What you didn't know about the ICC Champions Trophy 2013

The Champions Trophy just ended, I realized a lot of interesting things.

We live in a digital world, with BBM, Facebook, tweets and MySpace. I’m joking, nobody goes on MySpace anymore. India won the Champions Trophy, and the updates just kept coming. “Oh Em Gee India won 10 exclamation marks.” “India with far too many A’s followed by heart heart.” “So proud of India semi-colon closed parentheses.” “We are the champions equal to sign capital d.”

How very gratifying. There is a catch though; these updates only show up after we win something big. I don’t remember anybody writing anything when we beat Sri Lanka in our annual (or is it semi-annual?) series against them, there were no colons followed by closed parentheses. Likewise, when we crashed out of the World T20 (all of them except the first) there were no sad updates ending with colon apostrophe closed parentheses or less than sign slash 3. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

People keep saying South Africa choked. They never choked; it was just a cricketing re-enactment of an angry Mike Tyson knocking out a rather puny opponent. Come to think of it, they have never lost the final of an ICC tournament. That’s a 100% winning record; the only other Test playing nations to never lose the final of an ICC tournament are Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. They do have an unfair advantage though, having never played in an ICC tournament final.

I wonder why commentators say ‘they’ll have to field like devils’. It seems an odd way to describe a great fielding effort, after all, the Devil has too much on his plate to be bothered with running after and catching a leather ball. Why not say something like ‘they’ll have to field like cheetahs’; after all, they’re lithe, athletic and fast and spend their time chasing gazelles (animals faster than your average cricket ball) in the grass (I know, it’s like it was meant to be).

I was watching Star World the other day and heard this tagline used to promote ‘MasterChef: The Professionals’. It said ‘In this cooking competition if you can’t cook, you won’t survive.‘ Yes, I know what you’re thinking. One of the prerequisites of being in a cooking competition is that you know how to cook, and it goes without saying that if you don’t how to cook you will fail to survive, like a rogue rabbit against a SWAT team. It reminded me a lot of bad cricket commentary, pointing out what is painfully obvious and attempting to make it profound and astonishing.

Speaking of cooking and cricket, we’ve heard of Cook, Mustard and Onions. New Zealand unveiled one of their own, Corey Anderson, or as he should be known if he wishes to join the aforementioned culinary trio, Coriander Son. Speaking of England, have you ever wondered why they never burn effigies? They do lose a lot of finals (not everybody can be South Africa). Maybe it’s because of the rain, after all, I can imagine nothing more annoying as an effigy burner than to light my effigy and realize that it’s pouring. You go to all the effort of going to your local effigy vendor, picking out an effigy and it all ends as a damp squib. It could also be that their public is willing to take the bad with the good and accept the fact that sportsmen are human as well, but what do I know, I’m an Indian cricket fan. We don’t take the bad, we just burn things. And egg houses. The usual stuff you know.