Champions, like Virat Kohli, embrace pressure and rise in its presence. They know how to shut out noise, and when to be buoyed by it
Sambit Bal10-Oct-2023Leading up to the World Cup, Rahul Dravid, whose press conferences have humour – often self-deprecating – and wisdom in equal measure, was asked about the inconveniences of India’s punishing travel schedule during the tournament.Indeed, no other team will log more air miles during this tournament, go through more airport routines, and play at more venues. Their World Cup began with a 2500-kilometre leg from Guwahati to Thiruvananthapuram, a route so thin that no direct commercial flights exist on it. With their two warm-up games in those cities washed out, all that travel would turn out to be an exercise in futility.Through the course of their league games, each played at a different venue than the one before, they will have travelled about 13,000km, roughly 3000 more than second-placed England. Pakistan, in contrast, will clock only about 7000km, mostly on account of playing their warm-ups and their first two matches of the tournament proper in Hyderabad.Related
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This, of course, is not the only nuisance during a home World Cup in India. As the class of 2011 could warn you, the chatter will be relentless: from airport lounges to in-room dining, the players will have no escape from their compatriots demanding the trophy be won. From 24-hour newsrooms to zillions of social-media handles, the stream of opinion and advice will be ceaseless. Unlike in 2011, when the team studiously shunned many forms of external aggravation – newspapers, websites and news channels – doing so will be a hopeless task in 2023, calling for monk-like abstinence from cell phones.And the demand for tickets – what an absolute menace. Each team member is allotted three per game, but hundreds of acquaintances beg for one or more. It prompted Virat Kohli, who must get more such requests than most, to put out a social-media post: don’t ask me for tickets, enjoy the World Cup from your homes, please. Another player made “No tickets please” his WhatsApp profile status. Others avoid calls from the usual suspects.
Sachin Tendulkar waited about 20 years to be a World Cup winner. Shubman Gill, Mohammed Siraj, Shreyas Iyer and Ishan Kishan have that opportunity at the first go, in front of their own people
But it took Dravid only a couple of minutes to set things in perspective. He was responding in Hindi, so I will paraphrase. What trouble, he said. What an exciting opportunity, instead, to go to so many different places, let fans have a chance to see their favourite players, from airports to stadiums. We are playing a World Cup at home, in front of our people. What can be bigger than that? What can be more exciting?He should know. Despite a long and sterling career, he never got that opportunity. Neither did some others from that golden generation, including Sourav Ganguly. VVS Laxman never got to play a World Cup at all, and he carried that hurt for years. Only Virat Kohli and R Ashwin from the current squad know what it is like to play a World Cup at home. Rohit Sharma, who has called this World Cup the biggest event of his career, knows how utterly rotten it is to miss out: he lost out in 2011 by a whisker.What a blessing it is, then, for those making their World Cup debuts at home. Sachin Tendulkar waited about 20 years to be a World Cup winner. Shubman Gill, Mohammed Siraj, Shreyas Iyer and Ishan Kishan have that opportunity at the first go, in front of their own people. Of course there will be pressure. But pressure follows expectation. And expectations are placed only on champions.Pressure, as Billie Jean King said, is privilege.King, winner of 39 tennis Grand Slam titles, won the highly publicised Battle of the Sexes match in 1973 after she accepted an obnoxious challenge from Bobby Riggs, a former Wimbledon winner and a serial baiter of women tennis players. Riggs was 55, and 26 years older than King, when the match was played, but he had earlier that year defeated Margaret Court, another Grand Slam winner, then ranked No. 1, in straight sets. The King vs Riggs match carried a winner-takes-all prize of US$100,000, a fortune in those days. But there was a lot more at stake: King was stepping up, too, for liberals and feminists, who had been appalled by Riggs’ comments, which included this gem: “Women belong in the bedroom and the kitchen, in that order.”And everywhere the players go, the fans want a piece of them•Getty ImagesAmong Indian players, no one will have known pressure more intimately than Tendulkar, and I had the opportunity to talk to him about the burden once. How was it going out to bat with a knowledge that a fifty wouldn’t be enough because a hundred was expected? His response was similar to King’s. “I have never seen it as a burden,” he said. “I would rather have people, and my team-mates, expect things of me than not expect anything. It’s an honour. I am fortunate to be in that place. It shows that people care.”Kohli hasn’t merely followed Tendulkar’s path in run-scoring, he has inherited the universality of his mass appeal too. To be at the MA Chidambaram Stadium for India’s World Cup opener was to be exposed to the full force of Kohlimania. His mere presence at the boundary was electrifying: wherever he went on the field, it led to instant and spontaneous cheering and chanting of his name, which stood out for its authenticity against the announcer’s continual, and grating, attempts to orchestrate crowd responses over the public address system.When it mattered, Kohli paid it back in equal measure, first by absorbing the blows Australia were delivering – they had reduced India to 2 for 3, a score from which no team had won chasing in an ODI – and then slowly and inexorably taking the match away.That’s what champions do. They embrace pressure and rise in its presence. They know how to shut out the noise, and when to be buoyed by it. They know how to ride the wave of emotion and how not to be swept away by it. They also accept failure as inevitable and they know how to leave it behind, like they do a game after the last ball is bowled. Kohli played and missed, chopped a ball past his stumps, and was dropped on 12. Unruffled, he extracted full toll.He has known what it is like to win a World Cup at home, having had the good fortune to experience it in his first World Cup. He now has the chance of an encore in what could be his final World Cup. And having missed out on one, what might Rohit not trade to get on board? The World Cup comes once in four years; for many, a home World Cup comes once in a career. It’s a chance to create memories for a lifetime.Pressure? Who has won a World Cup without embracing it?
