Sharmistha Gooptu in Leeds
I was at the street corner just ahead of a Sainsbury’s, waiting for a couple of team members who were shooting the last video of the day. A third colleague was on the camera and my job was to signal to passers-by to walk behind the camera person, so as not to cut into our frame.
Several intrigued bystanders moved on but one stayed on, watching the recording in progress. He was Indian, and asked me ‘which channel’? He held his phone to me and I found RevSportz on his social media, and he instantly subscribed. This was the evening before the team arrived in Leeds, yesterday. ‘Do you know which hotel they’re staying in?’, he asked, and then proceeded to answer his own question. ‘I think it’s Queen’s’.
He was a software engineer, he said, and had visited team hotels in the city where cricketers had stayed in the past, and he ‘had taken pictures with all of them’, he proudly informed. ‘Do you know what time they’re coming in tomorrow? Do you know if Gautam Gambhir will be with them?’- his questions were no less pressing than those of a sports journalist looking for a breaking or a news story. A part of the living lore of cricket in the city, he is someone who memorialises each tour and each visit by cricket teams here, with selfies taken and through a count of the hours spent waiting outside team hotels.
Even today, when the team came into their hotel, it was a relatively relaxed situation and some of the cricketers signed autographs and posed for pictures with fans who had stopped outside the team hotel. Unlike at home, where cricketers move in the tightest of security cordons, this place has allowed fans like the above bystander to memorialise their fan moments.
Leeds has also had a special place in its heart for Virat Kohli. In 2018, Kohli had visited Tharavadu, a local Indian restaurant that specialises in Kerala cuisine. Tharavadu has memorialised Kohli and Anushka Sharma in a signed porcelain plate, where the couple wrote a message for their favourite local eatery, on one of their successive visits. The plate now has a pride of place inside the restaurant along with a couple of cricket bats signed by the past Indian side, including the likes of Kohli and MS Dhoni.
Step forward to 2025, Tharavadu now has a sister restaurant- Uyare, which is a rooftop high end, fine dining area. The restaurant started off with 17 tables, and the 18th, added only recently is a private dining space within the restaurant- a room marked No. 18, the Virat Kohli room! Kohli’s past visits to this restaurant are now memorialised in this area No. 18- adding to the now ever growing trend of cricket tourism.
This trend of cricket tourism has ensured that collectibles, memorabilia or the act of memorialising is no longer a preserve of official or administrative bodies or of specialised collectors, or aficionados, as it has been in the past. It’s now part of a living lore wherein fandom, a selfie culture and desi entrepreneurship jostle with one another to make immortal the legacy of our cricket and its players.