How infectious is cricket fever? Infectious enough to want to skip work and watch TV all day, if you ask me. And it's a different matter altogether that my work timings and the Caribbean match timings don't really clash. Ah well, did humankind ever need a reason to want to stay home from work? It's the same sad story with everyone - the early morning 'waking up' dread, the mid-morning dejection from looking at the perfectly useless but positively humongous pile of work, the afternoon frustration at realizing that yet another bunch of six hours has gone down the filthiest of drains and the evening exhaustion from, well, all the other negative thoughts that flitted through your mind all day. It's a vicious, vicious cycle.
Alright, enough of such depressing talk. Let's focus, instead, on the main subject of my post. The one word that has been on everyone's lips these first few days of the World Cup is 'minnow'. The first three days it was all about minnow-walloping and today it has been all 'minnow topples heavyweight' drama. I blame Ricky Ponting for starting this disturbing trend of social conversation. If he hadn't found the need to equate the minnows with some kind of annoying flies who do nothing but buzz and irritate, then we wouldn't have had the momentous discussions that followed about the advisability or otherwise of minnows playing in the World Cup. Barely had the disastrous comment escaped his colorful tongue than indignant minnow captains erupted out of nowhere claiming that they could 'spring a few surprises here and there' and cricket 'experts' began their drones about how the minnow matches prolong the World Cup beyond tolerance levels or conversely, how the unfortunate babes need all the big match practice they can get. Yawn. Somebody should put a gag order on the imaginative Mr. Ponting.
Moving on to more important things, South Africa's pummeling of the dazed Dutch yesterday had to be seen to be believed. Enough has been said about that over in which Herschelle Gibbs decided to check whether a bowler would break down in heartbroken sobs if forced to suffer too much violence, so I'll talk instead about the innocent-looking massacre inflicted by Mark Boucher and the composed ransacking antics of Jacques Kallis. I don't quite think I've ever been witness to a more sumptuous feast of runs. It felt like the boundaries would never stop - they kept getting bigger and bigger as the morale of the hapless Dutch bowlers kept getting smaller and smaller. That match, together with Australia's murderous assault on Scotland and Sri Lanka's clinical slaughter of Bermuda nearly vindicated Ponting's path-breaking statement, making him sound like an accomplished clairvoyant. Thankfully, however, today's events will have done enough to prevent Ponting's ever-present supercilious smile from widening further. That's because, as I write, Ireland seem to be on the verge of prompting full-scale riots in Pakistan, having dismissed them for a barely-believable score of 132. And Bangladesh seem to be on their way to inflicting some acute embarrassment on Dravid and Co., with India huffing and puffing mightily to reach a quite miserable score of 191. Bangladesh have been really robust in their reply so far, rattling away to 109 for 3 after 25 overs, and I sense that some really dark times are about to engulf the sub-continent. Don't be surprised if a few cricketers' homes are vandalised tomorrow. And Mr. Chappell, Mr. Woolmer, I think the pair of you should be packing your bags painfully soon.
Honestly though, these first few days have been really really entertaining. Barring the one languid game between the boringly efficient New Zealand and the woeful England (I guess they're back to their dark days), all the other matches have been real crackers, nasty shock or no nasty shock. I mean, come on - it was seriously good fun to watch the rampaging Gibbs clobber the poor Daan van Bunge with such remarkable disdain. And the Ireland-Zimbabwe tie, which literally turned out to be a tie, was fairly engrossing too. So things certainly are looking bright for this to end as the best World Cup ever. And that, in spite of all the garbage talk about minnows. I've always wondered though, why does everybody refer to the inexperienced teams as 'minnows'? Surely someone's got to have a better word to use? Any ideas, Mr. Ponting?
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