Cricketing admen

Every year, the advertising fraternity in Delhi religiously turns out for the cricket tournament conducted by the Media Transasia Group.

The preparation starts some two months before the event. The Captain (usually a senior person in the agency who usurps the position by virtue of having represented his school in the seventies) tries to get eleven people to attend the practice sessions, termed, rather ambitiously, The Nets. The only people who turn up are a few canteen boys and the utterly hopeless semi-paralytics who have no chance of being selected in the team. ‘The professionals’ are recklessly confident that they’ll be in their elements during the actual matches.

As the event gets closer, the excitement picks up inside the agency office. There are pre-match conferences and animated talks in the corridors. Strategy meetings are held and tactics worked out on laptops, John Buchanan style.

After all that frenzied build-up, the hardest part for the players is turning up for the matches. They are typically fixed for 8am on Saturdays – a time when the average advertising person, after his Friday night excesses, is in deep slumber.

Indeed, matches have suffered because the tearaway fast bowler from Production was recuperating after checking an artwork or the copywriter, who is also the opening bat, in a fit of rash optimism, decided to celebrate the night before with sixteen tequila shots.

The only thing professional about the whole spectacle is the uniform. Expertly designed in the agency (at the cost of missing many work deadlines), it makes the team look very accomplished and the players trot out as if they have multi-million-dollar sponsorships from Nike. The audience usually consists of one or two girlfriends and the odd stray cow.

There are essentially two types of batsmen. The first is the kind that has played some sort of cricket a few decades back. They are under the impression that they are still in their prime and try to play shots copybook style. This sort also tends to have fancy equipment and a very professional air about them. They inspect the pitch closely, prod the crease expertly and spend an eternity analyzing field placements before taking guard.

These batsmen play from memory forgetting that in the intervening years their reflexes have slowed down and they have added beer bellies to their physiques. They are usually out in the first three balls they face. To their credit, their walks back to the pavilion is every bit as professional. They always have a technical excuse handy for their dismissals: the reverse-swinging ball or the one that kept brutishly low after hitting a crack on the pitch or, sometimes, even the early morning dew.

The second type learned their cricket by watching it on TV and listening to the commentary of Sir Geoffrey Boycott. These batsmen have come to the conclusion that the whole thing is as simple as faking a travel voucher and can’t wait to get going. This is a particularly fascinating lot to observe as cricket on TV and cricket on the field are two entirely different things. There’s nothing more heartrending than seeing a Creative Director trying to imitate a VVS flick through mid-wicket and instead getting the bat entangled between his legs as his stumps go cartwheeling.

The bowlers too come in various shapes and sizes. Or rather, mostly in one particular shape, viz., round, like the ball.

The idea when bowling is to aim for the stumps. This seemingly easy task is not achieved by most advertising cricketers simply because it isn’t easy to roll your arm over and aim across twenty-two yards if the only thing you did all year was sit in conference rooms eating chips, smoking Classic Milds and drinking pots of coffee.

Needless to say most overs are at least 11 balls long and if it wasn’t for the umpires sympathetically putting an end to many a bowler’s misery, the ordeals could well extend over the weekend.

Fielding is an art the advertising cricketer has never bothered perfecting. Catches, especially skiers, are promptly dropped. The technique of keeping one’s eyes on the ball and watching it all the way into the hands is too complex for our adman who has a remarkably short attention span.

Not too many boundaries are stopped either. The knowledge that any contact with the red object or the ground below could result in severe bruises ensures that all bravado is avoided. Some do make a despairing dive or two, but this is only to show-off and is always done after the ball has safely crossed the boundary line. And yet mis-fields and dropped catches are stared at in utter disbelief as if the fielder wasn’t the chain-smoking Account Director entering a cricket field for the first time in nine years, but Jonty Rhodes in his prime.

If you are at work on Monday and overhear the discussions, you could well be under the impression that a cracker of a cricket match had taken place during the weekend. You’ll hear it being analyzed in every nook and cranny – the batsmen waxing eloquent about their cover drives, the bowlers holding forth on their off-cutters and the fielders bragging about their spectacular catches. It’s only when you watch the players totter off to clients meetings, some with pronounced limps, and others, clutching their backs in agony, that you begin to suspect that all was not quite cricket.