With most Australian cricket fans sounding clinically pessimistic about our chances in the upcoming Border-Gavaskar series, it’s no surprise that Indian fans sit smugly on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Indeed, ever since Harbijan Singh fired the first shot over our bows by musing, ‘If Australia play well, then India will win 3-0,’ blogs all over the sub-continent have been fizzing with a cockiness even Apollo Creed would find boorish.
One fan, Kapil Viswanath, even mentions Apollo in suggesting that Kohli ought to make his way to the crease with the same pomposity as the antagonist from Rocky.
“I would like to be seeing him costumed with the eight settings of arms of Burga and surrounded by Bollywood dancers,” he added.
Kapil went on to detail in Hindi that he saw the dancers removing all the prosthetic arms in a choreographed way as Kohli approached the crease. To be sure, he did an eloquent job of it too, while also revealing that English was his 14th language and that he’d like to see Greg Ritchie speak Hindi without botching inflections, clauses and past tenses.
Meanwhile, on his blog ‘Doosras and ducks’, Dilip Manjrekar suggested that the BCCI should order players to use cans of ‘spray-on sweat’, as it won’t be a good look when they drub the Aussies four zip without having worked up one.
“The advertisers should be telling BCCI this is essentially necessary because the TV viewing audience wants the illusion of a contest, even when there’s unnecessarily not one,” he said.
Dilip also wrote eloquently in Hindi from there, detailing that he’d only learnt English three weeks ago and that he’d like to see Greg Ritchie learn a new language while also working 14-hour shifts in a Kolkata sweat shop.
Back on the bluster, and it doesn’t just stop on blogs!
Over at Cricinfo, the threads are littered with fans trumpeting 4-0.
A fan with the handle ‘Spicy-reverse-sweep’ crowed that Jadeja would make so many runs, he’d hone his trademark sword dance celebration to a level befitting a ninja.
“I can be seeing him in the next Indiana Jones films,” he predicted.
Meanwhile ‘Bangalore is more than just outsourced call centres’ proclaimed India wouldn’t just beat Australia, they’d make us look Pommie. “I will be seeing India taking all the ocker out of Aussies and leaving them all Oxford Universities and Mayfair soft,” they said.
This fan didn’t go on to justify his hazardous foray into English but they did detail that Greg Ritchie is as funny as a mongoose in a samosa. (Note: we assume that fits in the ‘not remotely funny’ spectrum over in his parts.)
But as eye-catching as all these predictions were, most revealing was this little bit of pessimism.
“Kohli played and missed once in his last double hundred,” wrote ‘Tigers at home; gerbils abroad’. “I worry the next time he will get a snick. He needs to find the forms of his last three double-hundreds where he never played and missed. India might only win 3-0 if he doesn’t.”
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