ICC Cricket World Cup 2015: The Terrace talk

The 2015 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand is bound to be a visual delight but it won’t awe us Indians as much as the ‘92 edition did. We look at few of the reasons that makes the ‘92 tournament an unparalled event in our cricketing history.

Home theatre

For a large part of the cricketing world outside Australia and England, who weren’t used to classy broadcasting quality, the visual-feast of ‘92 was quite something else. The 1985 images from Benson & Hedges world championship caught the freshness and frenticism of ODIs – that swooshy woody sound of stumpings done by Sadanand Viswanath remains a grunt of nostalgia for that generation – but it was still not large-scale world-over phenomenon like ‘92. It wasn’t the World Cup after all. By then, television technology too had developed even more in Australia, and TV sets had entered more homes across India. The brodacasting is world-class now but back then it seemed out-of-the-world.

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Studio-talk
Australia’s state-run Channel 9 produced stunning coverage but India wasn’t quite ready to receive those pictures. Until ‘92. Cable TV had just begun to enter post liberalisation and concepts like studio-talk, with Sunil Gavaskar, started streaming through in that tournament in Prime Sports, one of the five channels from Hong Kong-based Star company. It was a little-big moment in Indian sports coverage. Those hurried talks and brief insights and awkward smiles with former legends were new and caught the imagination.

Fly like Jonty

No one had flown through the air to take out the stumps quite like that before. For starters, they would have tried throwing the ball. But Jonty Rhodes couldn’t be blamed for thinking he could out-run Inzamam and when things got tight, he simply chose to fly. A visual tatoo on our brains. It wasn’t that fielding standards were substandard before but combined with better television coverage and phenomenon like Jonty, the ‘92 edition triggered a widespread adulation for fielding as an artform, and as something to be emulated.

India’s royal blue

There were those traditional tri-series in Australia in the 80’s but they obviously didn’t have such an impact on Indian psyche like the ‘92 did. Where purists saw white flannels as classy tradition, the coloured clothing dismantled a sense of formal-ness. People loved it. Even today, many Indian fans are wistful of the dark blue apparel Indians wore in that tournament.

Grassbanks of joy
It still boggles us but it’s largely sadness that we don’t have it but back then it startled us – those dreamy grass banks in stadiums, with men and women lying down, with kids playing around them, and people always drinking or eating something. In some grounds, the families even cooked at the back in barbeques. ‘92 offered several such sights from New Zealand in particular, and also the joyous and boisterous bonhomie of Australian crowd watching cricket in such envious comfort.

The Jadeja catch

When the debutant Ajay Jadeja exuberantly ran in from a boundary in New Zealand cricket stadium to a head-on collision with the ball, several Indian living rooms, or ‘halls’ as we called them then, would have heard gasps. What is he doing with that move? And when Jadeja dived full stretch, straight-ahead, and came up cupping the ball to dismiss Allan Border, the gasp had turned joyous. The earlier generation had great close-in catchers like Eknath Solkar, safe slipcatchers like Sunil Gavaskar, and a rare athleticsm in taking aerial catches like Kapil Dev had famously done in 1983, and wiry Azharuddin but with substandard coverage. However, the fans weren’t used to acrobatism in the outfield. That day Jadeja triggered delight and new hope that fielding standards can improve a bit more, as it has done in the current generation.