then overpowers the grown-up man.

When Andrew Symonds and James Franklin tied up Chahal during a party in 2011, Symonds was 35 and Franklin 30. Liquor then interfered with reason, and they tied up Chahal and told him to untie himself. For good measure, they taped his mouth too — then forgot all about him, leaving him to be discovered in the morning by a hotel cleaner.

“They were in so much masti they have taped my mouth and forgot all about me,” Chahal, a diminutive, lightweight spin bowler, said in a podcast. “Party got over and in the morning, when a cleaner came, he saw me and freed me. They asked from when have I been here like this and I told them, ‘from the night itself’.”

Symonds and Franklin — big, beefy cricketers well over 6 feet — did not apologise to Chahal, he said. “No, they said sometimes when they drink ‘juice’ so much, they can’t handle it and they can’t remember anything,” said Chahal.

Chahal, relatively tiny at 5 feet, 5 inches, seems to be picked on for his small frame and attracts big muscular bullies after they get horribly drunk. In 2013, a Mumbai Indians player suspended him from a 15th floor balcony. “So, there was a player who was very drunk, I won’t say his name. He was very drunk, he was looking at me for a long time and he just called me and he took me outside and he hung me on the balcony,” Chahal said in a video shared by his current team, Rajasthan Royals. “And my hands were around him, like this (behind the neck). Had I lost my grip, I was on the 15th floor. Suddenly, many people who were there came and they handled it. I kind of fainted, they gave me water… This was one incident where I felt I made a narrow escape.”

Chahal is a relatively cerebral cricketer who was a junior national champion in chess and represented India at the World Youth Chess Championships. He still has a world chess (FIDE) ranking, though a very modest 82,237th currently. Physical strength is celebrated and prized in sport, and in a team sport environment — as in a school classroom — the brainy, bookish types often attract the muscular bullies.

Curious case of Imran Khan

Imran Khan was a man of reason. Speaking at the inaugural Tiger Pataudi Memorial Lecture in Kolkata 10 years ago, he prized his university education — Oxford, no less! — and scoffed at Zaheer Abbas’s superstition over his poor form during the tour of India in 1979-80.

Imran said at the lecture: “He (Zaheer) comes to me and says: ‘Look, Imran… I’ve just discovered why you and I are not performing — it’s black magic!’”

“And the great Zaheer Abbas gets himself dropped from the next match because he thought he was under a spell,” Imran continued. “So I’m just telling you the advantage a university education has…”

That was a rationalist Imran, respected by his opponents on the field, adored by his fans — especially female — across the world, and especially in India and England.

Imran was the cricketer who outgrew cricket; a man who set up hospitals and universities and threw himself wholeheartedly into politics in order to transform his country — so that, he said, emigrants would prefer the Naya Pakistan crafted by him over Europe and USA. If he talked cricket in studios, it was not due to inclination but due to the money, which he could channel into his projects or politics.

But in the winter of his life, Imran’s confidence in the strength of his own mind and body and university education is gone, just as Zaheer Abbas’ confidence in his eyesight and his batting grip had vanished. Imran is now a man of superstition — he’s now seen counting prayer beads while talking with world leaders.

He does a wicked bit of politics, too — he subverted the Constitution with a weird and far-fetched claim that a foreign power was trying to unseat him by orchestrating a vote of confidence against him! He uses religion in his politics, promising his countrymen Riyasat-e-Madina, having lived his life far from religion.

It’s good that Imran Khan, unlike Symonds or the late Shane Warne, is not a big, muscular adolescent lad who loves to play pranks, party all night or horse around. But he is potentially much more dangerous — he’s a self-obsessed old man who juxtaposes his own fate with that of his country and plays the religious card. It’s difficult to pick up who is better or worse, the big adolescent or a mature man who’s a cynical politician.