We arrived back in Kolkata from our Sundabans trip in good time and we collected our bag from the office and we were soon checked into Ashreen Guest House just off Sudder Street. Well I say soon, but we of course had to go through the usual rigmarole of filling in numerous ledgers with our life history ( the new piece of info they required here was the address of our local police station!) and then the receptionist wanted us to pay even though I had not a minute earlier given him a receipt showing we had paid in advance! Anyway, the room was clean and in a great location so fitted the bill.
Our task now was to get tickets for the evenings IPL game, Kolkata Knight Riders v Mumbai Indians. Now as a cricket fan I much prefer test cricket and have not been a big fan of T20 cricket, I can of course see the appeal of the shortened form of the game, the excitement and the big hitting but to me it’s not real cricket. However, after being in India and watching some of the games on TV you sort of get caught up in it and I couldn’t pass on the chance to see an IPL game live. We had tried a few days earlier to procure some seats but the ticket office was besieged by thousands of cricket fans clambering for tickets and police on horseback trying to keep some sense of order with sticks. We hoped that nearer game time there may be less of a queue. We grabbed a Kolkata roll, the classic street fodder of the city and headed towards Eden Gardens, or more correctly, Ranjiv Stadium, but everyone calls it Eden Gardens or the Eden, named after the gardens next door. Now, as a cricket fan I had always wanted to watch a game at Eden Gardens, ever since I was a young lad listening to crackly radio commentary from distant Calcutta as England succumb to another bout of Indian spin. I also had pictures in my mind of a huge stadium with terraces and Indians rioting and throwing bricks at players, as we strolled towards the ground I wondered if it had changed from those days.
We got to the ticket office to be instantly surrounded by sellers trying to get us to buy flags, shirts, headbands and to have our face painted in the colours of KKR or Mumbai. We declined all kind offers, especially the face painters, in my opinion, any grown adult who goes to a sporting event and has their face painted should be taken out the back of the stadium and shot – with a paint ball gun of course! Besides, these guys were wielding tins of gloss paint you might well use on your front door, didn’t look like it would come off in the rain. We needed tickets and some annoying little brat of about 8 had latched onto us and was hassling us to buy tickets off him, like policemen, ticket touts are also getting younger these days. We decided to see if the game was really sold out and were dismayed to find the sold out signs up at the ticket office, the Eden holds 90,000! We tried to brush the tiny ticket tout off and see if we could deal with an adult. Lots of people were milling about and some had spare tickets, we negotiated a pair of 400 rupees tickets for 700 apiece, bit over the top but at less than a tenner it had to be done. We sloped off back to Sudder Street hoping we hadn’t bought a pair of fakes.
One of the reasons that the game was sold out despite the huge capacity of the ground, which has to be one of the largest in the world along with the MCG, is that Sachin Tendulkar plays for the Mumbai Indians. Sachin, the ‘Little Master’ is arguably the greatest batsman ever to play the game and he is considered a god in India for the feats he has achieved whilst playing for his country. That may not be saying much in a country which claims to have 300 million gods but Sachin is right up there with Ganesh and Shiva et al to most Indians. It also happened to be Sachin’s 40th birthday today and quite possibly his last ever knock at the Eden as he has to hang up his bat at some point soon. All these factors meant that Kolkatians (if that is what you call people from Kolkata) were coming out in force to pray to their god at the temple of Eden.
We had a few hours before the game so I got a haircut and shave in order to be well turned out at Sachin’s birthday bash, and you never know, I may be sat next to Kollywood babes. I’d like to say I got it done by a one-armed blind guy on a street corner to make this travelogue more Anthony Bourdain like but it was in fact a quite respectable barbers, the only down side being his clippers were ancient and they worked like a vacuum cleaner and he sucked the small amount of my remaining hair off my head. A close shave and a splash of old spice later, I kid you not, and I was good to go. We dropped into the colonial era Fair Lawn Hotel for a pre-match beer and a bite to eat, it wasn’t what we expected and it was pretty down at heel but it had a garden bar which was just up our street and the prices were cheap too. As we sipped our Kingfishers the clouds rolled in and the thunder claps could be heard reverberating around the city. Typical, we have just bought overpriced IPL tickets and the Indian monsoon rolls into town. We hoped the rain would abate in time and that the pitch wouldn’t be too waterlogged. We ate our colonial sandwiches with the crusts cut off darling and kept our fingers crossed.
Luckily the rain didn’t last too long and we made our way towards the floodlights a bit more hopeful of play. The crowds were building up but it was unbelievably well organised for an Indian event, they have fenced off walkways which funnel people towards their particular gate, so we were soon at gate 15 ready to enter, hang on I as the male have to be searched. The security guy soon found my camera on which I had hoped to record my visit and sent me to talk to the old police chief complete with raj-era tasche. He said that I couldn’t take my camera into the ground and that I would have to give my battery to one of his minions. I showed him the ground rules on the back of the ticket which didn’t mention cameras being prohibited, but he shrugged his moustache and said he was too old to be able to read it! They promised I would get my battery back after the game, yeah I better; it cost more than the ticket to get in.
Amazingly the tickets passed the electronic scanner and we were inside Eden Gardens. We found our seats which were fairly high up and had a decent view square on to the wicket. The ground is huge with really modern, good facilities such as a giant video screen, a far cry from my childhood images of Pakistan players ducking bricks on the boundary. The weather had cleared up now and the play started only half an hour late on a now very sultry Kolkata night at 8.30 pm. KKR were batting first but I was a tad disappointed that the Mumbai Indians captain, Ricky Ponting had left himself out of the team (even he knows he is rubbish these days), I was looking forward to shouting some abuse at the Aussie. Haberjan was to bowl first and the crowd worked themselves into a fever pitch, Eden Gardens erupted as Pathan tonked the first ball for 6, cheerleaders danced and music blared from the sound system. I found myself joining in with the masses while still muttering about test cricket being better. The excitement continued as Haberjan went for 26 off the first over and the crowd roared “KKR KKR KKR” after being prompted by the stadium announcer.
Now as you may be surprised to learn, I am dead against orchestrated chanting at a sports stadium, surely the fans can do it by themselves spontaneously, can’t they? So I decided to try and instil a bit of the barmy army to the nights events. Mitchell Johnson, the Aussie pace man was warming up getting ready to bowl the second over for the Indians. So I got the crowd around me to sing the Mitchell Johnson song, “He bowls to left, he bowls to the right, THAT Mitchell Jonson, his bowling is shite” while waving your arms to the left and the right. The crowd seemed to like it and we all howled with laughter as his first ball sailed down the leg side for a wide. Unfortunately for KKR he then bowled a great spell to slow up the KKR run rate and we stopped singing that particular ditty.
The crowd turned out to be a schizophrenic lot, half of them seemed to be supporting the home favourites while the other half were wearing Mumbai colours and shouting for the opposition. Some even had both sets of colours on and cheered whether it was a six or a wicket! It had been said that only Surav Ganguly, ‘The Prince of Calcutta’, could get the Eden Gardens crowd to support against their own team, but only days before I had read that many KKR fans supported Chennai Super Kings because MS Dhoni was playing for them and he is the current captain of India. It doesn’t make sense to me; you support your team no matter what. Can you imagine United fans supporting Liverpool at Old Trafford because Stevie G is the England captain, I think not. Maybe I should give up trying to understand India and Indians; that said I guess it was obvious that some would support Mumbai because of Sachin but the reality was incredible.
Every time he went to field on the boundary, hundreds of fans charged towards the fence to get closer to their idol, only to be beaten back by the police. Jacques Kaliss and Eoin Morgan added a decent partnership but at 159 I felt it may be a few runs too short, especially with a certain Sachin in the Indians batting line up. During the first innings many people around us had been taking photos and videos with their mobile phones, I Pads and other such gizmos so I thought I would try to reason with the police office that many people were taking photos so could I kindly have my battery back in order to take a snap of my only ever trip to Eden Gardens. “No sir, mobile and computer ok sir, camera no ok”. “Why sir, they are taking pictures and video sir”. “IPL rule not our rule”. Go figure, hang on I just said I was going to stop trying to understand this land and its rules and regulations.
All through the game there had been the usual T20 razzamatazz of cheerleaders and music and the MC getting the crowd to chant or to do the Mexican wave but he now announced that due to Kolkata’s noise restriction laws there would be no more music or announcements. Noise restriction in India! Was he having a laugh? So the crowd were left to their own devices in the second innings but the noise went up a notch as Sachin walked out to open the innings for Mumbai.
It was ridiculously hot a and sweaty now for 11 o’clock at night but that didn’t stop people getting excited at the thought of Sachin spraying balls to all parts of the Garden. He eked a couple of singles and on his sixth ball Sarine found the gate and Sachin’s timber was flying. Half the crowd was stunned, how can Sachin be out for only 2 runs? The other half, me included celebrated wildly. The Indians got over this early shock and carried on at a decent rate, Kaliss unfortunately was unable to bowl and this left the Knight Riders a bit short in their attack but they pegged the Indians down and it all came down to the last over, 10 needed. Harbajan who started the whole thing off so badly finished it with a 6 and a 4 and the Mumbai lot went crazy.
At 12.30 at night we drifted out of the ground with people singing about Sachin who had done nothing at all in the game, but if you are a god what does that matter. As we squeezed our way out (and amazingly I got the camera battery back) I wondered if Sachin would ever step out to bat at Eden Gardens again.
