We got access to a team meeting of the Indian Premier League two hours before a game. Before we were allowed to enter the dressing room, we were frisked for wires, recording devices, diamonds, Swiss watches, semaphoric towels and wads of currency notes. The contact lists of our mobile phones were meticulously scrutinised, especially under 'B', we guess because they thought we would have the contact numbers of 'bookies' or 'bettor' there.
The boys ambled in along with the head coach, the assistant coaches for bowling, batting, fielding, and 30 sundry support staff. Everyone solemnly sat in a ring.
"So how'd ya all feel 'bout today's match?" the coach began in his gruff foreign drawl. The look on the faces of at least half the players showed they had neither understood what he had just said nor understood anything he had said in the past three weeks.
"Definitely, I sure I bowling and batting great in match," chirped one impish all-rounder. The coach's ears perked up, and being the expert who knows how to read the most obscure of cricketing clues, knew that the lad with the mangled English could be man of the match later that night.
"Attaboy, what makes ya so sure?" he asked, hoping to draw the rest of the team into a discussion of the opposition's weaknesses.
"Sirji," the all-rounder said, pulling the corners of his moustache, "I seeing in sleep I clean bowling to Kevin Pietersen, Sehwag Paaji, Yuvraj bhai and Yusuf bhai." The coach, expert in the ways of how sportsmen's minds work, kept to himself the thought that castling wretchedly out of form batsmen was hardly an omen of winning. But he was coach not for nothing. He would channel certainty of this sort to forge a win for his team, which had lost six in a row now.
"Good. Very good. I like your winning spirit," he said. Such optimism would surely percolate down to the team members, if he knew his sports psychology.
He whispered something to an assistant coach, who passed on the message to the next and to the next, so on down the line, until a gentleman dressed in the team colours and a pair of spiffily polished black brogues stood up. Speech mentor, whispered a Ranji reject sitting next to us. The said speech mentor handed a sheet of paper to the optimistic lad, who gratefully looked at the words he should recite at the presentation ceremony: "Thank you. I bowled … in the … right areas. I want … to thank my … team mates. We will … take a lot of… lot of… of … uh, um, po-ji-teevs… from the match."
As he memorised his speech, another lanky youth looked up sheepishly and mumbled, "The usual problem." Now what could that be? Promptly, a spectacled, grey-haired psychiatrist type reached out to him. "Cheerleader mentor," whispered our Ranji reject informant. It turned out that many of the cricketers were, for the first time in their lives, encountering pretty, white girls going ecstatically berserk whenever they hit a four or took a wicket. Having never been applauded even by a clap-happy eunuch earlier, the cheerleaders were a huge distraction that caused sleepless nights. But, no worries, the mentor with the anodyne to thwart disruptive cheerleading dreams was there to hold your hands.
Fancy that, we hadn't realised how professional an IPL franchise is nowadays. The Ranji reject with insider information disclosed there were other mentors around - for sledging, high-fiveing, gangnamming, why, even a mentor for cursing… his job apparently was to ensure the men vented frustration using ambiguous terms that could be interpreted variously at a hearing of the disciplinary panel. Now, throwing the bat at the bowler wouldn't quite do, would it?
Free Run is a fortnightly look at alternate realities
joel.rai@bsmail.in
