One of the most beautiful aspects of Cricket is the diversity in playing conditions that are found all across the globe. International Cricket isn’t just fun to watch because of the variety in skill-levels of players from different countries, but also because of how differently surfaces react in different parts of the world. The pace & bounce of the hard soil of the Optus Stadium is juxtaposed with the sharp turn & bounce of the red soil in Wankhede. Both of these are incredible spectacles for someone who truly enjoys watching the sport.
However, there have been plenty of pseudo-enjoyers that have plagued Cricket in the recent years. The advent of T20 is what one would presume gave rise to the pseudo-enjoyers. This group is characterized by an incessant attachment for those aspects of the game that are filled with excitement, and they have a disdain for those aspects that makes, and have made the sport into what it actually is. Their obsession with high-scoring games and a flurry of big-hits, wickets & stunning catches tends to forget about the things that lead up to those events.
The pseudo-enjoyer can never find joy in the session-long toil of batters surviving, in the beating of the bat on numerous occasions by a spinner on a raging turner, in the grind of scoring runs on a slow, low wicket. The saddest part about this is that not only is the pseudo-enjoyer a part of the crowd, but he has managed to sneak into the administrative parts of our sport, poisoning & trading the sanctity of Cricket in the name of dopamine & eyeballs. This is what the sacking of the Lucknow pitch curator tells us, that in today’s context, a 99/8 in 20 overs will never be able to compete with a 230/3 in 20 overs. It should come as no surprise then that the longer versions of the sport are crying out loud for context, because the days of nuanced Cricket-watching have well and truly become a thing of the past.
-Vibhor Dubey
The Average Cricketer 