January 30, 2003

Next week, the Cricket World Cup will begin in South Africa. Most of us are familiar with the ins and outs of this momentous event, but for those of you who need further education, Bina Shah offers you enlightened opinions and observations on this phenomenon. Be warned though: by the time you finish reading this you may feel more confused than before you started.

(*Editor’s note: “Idiot” refers to the people writing this guide, not those reading it.)

Q. Which religious festival is celebrated by the most people all across the planet?

a. Christmas b. Eid c. Divali d. The birth anniversary of Buddha

Never mind if you hated multiple-choice tests in school, this is a trick question. The answer is none of the above, or, more precisely, The World Cup.

Contrary to official statistics, cricket is the true religion of the Commonwealth, occupying a place far superior to other faiths. The World Cup, its major celebration, occurs just once every four years, making it far superior to the paltry joys that are experienced through more mundane religious traditions.

Imagine strangling yourself with the decorations for your Christmas tree, playing the Grim Reaper by sacrificing countless heads of cattle, developing chemical allergies to the coloured water thrown on your skin, or eating jalebies until you end up in the hospital with severe ulcers. You can do this every year, but only once every four years are we mortals given the chance to worship at the altar of the cricket gods.

The rules of worship are simple: for one month you must sacrifice your life, your career, your family, and your powers of reason to sit in front of the television like a zombie and watch one day matches all day long. Capitalism, that other great religion, has tried to get a piece of the action by offering free trips and lucky prizes for its minions to go to South Africa and watch in person, but failing that you can sell your soul to the devil and lease out a big screen television which will take you twenty years to pay off (but you’ll get another four World Cups out of it).

You must swear allegiance to one team, usually the team of your country of origin, and buy the T-shirt and pants that your team wears, even if it is in a disgusting colour like lime green or neon blue and makes your legs look like pipe cleaners dipped in fluorescent paint. Finally, you must tithe your earnings to this faith by placing bets on your team’s performance which you are unlikely to ever win, given the fact that on any day your team’s star player will probably injure himself in the pre-game warm up exercises and be dramatically taken off the field in a stretcher.

It is said that cricket originated in Britain somewhere in the eighteenth century, when the game was played with the heads of executed French aristocrats imported especially from Paris to amuse the British monarchy. However, this sport was too costly for commoners, and the decapitated heads were replaced by a round hard ball that, when thrown properly, itself had the ability to decapitate the unprotected batsman.

Colonists took cricket to America, where it morphed into the ugly creature we know today as baseball, but when cricket came to the subcontinent it retained its pure, unadulterated form, and was adopted by the Asian masses with such popularity that the Christian missionaries lodged a formal protest in 1857 with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The rumor that cricket was to be banned for brown-skinned people was said to have been the real reason for the beginning of the Indian Mutiny in the same year.

Skipping all that history, however, we see cricket today being worshiped by millions all around the globe. Teams from Australia, India, New Zealand, Kenya, Holland, Namibia, England, Pakistan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, the West Indies, and Bangladesh ensure that this year’s World Cup will cross ethnic, cultural, religious, and national boundaries. The introduction this year of a Canadian and Holland cricket team shows that its popularity has extended into North America and continental Europe, although polite Dutchmen and Canadians will probably find themselves at a total loss when confronted with the match-fixing, sledging, corruption and general sleaze that permeates the game today. But even the most holy of religions has faced problems in the hands of man.

It’s not just a man’s game

It’s a fact that more divorces take place in the subcontinent during the month of the World Cup than any other month in the entire year. This is because women tend to feel terribly neglected by their husbands while the tournament is on. However, women should not feel left out of the World Cup fun; there is something for everyone during this special time.

Back in 1987 when the World Cup was taking place in India and Pakistan, the Pakistani team played a match at the National Stadium in Karachi. The crowd screamed and cheered every time someone hit a four or a six — that is, the men screamed while the women looked bored and fed their children and did their nails. This continued until the moment Imran Khan decided he was feeling hot, took off his shirt and doused himself with cold water. Immediately, every man fell silent while every woman in the stadium began to shriek so loudly that all the floodlights in the stadium immediately exploded. The women grabbed the binoculars from their male companions to watch the spectacle; girls leaned out of their boxes and held up signs saying, “MARRY ME IMRAN”. Khan did not comply with their requests to strip down to his boxers, but he seemed quite reluctant to put his shirt back on.

So, taking that piece of history as a cue, women can amuse themselves plenty by speculating day and night about who is the cutest cricketer, which player they would most like to marry, and so on. They can torture their husbands by comparing their spouses’ flabby physiques to the toned, sculpted bodies of the athletes. “Why can’t you look like Wasim Akram, darling, look at his muscles and his full head of hair, the closest thing you’re going to get to being a sportsman is the tire you’ve got around your stomach” and words to this effect should make the most cricket-mad man reluctant to turn on his television during family hour for fear of complete and total humiliation. Women can even train their children to join in the fun: “Daddy, I bet you could never hit a six on the cricket field, you couldn’t even open that jar of achaar the other day at dinner.”

Unless they can travel to South Africa, though, the women of Pakistan will miss out on one of their most favourite pastimes during cricket season: going to the five star hotels and hanging out in the lobby for a glimpse of their favourite players. Whenever a match is played in town, the beauty salons see more business than during the wedding season as girls flock to the parlours to have hair cuts, manicures, pedicures, and other esoteric treatments in order to dazzle the cricketers’ eyes. Boutiques sell out their best clothes; hotel managers suffer nervous breakdowns trying to keep girls from roaming all over the hotel in search of their hot favourites. The city authorities must be breathing a sigh of relief that the tournament is not being held in Pakistan, as they will successfully avoid not only the threat of terrorist attacks, but also the risk of police raids, paternity suits, and honor killings that inevitably dog the World Cup and its contestants.

World Cup predictions

We at The Review do not claim to be any sort of cricket gurus, and if you’re looking for a serious assessment of each competing team’s chances, we suggest you watch “Harsha Online” or consult www.cricket.org (consult your local bookie at your own risk). However, we have come up with a few predictions based on previous performances, individual player characteristics, and that all-important factor, the Hand of God.

* Shoaib Akhtar will sprain his shoulder, both wrists, both knees, and his groin the night before every important Pakistani match. The evening of the match, he will be seen dancing in a Cape Town nightclub with three blonde women who he will later claim were his South African relatives.

* In a similar episode, Brian Lara will come down with a mysterious illness the night before a crucial West Indies pool match. He will be spotted playing golf in Barbados the following day.

* Nasser Hussein will lose his characteristic cool after repeated sledging by the Australian team. In a fit of road rage, he will attack Steve Waugh with his cricket bat, and clock him on the head, effectively putting Waugh into permanent retirement.

* Hansie Cronje will return to South African cricket after revealing that his death last year was just a hoax. He will not be allowed to play until he can prove that he was not paid big money to disappear.

* Shane Warne will bring his pet pig along as a good luck mascot. The Australian team will be fined for allowing the pig to play as the eleventh member of the team. Pakistan and Bangladesh will protest that they cannot play against an unclean animal, and will argue that it is impossible to tell the pig apart from Warne.

* Inzamam-ul-Haq will effectively petition for a Big Mac truck to come on field during breaks along with the Coke truck, the Pepsi truck, the ice cream truck, and the cotton candy truck.

* Robert Mugabe will replace all white players on the Zimbabwean team with black players who do not know how to play cricket. They will occupy the cricket pitch and claim property rights to the stadium in Johannesburg.

* The entire Bangladeshi cricket team will be stranded on the way to South Africa by a giant cyclone. However, true to their plucky nature, they will hitch a ride on a Japanese cargo ship taking animals to the Pretoria Zoo and survive the trip by eating the animals. The introduction of animal protein into their diet will give them enough fire to make it to the semifinals.

* The Canadian team’s only contribution to the World Cup will be to make “Eh?” the official motto of the tournament.

* The Indian team will threaten to use their nuclear bomb on every other nation in the tournament if they do not win. The regular players will be replaced by Bollywood film actors, making them the crowd favourites. Shahrukh Khan will charm the umpires into reversing all negative decisions against the team during play.

* The New Zealand team will obtain special prayers and spiritual aid from Maori priests. This will not help them win the tournament, but they will be the most peaceful team throughout the whole tournament. The priests will offer full-body tattoos as a sideline event during the matches.

* The Dutch team will be the second most peaceful team throughout the tournament, due to their exemption from dope-testing rules. They will be allowed to smoke marijuana all day as a result, and will be so blissed out that even the Canadian team will defeat them in the pool matches.

* Nobody will recognize the Namibian team and they will not be allowed entry into any of their venues or even their base camp.

* In a charity match to raise money for cancer victims at Imran Khan’s Shaukat Khanum Hospital, the blind Pakistani cricket team will defeat the real Pakistani cricket team by seven hundred runs.

So, readers, even if you can’t fly to South Africa to be there, you can sit back and enjoy the fun coming up for you this February. George Bush Jr. may try to steal the show by waging war on Iraq, but we in the subcontinent all know where our television dials are going to be, and it definitely will not be CNN.

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