Cricket and its Fat Cat Whore

Originally titled "Cricket Haters". Wonder why my editor wanted it changed:P? Published a day after the Lahore attacks on the Sri Lankan Cricket team.



Cricket lovers; bow your heads a moment. Your sport has been attacked and the spirit of your game shattered like the windows of the Sri Lankan team’s bus. Tuesdays attack could not come at a more twisted moment not just for the sport but also for affairs of the region in general. In one instant three neighboring countries were tied to one attack and people of Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka were glued to their screens.
The Indian looked for similarities to the Mumbai attack, the Pakistani looked for the possible Indian hand involved and the Sri Lankan looked for his beloved Kumar Sangakkara. Perhaps the rest of the world simply looked on in dismay at yet another piece of turmoil and instability in our region. What the attackers themselves hoped to achieve is best answered by psychiatrists studying the shoot-self-in-foot syndrome. Simple logic and reasoning from any half-witted individual would say that attacking a neutral country’s cricket team is certainly the most retarded tactical move possible. It has put Pakistan’s bid of hosting the 2011 world cup into the trash can. It gave India (and the rest of the world) a chance to pooh-pooh Pakistan’s claim to be tackling terror. Poor Sri Lanka, the neutral country, almost lost its entire cricket team.
Overall a loss to cricket but if that was the aim of the terrorists they have brought down the bar from holding entire countries to ransom to merely shooting themselves in the foot. Some quarters speculate that the original motive was far more sinister and that the target would’ve been the Indian cricket team had they not very wisely backed out. Sri Lanka unfortunately, eager to make friends, rushed to fill in and tout its ‘loyal relations to Pakistan’. Let us forget that loyalty would disappear as soon as Pakistan’s arms shipments to Lanka stopped. Lanka being in the middle of slamming the tigers back into their caves is in dire need of friends. Unfortunately Prabhakaran has his good friend Vaiko in India to promote the ‘eelam’ cause. So Lanka has to go elsewhere and it just so happens that Lanka decided to trade its cricket team for guns in order to keep its good relations going. God forbid India’s own pro-cricket-no-matter-what lobby had its way and sent the Indian team despite 26/11, the likely hood of this newspaper reaching you would be most improbable. But let’s not get ourselves down in gloom. Whilst the events in Pakistan unfolded India won the first one dayer against New Zealand. So cheer up cricket lover. All is yet not lost. Jai ho!