Hatewatching

Bitter and delicious like dark chocolate

It's that time again. A World Cup is hurtling towards the pointy end, and the air is thick with expectation and hope. The level of jeopardy is increasing with every match, which is fantastic for the neutrals, but too many of these tournaments leads to the excitement wearing a little thin. That’s when the real connoisseur craves a different kind of taste, the true caviar of competition: schadenfreude.

As I write this, South Africa's bowlers are squeezing England’s chase. I’m honestly more keen to watch Austria play Poland at the European Championships, but the possibility of England tripping over a garden shovel and getting hit on the head by its handle is way more delicious. England are lucky to be even playing this match. They were practically at the boarding gates, ready to take the flight to Heathrow, when the downpour in Antigua stopped and the cricket gods gifted them a ride back to the World Cup.

Across the pond, their star-studded football team is stumbling through another major tournament. There's a comforting familiarity to all of this. You know where this is going, that the cigarette on the floor is slowly burning Tom’s tail, but the scene is never not funny.

Look, it almost feels cruel at this point. This generation of English athletes – talented and likeable, all of them – deserve better. They don't deserve to be the punchline to the same jokes that have been dished out for decades. But there's something alluring about watching a team brimming with potential consistently find a way to undo all the goodwill.

Return to the Convent, by Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala, 1868. A group of monks laughing while a lone monk struggles with a donkey.

The Japanese have a saying: “The misfortunes of others taste like honey.” A version of this sentiment can be found in the French, Danish, Dutch, and Mandarin dictionaries. Or any language of your choice.

“To see others suffer does one good. To make others suffer even more so. This is a hard saying, but a mighty, human, all-too-human principle.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

But England are mere amateurs compared to the true masters of the dramatic implosion: Pakistan. Pakistani cricket is a Shakespearean tragedy unfolding on our screens and newspapers, and sometimes on the field. While others can be the occasional comedy skit, Pakistan are an operatic broadway show.

A team begins to show green shoots - a technically sound batter, a fiery pace bowler, maybe a plucky all-rounder. They get themselves into a strong patch of form. Suddenly, the PCB chairman changes, who changes the coach, who, in turn, wants their own set of players and possibly a new captain. This disorients the entire team. The captain isn't speaking to their best bowler, who is busy showcasing his unorthodox batting technique on Instagram reels. The most destructive batsman of the team is shuffled around the batting order like a random warranty card in a drawer. Some old warhorse is brought back for “experience”, while someone more deserving is left to watch from the sidelines. Later in the evening, a batch of ex-cricketers, a choir of Angry Bird characters, are on television admonishing the current team for being lackadaisical and not being up to the mark. Another set of ex-cricketers, never ones to miss a chance to be on TV, are on a competing channel, having a go at this first set of ex-cricketers for being too harsh on the team. The following week, members of the current squad are also on these TV channels, this time taking aim at the coach for being too demanding, while one of the ex-cricketers from the previous week is now the board president.

And all this is just one episode of a show that has been running for decades. It's a masterclass in self-sabotage, a high-wire act without a net, performed entirely blindfolded with death metal music blaring in their ears through noise-cancellation headphones. At times, you almost laud the players because they keep showing their talent in an environment as healthy as the exhaust nozzle of a 4x4 truck.

I promise you, there is no partisanship here, no joy being derived because Pakistan are supposed to be rivals. Okay, I’ll come clean, maybe a little bit but nothing more. In fact, this Pakistan team is legitimately a good bunch too. And after all these years of watching them, you begin to feel for them and their supporters. No serious fan should have to endure this for the most important years of their life.

There was a long stretch of time when the hilarity of watching a Pakistan fumble could only be topped by the joy of watching Australia slip. Especially as an Indian fan who endured the 1990s and 2000s, when you were only good enough until you had to face Australia. I remember this one time when Australia losing a game to Bangladesh prompted an otherwise stoic anchor to break into a smile while announcing the news. I have it on good authority that he interrupted an edit meeting at his channel just for this. One small loss for the Aussies, one giant holiday for mankind.

For decades, Australia were the sporting equivalent of that smug kid in school who aced every test, captained the athletics team, dated the head girl, and had the physique of a boxer. Even on their worst days, they were too good for everyone else.

At the 1999 Men’s ODI World Cup, they lost key games and were close to elimination a couple of times, but ended up winning it. Then came the 2003 World Cup, an unbeaten triumph, but with a couple of close shaves. At the 2007 edition, no one could come near them. Their women’s team have won 13 out of the 20 World Cups held across white-ball formats. At this moment, they are a handful of good games away from holding every major trophy in cricket, across gender and formats.

How do you watch a team like that with anything other than a potent cocktail of disgust, resentment, and hatred? For a while, at least, that loathing was fuelled by the way they – mostly the men – conducted themselves. They were a touch too abrasive, and always seemed to have a sledge forming on their lips. “Get ready for a broken fucken arm.”

When their castle fell apart after the sandpaper scandal in 2018, the collective glee around the cricket world was almost cathartic. Australian cricket was in the mud, and we were only too happy to see them marinate in it for a while longer. A new team was formed, a new captain brought out from the cold storage, and a coach famous for his grit was asked to fix the culture of the team. He came up with terms like Elite Honesty. A documentary crew from Amazon Prime was commissioned to follow them and turn them into coffee-loving cuties. Hilarious.

But 2018 happened when our generation had already grown up. It gave us a moment of devious joy, but not enough. See, the problem with growing up is, there is this pathetic itch to contextualise everything with information. So you go looking for articles and books. Maybe some interviews and autobiographies, anything to understand Australian cricket better. You scythe through Gideon Haigh and Peter Roebuck’s work. They speak from the inside, but without wearing the home jersey.

And then there is some commentary by those looking from outside. I am often reminded of an essay by Harsha Bhogle, written for Wisden Cricket Asia in the aftermath of India’s disastrous ODI World Cup in 2007.

I can’t recall the exact words, but there is a bit in that piece that I will never forget. While many senior Indian cricketers came into that World Cup after breaks and complained of rust, Harsha reminded us how we will never hear an Australian use that excuse. In the year that Shane Warne was banned from cricket for using performance enhancing drugs, he bowled hours upon hours of leg spin with a coach who wasn’t a fraction of the cricketer Warne was. Glenn McGrath, upon returning from a break to support his wife battling cancer, didn't expect an automatic first-team berth. He turned up for domestic cricket, regained his edge, and only then reclaimed his place in the national side.¹

“Australianism. It means that where the ‘impossible’ is within the realm of what the human body can do, there are Australians who believe that they can do it—and who have succeeded often enough to make us wonder if anything is impossible to them.” - John Arlott

There are a lot of things I like about being an adult, but admiring Australian cricket isn’t one of them. The disgust has turned into admiration for their work ethic, the rage into envy for the sporting culture that manages to serve up champion athletes on a conveyor belt.

And, with age, that envy is now as real as the rage once was. Their Test captain, one of the best cricketers in the world for the last six years, can bat, bowl, or field his team to victories. In this World Cup alone, he has taken hat-tricks in consecutive games. He neither sledges the opponent nor gives spicy headlines to reporters. To top it all, he is climate-conscious, looks like Clark Kent, and is playing out a career as one of the rarest species seen in cricket: a smiling fast bowler. Prior to the World Cup, he pledged unwavering support to the new T20 captain. The T20 captain, who cried at an awards function last year because playing under this Test captain was an honour, joked about benching the big shot just for the shits and giggles. Other members of this team are regular guests on a popular cricket-comedy podcast.

Fuck off. Why can’t you be a little chaotic, a little reality TV-esque?

Thankfully, because of the events of 19th November, 2023 - we should’ve trusted the GenZ kids; moving on is hard - a bit of that toxicity has found its way back into our hearts. In a couple of days, India will have the chance to tonk Australia out of the tournament. A random T20 World Cup is no revenge for that other thing, but we live for small mercies and devious joy. Bring it.

1. As an aside - imagine anyone writing an article like that today. They’d be hounded and chased out of sight by the fanboys on the streets and in the cricket board.