India winning T20
I didn’t get to see India winning the Twenty20 Cricket World Cup live yesterday, but what a manic Monday it has been. Wow! Brings forth some nostalgic memories.
It was on a Saturday afternoon, at a family friend’s place in Bangalore, where I watched India playing, for the first time on television—a fourteen inch monochrome. I was eleven years old and barely knew anything about World Cricket. Bored that there were no other kids around my age, I sat back and watched the game, while elders kept talking about current affairs, work, life, and so on. What I didn’t know—until the host made us realize was—that it was the Prudential World Cup of 1983, that we were watching.
The game was bizarre, low score, and at the end of the first half, everyone was of the opinion that India would lose. It was only when West Indies began batting that things started looking up. Wickets kept falling, which stopped the ongoing conversation around, and people began paying attention to the game. Rest, as they say, is history.
India, the underdogs, surprised everyone by defeating West Indies—the then favorites.
We were on a high again in 1985 watching India win the World Championship of Cricket—in color. The glitch in the telecast in (I think) the last over, Ravi Shastri’s man of the series title, and the team taking a victory lap in Shastri’s Audi were some of the vivid memories of that mini-World Cup tournament for me.
And now this.