Notes From the World Cup: Memories of Premadasa and Batting Problems

India vs Pakistan, Colombo

“The Premadasa wants you to come back.”

I was making my first trip to Colombo, and at long last, a debut at the R Premadasa Stadium - the venue of many, many chestburns for Indian fans of a certain age. Sumit, Mumbai-bred and Colombo-seasoned, watches every international game when he’s in town. There’s nothing like live sport, he said. It was hard to disagree with him in principle, and harder still to agree because anyone who has stood in the crush of an Indian stadium knows it’s not always the easy sell it sounds.

We stopped at the coffee shop on the left turn that opens to the Premadasa’s southern gates. The coffee was made with chicory and passed through a metal filter, similar to the brew famous in south India as filter coffee. This one almost burnt my tongue. Better times ahead, Sumit told me. “There’s beer inside.”

The Premadasa truly does want you back. Food and drink are everywhere you look, water is easy to find, there’s space between seats, the washrooms are clean, and dustbins are placed every ten seats.

I carry two abiding memories from my trips to the Premadasa. The first is the papare band.

Papare is a form of brass-heavy music that originated in Negombo in Sri Lanka. What began as an exotic way of playing popular songs at festivals wandered along to churches, weddings, and even religious celebrations. Soon enough, school grounds and stadiums wanted to get in on the party.

The R Premadasa’s papare band sits under the awning of one of the grand stands. These are middle-aged men born for music. They wear Hawaiian shirts, crack jokes with the stranger sitting a row below, break for beer and pineapple, and tell you stories from the wedding they played at the previous weekend.

Listening to them is an experience. The pieces follow each other like they’re part of a live, mildly-chaotic Rube Goldberg machine. A bass drum starts the beat, the hand-snare sets the pace, trumpets carry the melody, a trombone slides in with the countermelody, and a cymbal raises the energy every eight bars. At times, a saxophone peels off on a choral solo.

They truly get music’s physicality, the things it can do to your body. Their playlist has everything - Baila and Bollywood, Sinhalese and Tamil, an Indipop chorus from the ‘90s - all set to a marching rhythm and an air of joy. If you’re around, you will, inevitably, find yourself bobbing your head and tapping your feet. At least.

The second memory involved a bunch of drunks.

Inside the stadium, Tiger Beer kiosks were placed every, say, twenty metres in the gangway, with a permission to carry a cup to your seat and drink in peace. As the sun dipped into the Bay of Bengal and the Colombo sky turned purple, some gentlemen, possibly steeped in one too many Tigers, made their way to our stand, with more beer dripping from the rim of their plastic cups.

The brass band belted out one Bollywood classic after another, and these guys danced, quite literally, as if no one was watching. Celebration of wickets, unlikely; celebration of life, certainly. Mid-chug, a couple of them saw my India shirt and asked me to dance along with them as the melody transitioned to Chak De India. There was only one rule: I had to sing Chak De Sri Lanka.

Now, here’s the deal. I grew up in Delhi. Twenty years in Noida and Gurgaon and Ghaziabad, not to mention four mind-bending years in Amity University, can leave your relationship with alcohol-enthusiasts on a fork. You either think their physical and mental state is an elevated form of being. Or you learn to stay at least fifty miles away from men who like to rub tummies with you while exaggeratedly shaking their, erm, unathletic bosoms.

So, naturally, being a true Amity and Gurgaon graduate, I couldn’t completely turn the other way, even though I was a touch apprehensive. They sensed that apprehension and started dancing even closer to me, which left me with no option but to spring up with Sukhwinder’s second verse and shake my own unathletic torso. Half the stand was dancing anyway.

We finished Chak De India Sri Lanka, followed it up with Kajra Re, turned around to see Dunith Wellalage twinkle the Indian batters back to the pavilion, and finished with an extended version of Alisha Chinai’s Made In India.

I texted Sumit to check if he’s going for the India-W vs Pakistan-W game. “Not in town, but expecting to see Pathum Nissanka jerseys sandwiched between Virat Kohli and Babar Azam jerseys ;)”

Colombo has thrown the gates of the Premadasa open. Tickets for all World Cup games are free. And yet, the crowd comes in trickles. Some blue shirts, a couple of green ones, travellers wearing England jerseys, but they’re patches amongst wide swathes of plastic seats. Around 4:30pm local time, a stream of schoolchildren pour in, some wearing World Cup merchandise, others wearing school-team shirts.

The form-guide paints a picture of contrasts. India have never lost a Women’s ODI game to Pakistan. They come in hot - having won 26 out of 40 games in the last World Cup cycle. Pakistan, on the other hand, have won only 13 of 34 games in that time - 8 of which came against Bangladesh, Ireland, Scotland, and Thailand.

Then, there’s the discourse. The bile from the men’s Asia Cup has spilled over to this game too. Days before the game, BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia made it clear that handshakes were out of the question. At the toss, captains Harmanpreet and Fatima Sana barely look at each other.

You wonder where this line leads. Will it soon be acceptable to completely shed civility when you’re wearing national colours? How far are we from shoulder barges and headbutts?

There was another world where the match almost didn’t happen. Saturday’s game between Australia and Sri Lanka got washed out. The weather forecast for Sunday, too, was all thunderstorms and scattered showers. The rain, mercifully, stayed away, even if most of the game was played under dark rainclouds.

India started well. Smriti Mandhana pulled Sadia Iqbal for a first-ball four. In the second over, Pratika Rawal creamed Diana Baig for three sumptuous cover-drives. The hot knife through butter metaphor is overdone, sure, but these shots truly evoked that kind of imagery, with the shapes Pratika’s bat made through the air and the crisp, wafery sound of the ball pinging off it. Pratika’s stay was brief, but the knock left you wanting more.

The middle-overs slowdown came, sure as a law, once Smriti and Pratika left. It’s now becoming a bit of an alarming theme of watching the middle order drift aimlessly whenever India lose Smriti early.

To their credit, Pakistan’s spinners - Sadia Iqbal, Rameen Shamim, and Nashra Sandhu - bowled mechanically precise lines, choking all boundary or strike-rotation options. Nashra gave the ball a lot of air and no pace; Sadia darted it with the arm, all skiddy pace and no air.

The first 30 overs saw 113 dots - nearly 19 overs of nothing when you should be setting the pace. Australia, England, and New Zealand will most definitely not let India off the hook for this kind of lag.

Diana Baig got Harmanpreet, then thought she had Jemimah too, until the no-ball siren rang out and blessed Jemimah with another life. The next ball, as such things go, was thwacked for four. Life, eh?

Jemimah, lively as she sounds, injected the innings with energy. She ran at every chance, hit the occasional boundary, and dragged the otherwise languid Harleen Deol to push for the extra run whenever the opportunity arose.

Harleen got out for 45 off 65 balls - a much-needed consolidation but one that should’ve had more urgency.

Soon after, the game stopped for fumigation. Yup. After thirty minutes of flies and bugs swirling around the pitch, occasionally floating up next to a bowler’s eye, the players left the field and a gas mask-wearing Batman villain-impersonator sprayed repellent from a large canister. Does industrial-grade repellent smell the same as Baygon? One can only hope.

The break took away the batters’ concentration. Jemimah missed one from Nashra Sandhu in the first over back. India were then five down, with just 159 on the board and 15 long overs still to go. Deepti Sharma and Sneh Rana were left to carry the batting, with Richa Ghosh the only real option left. The saving grace, if you wanted one, was Pakistan’s record; against a stronger side this would have felt like peering over the edge.

The situation only got worse. Rana and Sharma trudged along at a pace fit for ODI cricket in the late ‘90s, and just as they looked ready to press, Pakistan picked them off in consecutive overs. The innings, which had seemed to be balancing itself, dipped again.

Richa Ghosh came out swinging. She swung cleanly, twice sending the ball high and long. One strike was so pure you could loop it to Shankar Mahadevan’s Breathless, raise the snare’s accent, and post it on Instagram with the reasonable expectation it would do numbers. It was a conscious decision to hold her back for the late overs, as Tarutr observed here, and it paid off handsomely.

Even so, 247 was not a good score. But against a batting side liable to crack under pressure, it passed for competitive. India had defended 244 at the last World Cup, which gave the target at least a little precedent.

If the game so far had felt fairly mundane, without much to raise the blood pressure for either team, the fourth over of the Pakistan innings brought chaos. Muneeba Ali missed a ball, wandered from her crease in that absent way batters do when nothing has happened, started ambling back. The throw came in, hit the stumps, her bat lifted for a fraction at the wrong instant. Appeals, confusion, replays, more confusion. Out by the letter of some law nobody quite remembered. In the next over, Kranti Goud had Sidra Amin dead to rights, plumb as they come - not given.

The papare band could have scored this passage - all dissonance and competing melodies, no resolution, just noise building on noise until somehow, improbably, Pakistan found themselves 26/3 and the game had tilted.

Pakistan never really recovered. Kranti Goud and Renuka Singh bowled long spells, allowing India’s spinners to come in only once the ball had gone soft and started gripping. Sidra Amin and Natalia Pervaiz couldn’t break into a tempo quick enough to truly challenge the asking run-rate. Captain Fatima Sana, coming off an impressive bowling display earlier in the day, could only cut a sorry figure with a bat, scoring 2 off 15 balls before holing out. And then, Deepti Sharma did Deepti Sharma things. She now has 78 runs and 6 wickets in two games.

Pakistan folded at 159, 88 short of India’s total. The margin felt right for the run of play, and yet a touch harsh on their bowling attack. The game finished with a whimper, punctuated, of course, by both teams walking off in different directions, no acknowledgement or handshakes in consideration.

Kranti Goud finished with 10 overs, 3 maidens, 3 wickets for 20 runs. Born in Chhatarpur, Madhya Pradesh, the youngest of six siblings, Goud’s story has the kind of feel-good, against-the-odds cadence that Indian cricket has a knack of delivering.

Credit: Cricinfo

Her face radiates all the youth her bowling so often belies. It’s impossible to tell that this 22-year-old made her international debut in May this year. It took her four months to go from a plucky youngster, awkwardly slipping into team huddles, to opening the bowling and winning Player of The Match in a World Cup game.

For years at the Premadasa, we watched Sri Lankan cricket unveil its surprises. This October evening, under the same Colombo sky, it was a girl from Madhya Pradesh who walked off with the match ball in only her 9th ODI, as her entire village watched on, huddled together in front of a giant LED screen.

Chhatarpur and India will sleep well. Two wins and four points is a good place to be. But these two games also revealed a few chinks. South Africa on Thursday will ask harder questions than Sri Lanka or Pakistan did. There’s plenty to admire about the bowling; just as much that needs tidying with the bat.