T20 – from celebration to country character
View(s):The feeling was fabulous. The feeling is always fabulous when Sri Lanka wins at cricket, and when it is a world cup in any form of the game, the sensation is so intense it could be carnival and the second coming all rolled into one! But it doesn’t last… When the last light goes out and the last diehard fan leaves the stadium; when the megawatt glare of the media spotlight fades from a loving glance to a listless stare; when the precious silverware has been stashed away until the next championship; game over. It’s all done and dusted sooner than you can say “Shane Warne sucks” backwards in Elizabethan – pun intended – English. (The Hurley bird catches the worm…)
Sri Lankan cricket fans celebrate in Colombo after Sri Lanka beat India in the final of the ICC World Twenty20 tournament in Dhaka on April 6 (AFP)
I’m not complaining. You shouldn’t be surprised, either. It’s the nature of things, dears. Glory passes in much the same way that even the most golden of grape or grain drinks turns to water: a miracle in reverse. Grim reality sets in faster than potholes on a poorly carpeted ‘political’ road (you know, the ones that get cosmetic treatment at election time). Soon, you’re gagging on a smorgasbord of multiple instant replays and photo op overexposure. The least mention of T20 makes you slightly sick…
If that’s not bad enough the bonhomie, camaraderie, and largesse of the immediate aftermath of the spectacular climax have all but vanished into thin air (like the plane named MH370). No longer is it noblesse oblige and all that. Less than a week after the famous victory, it’s once more unto the breach and each man, woman, and child for himself or herself. Question is not why this happens (it’s human nature). But how we can make it last longer (in short, try to reverse entropy). And whether this – a nation of joyful cheerleaders and mutual caregivers all year round – is a desirable consummation to be devoutly wished.
Going by the general consensus on multiple social media – which is the new e-village or some strange universal grapevine – it is.Everyone wants the goodwill and generosity of spirit to last. Less of the ostentatious cavalcades and noisy revellers on the streets until midnight, perhaps? But certainly bring on the joyful republican (I won’t say patriotic) good cheer and all-round love of fellow citizen in general and our dashing sporting heroes in particular. Of course, we can’t quite remember now the terrible sledging we gave “our boys” and “the ~!@#$% selectors” and “the ^&*()_board of control” just last week… and a good thing, too – that would dampen the enthusiasm somewhat, to recall what a low opinion we had of SLC the brand and SLC the merry band of cricketers, wouldn’t it? Go with the flow now. It’s what we’re good at. Making the most of it in all weather, even Bengali monsoons!
My contention is that we need to convert these short-lived national celebrations into a more sustainable national character. It is one thing to fall in love with all things ‘Sri Lanka Cricket’ for the bright but brief duration of a brilliant T20 and feel like we’re invincible gods… It is a whole different ball game to make the chivalry, the courtesy, the compassion, last beyond the afterglow of the awards ceremony and press hoopla of up to half-a-week later. And we’re going to need more than the esprit de corps of Dinesh Chandimal or 
the élan and éclat of the Mahela-Sanga nexus to make it happen more significantly and more meaningfully and more sustainably than for a single stand-out evening’s one-last-fling, one-night-stand, in the fever-pitch national imagination!
Time to take a chill pill… And ask the hard questions: So what lessons can we, as a nation, learn from ‘T20WC 2014’? (If a nation can, indeed, learn anything from an international sporting fixture?)
One thing is the demonstrable squaring of the circle when leadership is mutually interpenetrative team-work and not a pointlessly stiff upper-echelon one-man show. Who really captained Sri Lanka on some day, in that now emblematic series? Let’s just say that Mahela the strategist and Sanga the master tactician, together with Chandimal the capped skipper and Dilshan the visible whirligig, to say nothing of Malinga the much maligned slinger of balls and words, work better as a council of differently gifted leaders than as ambitious lone rangers.
One another is that it is never too late for our ‘mandarins’ who ‘mandate’ the national side to eat some timely humble pie, if only so that they can retain truly world-class talent (nay, genius, we dare say) – or entice them to reverse entirely justifiable decisions to retire?
Yet another is the selflessness of ‘star players’ or at least newcomers with sterling potential, who realise that they are out of touch and a liability to boot… and quite nobly step aside to give a teammate a leg up and thereby their team a fillip towards possible victory. Good form for national-level leaders to take a leaf out of this book in the national interest. You know who you are and we know who you are and you know that we know who you are and you know that we know… but you get it, don’t you?
Then there is the inexplicable, almost inevitable, incredibly transcendent and yet at the same time immanent sense of oneness that comes from a characteristic Sri Lankan victory at the apex of a sport like cricket. You have to be there to know it, to get it, to enjoy it, to trust it, to yearn for it never to end or to go away again.
Something slyly but also savvily suggests that this side of the second coming, there isn’t going to be heaven on earth in paradise isle courtesy lessons from cricketing Sri Lanka. But for one brief shining moment (18 years after that one achieved World Cup and only two years after that other abortive one), we all experienced the heady nirvana of a cricketing Camelot that somehow spilled over into the nation’s streets and captured a subtly, softly, silently, troubled country’s body and mind and heart and soul and spirit. Even if it all comes to nothing in the end, bliss it was that eve to be alive – to be unified with true Sri Lankans all over a world (and across a cosmos of walks and wherewithal, creeds and faiths) was very, very good… it was simply superb.