Over the last 15 years, since I first attended a day of Test match cricket, I’ve honed and perfected my own pre-match ritual.
While items such as sunscreen, water and Aerogard (not to mention the tickets themselves) are always mandatory, one particular item carries extra weight on a once-in-four-year cycle.
That is my beloved gold ODI shirt. Never mind Cricket Australia’s attempts to sway me to their home green strip, I’ve grown up watching my favourite cricketers play pyjama cricket in the canary yellow (or is it Australian gold?), and that has become synonymous with any visit to the SCG.
But once every four years, the shirt becomes even more meaningful, as some will inevitably construe it as the ultimate betrayal.
While myself and others don proudly the yellow and the green, several thousands of others, many of whom are my friends, will be in the opposite corner as they immerse themselves in everything blue.
Such is the hazard for Indian-borns like myself – confronting my identity.
That will be evident tomorrow especially, as memories will go back the last time Australia and India clashed at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
Fair for me to say that it remains the only time I became truly ashamed of the team I’ve loved and supported since I was a boy. Without going over the details and the various displays of petulance from both sides, this was the time I confronted what it meant to choose sides.
To some of my Indian brothers and sisters, wearing that Australian shirt was a sign of advocating unsportsmanlike conduct and cheating.
Even four years on, the gasps of horror whenever a new Indian friend discovers I support the enemy still resonate.
In plain English, no matter how much they call Australia home, an Indian Australian will still chant “Jai Hind” the moment the boys from the subcontinent come calling on our shores.
When that team comprises of Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman, the adulation reaches a fever-pitch, and the resulting anger at my ‘defection’ becomes even more telling.
“How can you support a team trying to stop Tendulkar scoring his hundredth 100?” they ask in a desperate tone aimed at getting me to realise the error of my ways.
Those errors include continuing my support for a team that has plummeted in fortunes since that unfortunate episode four years ago, and not celebrating among other Indians when their team won the World Cup last March.
Telling them that I have been raised in Australia doesn’t work either. Most of them have. Most of them accept their good fortune in being raised in this wonderful country.
But come cricket time, allegiances change. The fact mine didn’t, still irks them, and that’s what I’m gearing for: hordes of people swathed in blue, barking out words from the mildly humorous to the deliberately insulting.
And I’m prepared to cop them in the hope I have the last laugh.
As for the reason I became a ‘traitor’ and support Australia? I don’t know how that one worked out honestly.
But never has the joy of seeing my Australian brothers defeat my Indian ones ever sated.
Let’s hope for a repeat starting today.
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