Deep Backward Point

Look what I found in my basement:

The cover of the card

I got this card for writing a letter to the team. It reminds me of when I was 12, and what cricket (and this card) meant. So many things to talk about here:

• Recent chief selector Kris Srikkanth is still around.
• No photograph of Tendulkar, but there’s a signature.
• Manjrekar and Shastri are now in the commentary box.
• The bowling attack isn’t half-bad for the time: Kapil Dev, Prabhakar, Srinath, Raju, Banerji, and Shastri as proto-Yuvraj.
• But the batting reminds me a lot of 2012. A lot of aging stars, about to be shown the door: Shastri, Kapil, Srikkanth. And a few batsmen who we thought were the future, but didn’t pan out: Amre, Kambli, Manjrekar. Who would have thought back then that the real hidden gem of this team was Srinath?
• Remember Jadeja’s catch from this World Cup? Now seeing Jadeja and Azhar’s names just makes me sad.
• Prabhakar’s name just makes me angry.
• And Kiran More’s name reminds me that we used to repeatedly walk past the Benetton store he owned in Baroda just to see him.

But most of all, the thing that continues to blow my mind is that Sachin Tendulkar is STILL PLAYING CRICKET today!! I was 12 and now I’m 33, but Tendulkar will walk out to play a Test match in Nagpur tomorrow morning.

This was a great World Cup, even though India didn’t do very well. Nine teams and most were quite good. Even Zimbabwe punched above their weight. And everyone played everyone else in the first round.

Oh, one more thing. Raju with a bat is just funny.