KOLKATA, March 18: The talk in Kolkata is why the Eden Gardens Stadium that can hold up to a 100,000 spectators has not seen a full house for the second Test with three days gone. Usually, whenever there has been a big match here, the impressive cauldron is jam-packed but not this time.

It is not that the match has been boring, the reason being cited is that it is examination time in India.

One police official at the stadium thought that there was just too much cricket being played, so people were losing interest.

No way. If all those centimeters that the newspapers are devoting to cricket and the seemingly endless coverage that the television channels here are giving the Test series, only goes to show how much the people love this game.

Indeed a half-full Eden may not be the right yardstick to judge the game’s popularity. But pick up any paper and you will find pages and pages of cricket.

Be it a visit to a saloon by heartthrob Shahid Afridi or a trip to a local food joint by captain Inzamamul Haq, everything makes for news.

And a Times of India front-page lead on Wednesday that screamed “Mush googly stumps India,” said it all, as the paper wrote that the president had made a clever move in choosing New Delhi for his forthcoming trip to watch the sixth and final One-day International. So it is cricket and only cricket that everyone is talking about.