Its right to say that cricket is a religion in India and Sachin is the god of cricket. I still miss the era when Sachin., Dravid, Ganguly, Laxman, Sehwag and Zaheer played for India. There are a few moments I still can’t forget.
The India-Pakistan game at Centurion was a day before finals. It was ridiculous to even expect anybody to study or even pretend to when there was a game of such magnitude going on. Funny thing was that parents, who usually are on your case in Indian families, went right along with it. I don’t think in our entire class anybody got more than a 70. We all felt pretty accomplished for watching that Sachin innings though.
Another is during the 2004 series when India was touring Pakistan for first time in 15 years. It was also our report card day and they used to sell the books for next year at the school as well. Our school principal was obviously not familiar with the passions of cricket(Catholic school and all that) so he expected everything to go smoothly as years before. The game, I remember, was supposed to start at 10:30 am and I have never seen anything quite like it. Parents and kids ran rampant through that school. Books and report cards for more than 2000 kids were done in an hour as everybody literally(unfortunately I am being literal here) ran over each other in the rush to be the first one out. Books were thrown about, few destroyed as almost everyone wanted to get the hell out so they didn’t miss anything. Next day our principal gave us an earful in lieu of our parents but they never sold books in our school again.
In the 2011 WC semi final which we were watching (do or die match with no doubt) all my friends lost hope after 4-5 overs of Pak batting assuming the score was under par and Kamran Akmal and Mohd Hafeez looking fluent and went to sleep. The tension was palpable throughout the match and you could see it on the player’s faces. What happened after that was nothing sort of miraculous. I specifically enjoyed Umar Akmal’s wicket and Munaf Patel doing an Anti Anil Kumble to dismiss Abdul Razzaq.
The most memorable moment was when Ganguly took his shirt off at Lord’s (2002 NatWest Series). The extraordinary match with the perfect climax.
And lastly, you turn up the volume to hear the crowd cheer and Harsha Bhogle’s epic comments !
Those were the days. But now in this modern day technology, we need the update right at every moment of time and for that we have smartphones. Everyone wants updated real time score updates and match situations! And if you are a true cricket fan you will surely like the extraordinary UC Browser that helps in keeping all the updates. The UC Cricket feature is the perfect way to connect to the game no matter where you are.
