The living room in Southern New Jersey that was filled to the brim with my raucous family reunion, had cleared out completely. India were 96/7 and a recovery looked increasingly unlikely. It was India’s second match in the latest edition of the T20 World Cup being played in the USA and Caribbean islands, on a spicy New York wicket against a formidable Pakistan pace attack.
Ravi Jadeja had just departed and only the three Indian fast bowlers remained, bat in hand, with limited prowess wielding it. My family was having none of this team India gasping for air nonsense, so they left for the dining room, en masse. As a die-hard cricket fan, I prevailed, admiring the bowling of young Naseem Khan and tearing up a little at seeing a smiling Mohammed Amir take 2 in 2 after all he has been through.
I had my fill of Hardik Pandya bashing (it’s that headband), when he was out for a 12 ball 7 and was looking for some other ways to fuel my vitriol. As India limped to 119 I shook my fist at the empty couches and gnashed my teeth until my jaw hurt. India had committed the cardinal sin of not batting out all 20 overs.
After a bowler-oppressive IPL, the average cricket fan, armed with recency bias has come to expect 200 plus totals and at least 20 sixes a game. The 2024 T20 World Cup has unceremoniously dumped that batter-centric trend. And made things decidedly more delicious with the USA beating Pakistan and Afghanistan outplaying New Zealand. A twenty-team cup that is more inclusive of the cricketing world is a step in the right direction.
The New York stadium, located in far away Long Island was near impossible to reach for anyone without a car. Even those with cars had to sell them to afford the tickets that started at a regal $300 and went up to thousands of dollars. I wept openly as I remembered watching whole test matches for $30 from the littered confines of my beloved N Stand (looking straight down the pitch) at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru. An egalitarian World Cup this is not. Someone like me had no chance of entering the fan park, let alone the Nassau County stadium.
And there was that pitch in NYC that has left a trail of destroyed batting lineups in its wake. Spicy but spongy, low but bouncy, carrying through but stopping on the batter, it had it all. By which I mean it was like 4 different pitches rolled into one giant cluster jam.
So difficult was it to bat on that the ICC was forced to put out a sheepish statement ahead of their money-spinning marquee event – India v Pakistan. They needed to stay ahead of any narrative that proclaimed that they hadn’t done enough. But here we were with the Pakistan openers striding in looking determined to chase down the tiny target.
The next 90 mins or so were a blur. The empty living room filled up again as more Pakistan wickets started to fall. My finance professor uncle crunched numbers with me and around the 10 over we figured that the adage of batting out the overs to win the game might not hold good on this challenging pitch. A couple of aunts mirrored my overreactions and stopped short of repeating my curses to the television. A third aunt kept calling runs “points” but such was the maahaul that I didn’t have the heart to correct her.
Bumrah, that beautiful, beautiful man let out an unusual roar of triumph kicking the air with clenched fists after clean bowling Mohammed Rizwan, the lynchpin of the Pakistan attack. He had been dropped before reaching double figures of Bumrah’s first over so the clean up job to Rizwan’s ugly slog across the line was even more sweet.
Even Hardik acquitted himself with two golden overs. As the family rallied around my increasingly crazed behavior, Arshdeep avoided colliding with Suryakumar while taking a skier. My cousin captured this moment for posterity. Decades later when cricket fans watch this game in their brain chips, they will see my skinny back, arms raised, celebrating as if I was on the field with the Indian cricket team.
This might not be test cricket and most Americans might not have a clue that there’s a World Cup being played but this devil of a pitch is making games of cricket nail-biting again.