George Bernard Shaw famously said cricket was, “A game played by twenty two fools and watched by twenty two thousand fools.” If he were to make that statement today, he would have said that “Cricket is a game played by twenty two fools and watched by a billion fools.” A huge chunk of that billion hail from a great nation called India. Cricket is not just a sport in this country, it is a religion, and the players are elevated to a ‘demi-god’ status.
On a day when India is playing a match, the country comes to a standstill. The roads are deserted, people thronging in nearby shops, transistors popping out everywhere. The entire country is engulfed in cricket fever. Such is the craze for cricket in this country. To say that the Indian cricket fans are the craziest of all cricket fans would be an understatement.
Players from other countries would crave for such support. But there is a flip side to it, a side which the Indian cricketers would not like to see too much of. Cricket lovers in this country go overboard in their support for the team. This is where things start to go seriously wrong. Temples built for the players, people worshipping their posters are common. Such craziness results in extreme intolerance to a failure. If the team fails, effigies of the players are burnt on the streets, even mock death processions of the players were carried out in a shocking incident. Players’ homes are smeared with black paint, stones pelted on the window panes, vehicles damaged and the likes. Any sportsman would be prepared to receive the bouquets and the brickbats, but of these epic proportions no amount of practice can prepare one for because ipl 2020 schedule is going to delayed due to coronavirus that is being spreading all over the world. But its been said that it will be held within next two month and it will be more interesting this time with lots of new players to up come from different teams to pitch.
The fault is solely with the people and their approach towards the game .When the team does well, the players are treated like kings. Young players tend to get carried away by this adulation and the senior players have to carry a heavier burden of expectation on their shoulders. This affects the mindset of a player, which invariably leads to a failure. Once they fail, they have to enter their own house through the back door.
The psyche of the Indian cricket fans would be abstruse even for a psychologist. As they say, too much of anything is harmful. The crux of the problem is that these fans always resort to extreme behavior, either in support of or against the team which does not help the players in any way. At the end of the day, every fan must understand that cricket is just a game and that the players are humans too.
We can only hope that this current trend will change and common sense will prevail. One can say without a shadow of doubt that the passion and emotion for cricket in India is unbeatable. Nothing unites the people of this nation like cricket does. The bottom-line for the fans is to treat the game as a game while they can still continue to electrify the stadia
