Escape Art

I have been procrastinating for a while as I am unable to find any subject to blog about. In recent times whenever I watch a movie, I felt rather sharing a small status about the movie in the facebook rather than writing a long post and boring the reader as the simple message to convey is either to watch it or not. few days before I saw a picture of Ashish Nehra which obviously reminded me of Premgi which lead me to my cricketing days in school. So I thought this story is worth sharing as some of my classmates who might read it find it amusing how I was surviving in the School team as a Vice Captain.

I started as a substitute player in school team in my fifth grade and subsequently promoted to Vice Captain in the Sixth grade. before you guess anything about my talent leet me tell you the story of my school cricket team. From 5th to 10th I studied in PKN Matric school which doesn't belong to the big league sports team. Our team won't go the state championships and so on. We mostly play with the same kind of teams out of n number of schools in madurai we form the tier 2 school. We compete with schools of our league which were organised by a Martial Art association. They promoted and conducted all the sports event along with theirs. For a school like mine they are very much happy to give all the responsibilites to the association and just provide the players. To be more clear the sports staff are all affiliated with the specific martial art association. Thus all the schools in the league have one or two big shots of the Martial Arts group to show their power. That is the way I secured a place in the team, but the Vice Captain position is because many of my teammates were not ready to bear the cross. The thing is in the yearly tournament we all know who is going to win the game and what is the best place we can secure. For us it is always "Kobayashi Maru". Our school usually plays only in the winning match and not the Kobayashi Maru. They needed a scape goat and inexperienced team to insult the Kobayashi Maru matches. As the captain too was a Spock they needed me, who was a KIRK and a prominent person among those schools participated and hence I play VC.

Shhapppaa..... at last I somehow managed to write how i got the VC post and it is nothing but a scapegoat. I played the tournament for four years and first two years as a VC and last two as a Captain. We actually lifted the cup one year too. but the story i am gonna share is not an underdog story of how we lifted the cup in four season (sorry..four post... seeing a lot of series effect).

As i said in the beginning of the post, I am the Premgi in my team. I have never caught a ball in first two years and accidentally some fell in my hands for which I was not at all responsible. But no one pointed fingers at me because I knew each and every player personally and they knew that I knew their weaknesses. To be frank I have never encountered mre than 5 balls in a 15 over match while fielding(20-20 was not known back then). I do bowl and bat at last only. I had more wickets to my credit than that of the best bowler in the team because of the timing of the bowling. At the end overs whoever bowls will secure at least two wickets, even when I come to crease they expect me to hit a few Sixes and just finish the innings. even while chasing big targets the other batsmen will eventually lose the wicket and takes my blame. That's how I am able to be in the team. To them I was no harm, big name that's it. My bowling is terrible, i can never hit the stumps even without a batsman so what I did was just to aim for the bouncers and was considered dangerous as people feared for my head hitting bouncers and the out swingers which were the only thing which came to me. I am not a regular professional cricketer so just representing my school and playing was not a serious business to me at that time.

Later when I became the captain of the team I had to do a lot of talking to the teammates and so I reduced my speed and bowled something between leg break and medium which other teams considered a wise move and nefarious. Whenever we faced the big teams usually play with no confidence but later stage we won the big matches because they were afraid of us and our strategy. As you know there were not a big strategy to play it was just don't let them hit. It was as simple as that. I owe to my school as they see me as kind of big guy who made them proud but in reality I haven't done anything. I just made use of other's fear.

I write these above statements because we wouldn't have criticised Nehra if he wasn't there to take the catch. We wouldn't have criticised the person if he refrained, we all criticise him because he tried and failed. As usual like my good old days I am neither supporting him nor loathing him (Happy to be an escapist).

P.S: Seems there is a big fanfollowing for my swingers and leg breaks(Literally) which I came to know in my Madurai visit recently. And my swingers are reserved for the cricket ground only and Leg break within the Martial art bout.