Victory and its aftermath

How can someone be made to feel surfeited about a hard earned and much yearned victory? But the BCCI, the obnoxious State Governments and the media (which just needs a bandwagon to always jump into) have proved it is possible.

So for once we had a good team that won. What if we had lost. I am sure there would have been excuses like 'new format', 'inexperienced', and more. Do not those terms still apply? For all the great win the team fashioned, it is after all a new format of game for which none of the teams have special strategies for. And they are inexperienced! To have an entire nation go crazy because the team won 4 matches in a row is ridiculous. Had the team been through several months of high quality performances, its members deserve honors. Praising the team and awarding them for every series win and then stoning the player's homes for every loss is happening much too frequently nowadays, so much so that people and the BCCI have lost a sense of proportion.

Praise them, yes. But do not flood them. After the World Cup debacle, the Advertisement value of the Indian team reached a nadir and subsequent good performances in England did not increase the face value much. The BCCI, which can easily fund two African nations even if no cricket matches were staged for the next two years, were obviously not happy with the reduced inflow to their coffers. And they saw in this victory the right moment to rekindle the interests of the public in Indian cricket and increase the team's revenue potential. Needless to say, this entailed reactions like 30km rally, felicitations at the Wankhede Stadium, $2million prize money, a crore and a 911 porsche to Yuvraj Singh from the BCCI. And the tax payers of Haryana want Joginder to be gifted Rs.21 lakhs because he took one crucial wicket.

Instead of making any socialistic statements on how these and much more ill spent money from the exchequers of the Government and the BCCI could have been rerouted for more 'noble' purposes, I will just say that these reactions make me feel blasé towards the game itself.