March 22, 2006

Rejoice!

It has been a fascinating, fantastic and fitting climax to the series here in Mumbai. England won by 212 runs to level the series 1-1. In the morning India looked incredibly resilient, and Dravid was at his stonewalling best. He scored his first boundary in his 77th minute at the crease to double his score up to that point.

At lunch India needed 238 to win with seven wickets in hand, and it looked like all three results could be possible, especially as Sachin was beginning to look as fluent as he had all series.

The noise when he came in to bat and started scoring some runs was possibly the loudest I have ever heard anywhere or at anytime. I leant forward and tapped the shoulder of the Indian fan sitting in front of me and waved my notepad and pen at him. “What is the name of the new batsman?” I asked him. He looked absolutely horrified. “That is Sachin” he told me, as if he had just met the most ignorant visitor to the sub-continent that he had ever come across. Perhaps he had. Eventually, I realised he was joking.

After lunch England were incredible. They came out and took 7 wickets in rapid succession. India had gone from 75-3 at lunch to 100 all out, and Shaun Udal aged 37 and playing in his just his 4th test had taken four for fourteen. Prior to this match he had taken just three test wickets at an average of 92.23. It was a fantastic thing to witness, like the ending of a modern fairy tale. And the first of the four was the greatest prize of them all; Tendulkar himself, the greatest player of his generation, prodding forward and getting an inside edge to Ian Bell under the helmet.

Yesterday I sat in the stands and listened to other spectators berate and mock a long list of England off-spinners. Today Udal was the unexpected punchline to their joke and it was delivered beautifully.

The day also contained another surprise, the visit of Stephen Fry to the media enclosure, one of my heroes and a huge fan of the game. I was lucky enough to have a brief chat with him, which was delightfully punctuated by the wicket of Dravid. Fry leapt to his feet shouting “He’s got him, he’s got him” at an astonishing volume, before immediately apologising to all those around whose view he had obstructed. A gentleman, and an unexpected end to my tour.

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March 21, 2006

Phew, what a scorcher etc

Today we have seen some very slow, patient cricket from both sides. It resulted in India needing 295 more runs to win with nine wickets in hand. Tomorrow England might draw the series. Or they might not.

It has been hot. So very hot. Look at the state of me. That’s it. I must lie down. Get help.

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March 20, 2006

Crazy Taxi

The man sat opposite me at breakfast today said that I should avoid using the taxis that parked up outside the hotel. “They are a rip off”, he told me. “Walk down the street a hundred yards and hail one. They will be much cheaper”. “But the ones outside the hotel are cheap”, I protested. “Yesterday’s only cost me 25 rupees to the ground”. “The ones a hundred yards away will be cheaper”.

And so it was that we (my friend Olly and I) ignored the vacant taxi outside the hotel and walked a hundred yards down the road and hailed another one. We got in and asked to go to the ground. “50 rupees” he said, and so we got out. Really they should use the meter. We hailed another cab, and this one agreed to use the meter.

Five minutes down the road, Olly realised that he had left his ticket in the room, and asked if we go back to the hotel to get it. The driver dutifully performed a sort of W-turn and we returned to the hotel. “Do you need anything from the hotel?” asked Olly, as he got out. “Yes”, I said, “perhaps you could bring down a dunce’s hat for you to wear for the rest of the day.”

As I waited for the fool, our taxi with its open windows parked outside India’s most expensive hotel began to attract a crowd. A girl put her hand through the window, and ordered me to give her money. I said I would give her some when my friend came back, otherwise I’d be handing out money until he came back. The front passenger door opened and another man got in. He called himself a traveller and said that I would also need to give him some money, purely because he was a traveller you see, and that meant that in a way I sort of owed it to him. I told him to wait until Olly returned also, so that the car didn’t fill with other people that it turned out I owed money to.

The man peppered me with questions. What hotel was I staying at? What was my name? What was my friend’s name? I lied for every reply, hoping to fill in the time.

When Olly finally returned I gave the girl and the man a hundred rupees each. The girl immediately called a friend over who appeared at the window immediately. I now had no money left. The cab driver drove off again, but we still had our traveller friend in the front with us; our friend who also turned out to be a little economic with the actualité.

“Where are you going?” he wanted to know. “The ground”, we told him. And where was he going. Also to the ground, because our taxi driver turned out not to know where it was, and so our traveller friend was helpfully going to navigate for us, and all we had to do was remunerate him a little further. It sounded like an excellent deal, although he was already earning more than the cab driver who had had nothing to do with any of the discussions up until this point.

Suddenly they were deep in discussion. The traveller turned round and asked us how many rupees to the pound there are. “I don’t know” I lied. “Seventy five” he said, “and so what is two pounds?” I told him it would be one hundred and fifty. “So what would four pounds be?” Three hundred. “Yes”, he said, “that is how much the driver says this journey will cost you”. We told him that that was not going to happen, and they accepted this philosophically. (They were from the shruggist school, so they just shrugged).

“I was a New York taxi driver for two years” the traveller told us, although without specifying in which life. I asked him if he had ever driven to the Statue Of Liberty. “Are you crazy?” he asked. “I was there for two years. I must have driven to it about a million times”. I found it delightful that even within the context of a lie he found room for exaggeration. “New York taxi drivers must be magical” I said. “Oh we were” he said. “Not like the ones here in Mumbai. They just try and rip everybody off!”. He laughed loudly at this. Olly and I laughed loudly at this. It was explained to the cab driver and he also laughed loudly.

So there we all were, strangers laughing together about lies we had told each other. A traveller who had never been anywhere was giving directions to a man who already knew the way.

Acording to the meter and the conversion chart we owed fifty rupees. The whole journey did in fact cost three hundred rupees once we had paid our fare, the waiting charge, travellers tips and money that other people deserved more. The cab driver had in fact been spot on in his prediction. And the man opposite me at breakfast had been the biggest liar of all.

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March 19, 2006

It really is rather warm, mother

Mumbai is without doubt the hottest of the three Test venues that we’ve encountered on this tour. It’s staggering. We might be just by the sea, but there’s no way that any breeze can find its way into the cauldron-like atmosphere of the Warkhede stadium.

The stadium, with its steeply tiered rows of wooden benches, is also by far the busiest of the Test venues. It was packed today, and not just with Indian fans. There are said to be about 6000 English supporters who have made the trip, swelling the numbers of the Barmy Army.

The Barmy Army have already been busy in Mumbai. Prior to the Test they held a cricket match and also had a sponsored one mile run through the city streets, all to raise money for Sport Relief.

They’ve also been in fine voice and have brought with them a brass band, who let rip every now and then, especially to signify bowling changes. When Freddie Flintoff comes on they play Meet The Flintstones. Rather more whimsically, Yorkshire man Matthew Hoggard is greeted with the theme from Last Of The Summer Wine.

Not every player has his own theme yet, but I’m sure they all will have by the end of the Test. We’ve been discussing possibilities in my area of the Stand. Shaun Udal’s nickname is Shaggy so perhaps the theme from Scooby Doo might be the trick although someone suggested, perhaps a little unkindly, that his bowling could be accompanied by Pulp’s Help The Aged. It would be a little harsh as Udal probably isn’t even as old as Jarvis Cocker.

Someone working particularly hard in this match is Ian Blackwell, the twelfth man. he seems to be getting more exercise than in the match he played in. Yesterday he had to sprint on and off the field practically every over to bring our batsmen fresh gloves, a towel to mop their brows with or a drink. By tea time he looked knackered, and in the last half hour he was replaced by Matt Prior. It must be hot if the twelfth man needs a replacement. Either that or he’d picked up an injury and was receiving physio.

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March 18, 2006

An exceedingly good camp

Kipling Camp is one of the most amazing places that I have ever visited, and a world away from the bustling cities and air-conditioned hotels where I have so far been staying.
It consists of a number of huts built around a covered bar and eating area called the Shamiana where the staff, volunteers and guests all eat and drink together and discuss the day’s sightings.

It is also home to Tara, a fifty year old elephant with whom nearly every visitor to the camp falls in love. In the afternoons we would follow Tara down to the river where she and her Mahout would play together before she would lie down on one side and a crowd of us would gather round and help scrub her skin with stones.

At the slightest sign of movement we would leap back and give her space to get up and then lie down again on her other side. I leapt back particularly far at these points, much to the derision of Tom, a volunteer at the camp. She weighs two tonnes, for goodness sake, but clearly in the wild it doesn’t do to show your fear.

After being scrubbed Tara would like to invest a little time blowing water at us all as we feebly attempted to splash her back. It seems that no matter how hard you try, you cannot beat an elephant in a water fight.

We were there for three nights and in that time saw an astonishing array of animals; langurs, samba, peacocks, wild boar, jungle cockerels, jackals, spotted deer, barking deer, barasingha, serpent eagles, kingfishers, and Indian bison.

But the highlight of the visit was our final morning. It was the third safari that we had ventured out on with our guides and naturalists Neil and Sidat. At about half seven we discovered that a tiger had been seen making a kill by a group of mahouts on their elephants, and so we set off to find it as quickly as possible.

There are 126 tigers in Khana national park, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will see one whenever you go out. No guest at the camp had seen one since we had been there, but at about half eight we met up with the mahouts and we climbed from the jeeps onto the elephants’ saddles so that they could lead us from the tracks and through the undergrowth. There we came across the tiger.

It was an astonishing sight. Not only was he an unbelievable size but he also looked so astonishingly calm and relaxed as he dozed in the sun. But then, what does a tiger have to worry about? Poaching and extinction in the wild, but in a national park he has no such fears. Just like Tara, he plays the camera beautifully.

Later in the morning we came across him again, when he crossed the track about two jeeps in front of us. A moving tiger is a different proposition altogether, and there was a real sense of fear when he appeared to be heading straight towards us. In the end, he changed his mind and headed off into the undergrowth and of sight to be a King in private, and leaving about ten tourists desperately hoping that their cameras had been working properly.

Thankfully they were. That would have been really annoying.

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