Boria Majumdar in Melbourne
The Boxing Day Test is the biggest draw of the Australian summer. Talking of great rivalries in cricket, it doesn’t get better than India versus Australia. Ticket sales have been very encouraging, and if administrators are to be believed, a crowd of 90,000 is expected at the MCG on December 26 when the Boxing Day Test gets underway.
There’s a lot at stake for both these powerhouses of world cricket, each aiming to make the final of the World Test Championship and give their fans the perfect New Year present.
The Indian fans’ dislike of the Aussies is palpable if you speak to Indians in Australia. Take this for a statement from someone I met at the airport: “We need to beat the Aussies to avenge the attacks on Siraj and Jadeja over the past couple of weeks,” said the fan. “2018 was sweet. 2021 was sweeter. This will be the sweetest.”
Australia, it is evident, have gradually become the new Pakistan where Indian cricket fans are concerned. Unlike England, against whom we no longer carry any political baggage and hence a loss is part of the game, India versus Australia cricket is now a proxy war and Australians the new sworn enemies.
This works well for us in India. With bilateral series against Pakistan a thing of the past as a result of the political chaos across the border, Indian fans, with their great appetite for spectacles, needed a new great adversary. Australia fit the bill perfectly. Incidents like Monkeygate triggered it, and Australian aggression on the field became grist for the hate mill. False media reports against Indian players have helped churn the sentiment and it is certain we are about to witness more than a high-powered cricket series in the next three weeks.
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This works. Because cricket was and is the true national game in both India and Australia, it is so because it could be played against the English as part of the great imperial project. Hockey in India or Aussie Rules in Australia could not, and hence their legacies, like their origins, remain curious in the sporting hierarchies of the two countries. When George Orwell said: ‘Serious sport is war minus the shooting’, this is what he was alluding to.
This is what really answers the question: ‘Why cricket, not hockey in India?’ If sport is, in fact, a metaphor (and in some cases a metonym) for war, then cricket simply was a necessity in both India and Australia. Prowess in any old sport wasn’t enough, prowess had to be demonstrated in the empire’s sport, which would mark a symbolic victory against the ruling state.
These deep passions will undoubtedly be aroused again during the Boxing Day Test, billed by many as the match of the year in 2024. With a media v player side story adding an extra edge to this intense cricketing rivalry, the label might well turn out to be the perfect tagline for this summer of cricket in Australia.
And for India, the stakes were never higher. A win in one of the next two Tests and they will have retained the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. It will be a rare achievement and one that no team in the recent past can boast of. Rohit Sharma and his boys will know it. Needless to say, they will do their best to achieve it for themselves and their fans.
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