From jeers to cheers?: For Sri Lanka and Pakistan, going through turmoil, wins in cricket have come as a respite

Rohit Mahajan

IN a moment of sporting exhilaration, it’s tempting to reach large conclusions about the significance of sport — ‘cheering a nation’, ‘lifting the spirits’, ‘resilience’, ‘tenacity’… Yet, beyond the adjectives, you must force yourself to wonder: Can victory for Sri Lanka be a solace to Janith Malinga, a protestor who earlier this month said: “My wife and I have been living on one meal a day for two months to make sure our child gets three.”

Twelve years ago, just before the New Delhi Commonwealth Games were to begin, we were confronted by terrible news on a regular basis — a collapsed bridge, a leaky roof, tiles falling from the ceiling, dirty swimming pools, dirty apartments for the athletes…

In the lead-up to the New Delhi CWG, public mood was decidedly sombre. Then we had a successful — if exorbitantly expensive — opening ceremony. The mood changed. The medals started flowing in, and national pride swelled and the controversies were relegated to the background. That’s the nature of collective pride.

National pride

Sri Lanka has virtually collapsed financially. Protestors have stormed the palaces and offices of the mighty and driven them out. Fuel, food, electricity have been scarce. People move around less often, they eat lesser food. Prices have skyrocketed, and even the upper class do-gooders have less of everything to share with the most unfortunate among their countrymen.

What, then, does cricket do for the country? People who stormed the president’s residence were amazed by the abundance of everything for Public Servant No. 1 — what would, then, they think of the elite cricketers of the world enjoying the luxuries in the country’s best hotels?

Sport is the luxury of the well-fed. Those living on the edge don’t throng the stadiums — it’s very unlikely that the people who must make money daily to buy food would be found at the stadiums in Sri Lanka. For them, cricket at Galle would be invisible.

Sport does, however, restore pride of a wounded nation. Earlier this month, in the second Test at Galle, Dinesh Chandimal attacked Mitchell Starc spectacularly as he rushed towards his 200. It was breathtaking to watch. The stadium at Galle has low stands, and one clean hit by Chandimal put the ball into the road and struck a young man on the chest, though not hard, and his friends were tickled. Inside the ground, the spectators were ecstatic.

Sporting excellence is uplifting — perhaps all the more so if it’s your own country’s.

Sri Lankans travelled to Galle from other parts of the country to watch the cricket, and they were happy with the win over Australia. The walls of Galle Fort, which provide a vantage gallery to ticketless spectators, had protestors who carried banners that thanked the Australians for coming, and ones that told Gotabaya Rajapaksa, then president, to go.

Sri Lanka’s most famous cricket fan, Percy Abeysekara, a fixture at the grounds for at least 40 years, declared: “The performance of our team is much better than that of the politicians of Sri Lanka. Not a single politician comes close to these cricketers. They’re not politicians, they’re crackpots. I hate politics.”

The 85-year-old Abeysekara came to Galle from Colombo by bus, but could not find an autorickshaw to reach the ground — most of them were probably in a queue for fuel. “I have never seen such a crisis yet,” he told a news outlet. “I saw the World War, I saw the tsunami, I saw the rebellion of the Tamil Tigers.”

But cricket does help him — at 85, despite the problems, he travelled to Galle for the cricket.

Cricket helped Pakistan, too. That country too is going through turmoil — staggering inflation, political instability, and Imran Khan’s narrative of a conspiracy against him by the United States of America!

The win over Sri Lanka, then, gives Pakistanis some respite. Abdullah Shafique, only six Test matches old, played the innings of a lifetime — 160 not out in a chase of 342. Only 22 years old and such maturity! In times of T20 cricket, when purists write hand-wringing stories about the decline of Test cricket, Shafique is good news. Cricinfo’s Pakistan writer notes that ‘Shafique has faced as many fourth-innings deliveries in six Tests (922) as it took Virender Sehwag 87 Tests to face. Or, as it took Gavaskar 50 Tests to face.’ The note of pride in the words is unmissable.

It’s not ideal that these two nations of South Asia, witness to extreme nationalism based on religion and ethnicity, have little to be proud of other than cricket, in these times of high inflation and poverty and scarcity. For India, surely, there’s something to learn from their stories.