Having been born in India (Polur, Tamil Nadu, to be precise), I grew up on a steady diet of my mum’s delicious South Indian “strictly vegetarian” food and cricket. Having six older brothers to play cricket with really helps to have cricket ingrained in your body, mind and soul, when you are a kid. Since my family was too far from any stadia and just couldn’t afford to send us to matches in Madras or have a television at home, the tradition of listening to radio commentary of cricket matches was an assumed birth right in our family and we would stay up at all hours of night listening to “short wave radio” of matches taking place at faraway places in distant countries, with commentary wafting through the magic box describing the action in fancy accents. Sure, if you wanted to play cricket, all I had to do was pester one of my brothers or just take my family’s “Sunny Tonny” bat out on the street and it was easy enough to find a bunch of boys for a quick “bet match”. [A “bet match” is a common occurrence in India, even today, where the winner of the match wins a “bet” – anything from a few rupees to a “cork” ball or your sister. No, I’m just kidding on the rupees part.]
The addiction with cricket only got worse as I got older – playing for my school team and discovering that I had the natural ability to bowl inswingers and hence, shifting from being an opening bat to a medium pacer. It further worsened when I went to a college where I stayed in a hostel – no parental supervision and cable TV meant I could watch as much cricket as I wanted and more importantly, whenever I wanted, which was basically all the time. I remember back to the days of watching on STAR Sports, the domestic cricket from Bangladesh!!! Yikes.
Having made a career move to pursue higher studies in the U.S.A. (a combination of being from Southern India where it was pretty much a norm – get a college degree in Engineering and ship up to the U.S.), I failed to recognize a potential breakup with the first love in my life till I landed in the U.S. They told me I could maintain the long distance relationship but I had to do all the work! It was the dark ages of internet – no Cricinfo, no hokey-pokey streams, no Willow TV and my love affair was doomed to expire, similar to the millions of cricket crazy ex-pats.
It was the summer of 1999 and couple of my mates figured out a way to catch the World Cup in England. Let’s just buy a satellite dish and get the subscription for this one tournament alone. Since we were all PIGS (Poor Indian Graduate Students), we formed a pool of PIGS that chipped in and decided to have the dish installed in a mate’s balcony. Watching Tendulkar crack that century only a day after cremating his father and the South Africans choking away the semifinals (and a small amount of India beating Pakistan) was well worth the effort of a few dish-installing, cricket-subscribing pioneers at the Penn State University. Soon, the word would spread across campuses in the U.S. and stories of brave graduate students shelling out the big bucks to install satellite dishes to watch cricket reached back to us and it warmed our hearts that we had started a trend in the U.S.
Soon cricket related sites started popping up on the internet with cricket.org leading the way which eventually morphed in to Cricinfo. Still, there was no viable and cheap (meaning free) way to watch all the cricket that I wanted to.
Typical cricket watching set up
My stay continued and continued in Pennsylvania with no cricket solution in sight. In the mean time, the great series of 2001 and Natwest 2002 had happened (you know the ones I am talking about, right?) and I could only follow the ball-by-ball on Cricinfo and wait for the DVDs to come out to relive the action. The world cup in South Africa (2003) rolled around and we went back to the routine of satellite dish installation. It was during this tournament that a decision was made to revive Cricket at Penn State. Apparently, Cricket was played here in the late 1800’s and much of the 20th century as well but died many frequent and sudden deaths, only to be brought back to life by ex-pats. And so, the Cricket club was formed yet again and it was decided that the team from the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania would travel to New Jersey and Washington D.C. areas to play competitive league cricket in summer. That’s 220 miles one-way homies, every weekend (16-20 weekends in a summer) to play Cricket and these clubs teams were mostly Indian students but there were a few Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Aussies and Trinidadians thrown in once in a while. I am in the 8th year of doing this routine of traveling on weekends. Dear Former Prime Minister of Australia John Howard, Don’t even bring that “Cricket Tragic” shit to us. Ever. Okay? You have no freaking idea what that is.
Now that Willow TV pretty much covers all the action and for times when that cannot happen, there are always dinky streams. Kids coming to the U.S. these days don’t have a hard time catching up on live cricketing action from across the globe. I am soon to be 34 years old and married and my wife turns away to shield her eyes from the bright light coming from my laptop that I keep by bedside to watch the beautiful sport. During any marquee series such as India-Australia, Ashes etc., I cannot wait for the highlights to come up and have to catch the matches live. This usually means I am staying up really late or waking up at midnight and going in to work with only 1-2 hours of sleep. I become a caffeine-filled zombie for a few weeks and my personal life takes a huge hit. But as I tell my wife, “In all fairness, Cricket came in to my life first”.
So deary readers, what did you have to do to keep up with the cricket? Let me know.
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Article by Subash Jayaraman
Clear Cricket 
Shridhar Jaju
December 8, 2010
I went to a fully-residential boarding school at the age of 11 (in the year 2000) and had to miss out on a lot of cricket. I have had to follow most of India’s cricket on radio commentary over the next 6 years.
The one match that I did manage to catch live was the World Cup 2003 match against Pakistan (Sachin’s 98). I, along with a group of friends had decided that we would watch this match, by hook or by crook. We were not allowed to watch television in our dormitories and the only few sets of televisions available on campus (which itself was located on a hill… miles away from any other civilisation) were in the cottages of a few of the administrative staff. So here’s what we did…
We picked the names of four such TV-owning staff members who we thought would be kind enough to let us view the score every once in a while. When the match started, we knocked on the first one’s door and asked the permission to watch the match for 10 minutes. When the time was up, we left and begged to be allowed to return after half an hour. During that half hour, we covered the other 3 staff members with the 10-minute stints. That is how we watched that entire match!
Oh man, those were good old school days! Hearing the commentators scream on radio when Harbhajan got his hat-trick and listening to Ashish Nehra speak in what I assumed must be his version of English language after that remarkable 6-for at Durban against England in World Cup 2003 are some other moments that I don’t think I’ll ever forget!
thecricketcouch
December 9, 2010
@Sridhar – Welcome to the site. Appreciate your comment and the story. When I was little, we had no TV in my house and we had to go to a neighbor’s house or a friend’s place to watch the match and/or the highlights (you know how it is in India). Your idea of 10 minutes in each staff’s house sounds pretty brilliant. I regret not watching 2001 series live and only on cricinfo and later on DVD.
Gaurav
December 8, 2010
As someone who came to the US in 2006, I guess I am a pampered grad student. Streams available easily for any cricket match I want to watch. Not for me, the travails you went through. Mwahahahaha.
But there was a similar, if less difficult period of life when in India. In the early part of the decade, when DD had exclusive rights to home games, they started this DD Sports BS. They charged a very high rate for it. Most cable operators didn’t shell out the dough; ours certainly didn’t. DD of course, showed the ODIs on the free channel, but tests only on their paid channel. As if to tease us unfortunate souls, they showed only the first and last hour of play on the national free channel. Everything in between, DD Sports.
So THAT 2001 India-Australia series, I could only watch the first and last hours of. Luckily, Harbhajan’s hattrick happened in the last hour. The Eden match itself (and the Chennai test) ended in the final hour. So luckily, we caught the crucial moments. But missed the sheer joy of watching all of Laxman’s 281 live. Was reduced to following it on cricinfo like you poor sods.
thecricketcouch
December 9, 2010
@Gaurav – you are a pampered little bastard. Not only were there any streams to speak of, back in the day, there was no concept of wireless internet either and no profusion of laptops. So, you had to go to someone’s place that had a computer or camp out in your grad lab to even follow the text commentary. Praise be to Mick Jagger for Jagged Networks that we started getting some coverage online. I am glad DD Sports made you suffer at least a little bit 🙂
Rishabh
December 9, 2010
I actually didn’t like cricket for most of my pre-teen life, for the mere reason that my dad always watched it when I wanted to watch cartoons. I was converted (very effectively) by THAT one-day run chase against England when I was around 12, but it took my nerd ass a couple of years to get around to following it the way I do now. As TV packages got more expensive, my parents decided not to have sports channels at home, so that no one (me) was distracted from their priorities.
I kept up with the game on newspapers and frantically switching between NDTV and Zee News, because radio commentary wasn’t really there. This was an issue for quite some time, because even though I knew of online streams, the internet was pretty slow so that wasn’t an option. I started to visit friends to “play squash” when important matches were on, so that was pretty much everyday when the IPL started.
In late 2009 my parents finally had DishTV installed. But guess what? I transferred to a Uni in Canada. The internet is crazy fast though, and I manage to catch most of it on the shitty streams, even though the majority of cricket goes on through the night.
thecricketcouch
December 9, 2010
@Billy – I am glad to hear you got your head screwed on straight post-teen years. I’ll blame the misguided adolescence for your not liking cricket.
Shridhar Jaju
December 9, 2010
@thecricketcouch, your post and then reading all the comments that are being written has really put me back into the nostalgic mode. I am just 22 today… and like I said earlier, I had moved out of home into a boarding school at 11. So I have spent half my life out of home, trying to catch cricket in whichever form and whatever quantities it was humanly possible to do so.
There are so many more incidents (other than the one I have already written above) that are coming flooding back into my memory after reading all that is being written here. I remember once I had had a fight with my best buddy and we weren’t speaking to each other… till Herschelle Gibbs engineered a chase of 438! We even forgot what the fight was all about!
There were times when we used to play our mini-version of Super Selector amongst friends. I remember how I always chose Ganguly in my team during his bad patch of 2005-06 because he was the favourite player of the girl I had a crush on!
I will stop myself here… because if I don’t, then I can go on and on and on… But I must say, I loved your post and a trip down my own memory lane that followed.
thecricketcouch
December 9, 2010
” I remember how I always chose Ganguly in my team during his bad patch of 2005-06 because he was the favourite player of the girl I had a crush on!”
-Classic. Can’t blame you buddy. Your heart is in the right place.
Viren
December 10, 2010
What about things we did to play cricket? I’m not a morning person, never have been but as far as I can remember I have always woken up early to play cricket. As a kid, waking up at 6 am to go and get on the ground so that you can get a pitch of your choice (or get one at all), sneaking out of home in the afternoon when I was supposed to nap and putting up with kids who took their bats, balls when they left because their mom wouldn’t let them play, leaving the match stranded, and fighting with neighbors who took your bat away because you broke their glass window (again), or apologizing to the lady who got hit by the rubber ball, knocking her down. Those red rubber balls had a very short life and we were always in want of one. This one time I even stole money (a whole of Rs 3.5) to buy a red rubber ball but was caught red handed (pun intended) and sort of learning a lesson of life – all by just a want of playing cricket 🙂
And till date, playing a proper one-day (40/45 overs) even after 2 hours of sleep, half hung-over after being sloshed at night, or a few times even without any sleep, and/or after having driven for 4 hours to play in a league match.. things we do for cricket!
knowledge_eater
December 11, 2010
I missed a lot of cricket, a lot, but I played more cricket than watch. It always been the case even when I was in India. I can only sympathize with your early situation, now, it’s very easy. But, Cricket will never go out of the system, no matter what country you live in. In younging days, we used to start playing cricket with anything, with everything, anywhere. Even I remember we used to make ball from garbage paper and rolled with lot of rubber bands, since there was not enough room to pitch the ball in class room, so we used to use lunch box as a bat and that ‘special ball’ and particular wall of classroom becomes either 2/3 runs according to tough ness of the shot….
I doubt it people do this kind of things anymore. I have fully enjoyed cricket in my child-hood, not only cricket all other sports. I am so glad that I couldn’t have enjoyed all sort of things, if Iwas brought up in high-class rich family. I mean who would make slippers as a bat and cricket ball from garbage!! It’s all un-real. I am blessed with my life. I have been lucky. I don’t know how many tubelights, we have crashed, … it’s all coming back … haha Name calling in gully cricket … etc.
Thanks for bringing back memories. I didn’t have to do match other than wake-up at 4 O’clock to watch World cup matches and gather around in friends house. It wasn’t awkward at all haha. But, I had been lucky where I have gone Cricket was there to play. I have always spent more time playing cricket than watching, and playing cricket was always cheaper close to free, compare to how much people used to pay early to watch.
Cheers. Thanks for bringing those memories.
thecricketcouch
December 18, 2010
@Eater — any flat piece of wood became an impromptu bat and i have played cricket with rocks, even crumpled paper as a ball. There was a period when we would roll up a few small stones in to a newspaper and cut cycle tube in to rings and put the rings around the paper to make it in to ball. It gave you bounce and at the same movement off the pitch. Good times.
Nishant
December 13, 2010
No cable connection at home during the 90s, so had to wait for the afternoon or night news bulletins to get the score.
And when you were unlucky to be travelling on match days, it became even more difficult.
thecricketcouch
December 18, 2010
I remember the days of begging uncles on train to borrow their transistor radios to listen to commentary!!
Goutham Chakravarthi
December 15, 2010
Awesome work! I remember having spent enough nights doing what you did and showing up at work like a zombie!
thecricketcouch
December 18, 2010
@Goutham – Yeah and this zombie routine is still ongoing. 🙂