JOGA BONITO? SEEMINGLY dripping in soccer frenzy and in glowing rage of the new line of commercials, there’s this im-mediate urge to compare the Ronaldinhos with the Tendulkars, the Peles with the Gavaskars. Cricket needs its own line of en-dorsement, Indian cricket especially. Other-wise, those beautiful remembrances—Gun-dappa Vishwanath’s oh-so-late cuts, Azhar’s flicks from the middle stump, Bishen Bedi’s tossed-up deliveries and the reflexes of Ek-nath Solkar—would be lost forever in this un-ending obsession to rake in millions.However, some of the most memorable moments of Indian cricket cannot be encap-sulated in images of the cricket field alone; there are ample instances where issues and individuals have proved larger than the ga-me, players and administrators included. So any attempts to trace the history of Indian cricket would be incomplete, even unfair, without looking it at from that perspective.Cricket at Fever Pitch is in like an album of cricket in our times. Khalid Ansari has had a view from beyond the boundary for close to 40 years now. In his columns—many for Sportsweek and a large majority from his col-umn, Khalidoscope, for Mid-Day—he has brought reflective assessments catching the small and the big pictures, the sidelights and the main events. This is a compilation of some of those articles.That Tiger Pataudi played his cricket with one eye is well known but how many, for in-stance, are aware that he wasn’t willing to take a three-month lay-off from the game to get his weak eye refocused with contact lenses and instead went straight to the nets to learn to play with one eye? Or the fact that Kapil Dev featured in the list of Best XI portly cricketers in the world!From those gems of an older, gentler time, it can come as a sudden shock to read of the inscrutable workings of the BCCI and the bushel of controversies courted by Saurav Ganguly. But then, as Ansari would surely say, that’s cricket.
