“Do you want to go to the Indian Premier League cricket match tonight?” I asked my colleague Nicola Christofides over breakfast.
I expected her to say no. After all, she had arrived in Hyderabad just a few hours earlier after a long flight from Johannesburg, and we had a busy day’s work ahead of us. But Nicola is a big cricket fan and follows the Indian Premier League (IPL) where some of South Africa’s top players join clubs for the 13-week season of 20-over matches. “I’d love to,” she said. “Can we get tickets?”
Sunrisers Hyderabad were winless so far, but their opponents, the Mumbai Indians, weren’t doing much better so we figured it could be a close match.
Our efforts to buy tickets online by credit card were unsuccessful, but the cricket-playing daughter of a colleague at the University of Hyderabad assured us they would be available.
As with many transactions in India, you need to allow plenty of time and hope you don’t get stuck in a traffic jam. Well, the traffic in Hyderabad is almost always jammed, so it’s a matter of degree.
You can’t buy tickets at the Rajiv Gandhi stadium, so our first stop was at the Hyderabad Cricket Association offices. We joined the line at the single ticket window, and I pushed 2,000 rupees (about $30) through the narrow window grille for two East Stand tickets. Then it was off through the traffic again to the ground, about 20 km from the city center. Our driver dropped us off and said he would meet us at the mosque at the corner when the match was over.
It took almost five minutes to cross the road under the arches of the city’s under-construction metro rail system. Eventually the police halted traffic and we joined the jostling crowd, keeping a tight hold on wallet and purse. Past the lines of street vendors selling T-shirts and flags, the samosa stands and through the security gate. 7:40 p.m. We had time to take silly photos with the cardboard cutouts of Sunrisers players. We climbed the stairs and found good seats in the stand among the “Orange Army” supporters.
The atmosphere was festive, the crowd noisy and good-natured and the match—until the final overs—close. Batting second, the Sunrisers lost their opening batsman in the first over. A few others went cheap, including England’s captain, Eoin Morgan, for 11. But a superb 94 by the Australian David Warner helped the Sunrisers win their first game of the season.
In the 15 years since I last went to a cricket match, TV and spectacle have taken over. It’s not only the limited-over format, which encourages aggressive batting. It’s the razzamatazz and the statistics. There were stadium TV cues for crowd cheers, and strategic timeouts at the end of which an announcer counted down to zero. The Mumbai Indians, in their glittery silver and gold-trimmed blue outfits, would not have been out of place at a disco. The blue metal stumps exploded like firecrackers when the ball hit them. The scoreboard recorded the distance of every six hit beyond the boundary. On LBWs and runouts, the scoreboard flashed “Decision Pending.” On the sidelines, cheerleaders who looked as if they had been plucked from an American college campus and dropped in Hyderabad (some were blonde—a rare hair color in India) pranced around on stages advertising one of the Sunrisers’ sponsors, UltraTech Cement--the engineer’s choice. Vendors hawked Coke, popcorn, ice cream and samosas, kept hot in Domino’s Pizza containers.
Nicola is a big cricket fan!
Below us, a stadium boom camera picked up the requisite crowd-going-wild shots. This is fun until the camera focuses on you, as it did just before the match began. I’m not sure if Nicola and I were the only white folks in the East Stand, but the camera held on the two-shot for at least 10 seconds. “Wave, Nicola, wave. We’re on Sunrisers TV.”