A Weekend of Cricket
The Men's Twenty20 Cricket World Cup has come to the New York area. I've spent the past two days soaking in the cricket.
Yesterday, I went to the stadium to watch South Africa face off against the Netherlands. On a hot Long Island morning, a couple thousand people watched a fun, low-scoring thriller of a game. A few thoughts:
I am convinced that the people who run sports venues, much like those who run movie theaters, have never purchased any food or drink anywhere in the real world. Ask any of them how much a gallon of milk costs, I'm sure they have no clue.
The view from point/square leg is great to get a sense of just how fast South Africa's stellar pace attack actually is. The ball zips through before you can make sense of what happened. How does anyone muster the courage to face the ball, let alone make contact with a bat?
The same vantage point leaves you clueless about the more subtle things that happened when a ball is bowled. I saw Marco Jansen dive to take an excellent catch at slip, but I had no idea that the ball had actually deflected off the bat - something I'm used to seeing when watching cricket on TV.
It may have been called New Amsterdam 400 years ago, but there was far more South African support at the stadium. I suppose that's also because SA is far more of a cricketing country, so their expats are more likely to show up.
People in crowds behave in funny ways. Tristan Stubbs was the fielder at point/square leg for most of the fielding innings. He was the beneficiary of numerous standing ovations and massive rounds of applause from the crowd, bestowed upon him for the most routine of fielding operations. I'm certain our stand was not composed exclusively of Tri-stans, yet our collective behavior was, amusingly, exactly like that.
Today, I was at the World Trade Center, at the Fan Park outside the Oculus, watching the India v Pakistan match. More thoughts:
This is my first summer in this area and the weather is unpredictable - torrential downpours delayed the match before clearing up into a very hot afternoon.
I'd have expected an officially organized Fan Park to have access to a dedicated feed from the stadium. Instead, they seemed to have the same $7/month subscription to Willow TV that I share with 3 others. They even muted the advertisements between overs, just like I do!
The atmosphere was charged with passion and a mild undercurrent of rudeness, which I felt it could've done without. An India-Pakistan contest always tends to generate such emotions, which reflect the uglier aspect of sport.
Yet, the beauty of sport was also on full display today - sport is a shared human experience. A tight match like today's produces a veritable roller-coaster of happiness, disgust, despair, hope, elation, and sadness, where any of those could be the last stop on the ride.