And I thought the Indian Cricket Team won the World Cup…
Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai
The cricket team arrived in Mumbai, India today after their exhaustive tour of England and South Africa which saw them posting an ODI series win against South Africa and a Test series win against England, and being crowned World Champions in the first ever Twent20 World Championship. To welcome them home, Mumbai put on a welcome show that won’t be easily forgotten.
The team was greeted by at least a million people thronging the streets along the entire route from the International Airport to the Wankhede Stadium. There were drums, horns, trumpets and a lot of good cheer. It took the team over five hours to cover the 18 miles from the airport to the stadium, where the Board for Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) had planned a felicitation ceremony for them. Over forty thousand people were waiting patiently in the stadium for approximately three hours to see the team and listen to them talk. But the crowd was in for a shock. Let alone hearing their team talk, they couldn’t even see the players. The stage was crowded by politicians of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) trying to score some brownie points with the public. Nearly all the cricketers were made to sit in the second row of the stage, where they were invisible to the attending public, while Dhoni and every honcho of the NCP took up the front row seats. The adoring public got to hear not the speeches of the winning team, but of the various politicians of the NCP trying to claim some credit for the team’s performance.
But what must be noted is that unlike previous instances of politicians trying to hog the limelight of others’ achievements, this time the public was not convinced. TV News reporters interviewed people who had come to see their heroes. The people were not only visibly disgruntled; they were very vocal about it. In the end, the public considered the politicians as having made fools of themselves, as stated very aptly by an audience member at the stadium after the show; Deval Mehta: “The way these fools were basking in the reflected glory of our men in blue, you’d think it was Sharad Pawar (BCCI President) who bowled the final over and Vilasrao Deshmukh (Maharashtra Chief Minister) who took Misbah-ul-Haq’s catch!”
Photo Courtesy: anandham
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