Yay!!! We won

I am an average Indian cricket fan. By average I mean I am not one of those guys whom you meet and they start talking non-stop about the latest Indian victory but if I ever meet such a guy I don’t ask him to shut up. Today I reached office with the determination that I will not type cricinfo.com in the address bar of my browser. I knew the score, I knew the score day before and thought a draw is bad for test cricket and after reading 55/4 felt a draw which is bad for test cricket is much better than India losing the match.

I reached office. Checked mails and went to cricinfo. Call me a person with weak willpower but I grew up in 1990s and for me as long as God is on the crease, there is hope. The God got out and my colleagues asked me would I like to join them for a cup of tea. The conversion during tea didn’t revolve around cricket, no one wanted to discuss it because we all had pretty much resigned to the fate that Australia were one-up in the series.

I came back, checked score, got the information that we were indeed going to lose and went back to work. After working for some time I logged onto to twitter. Twitter told me that Sachin is God but against Australia Laxman is the real devil. He always sinks the Australian ship and this time it was not gonna be any different.

I started tracking the match again on cricinfo and was happy to get ball by ball updates of what­ all the tomorrow’s edition of every Indian newspaper are going to call as the one of the best innings of Laxman and Ishant’s careers. India was on track to register a victory which every average Indian fan is going to remember for a long time and I was happy because thanks to my weak willpower I was watching history being made.

As the match progressed some more average Indian fans in my office opened cricinfo and then Ishant got out. Most of my colleagues considered it as the end of the Indian innings and went for lunch. Few asked me do I wish to join them and I wanted to throw paperweight at them but unfortunately the admin dept never issued me one. Lucky for my die-hard pessimist colleagues.

As India reached near victory cricinfo died. It was one of the moments in life when you wish you had plan B ready and I had one. I shifted to cricbuzz and it due to the heavy traffic from several average Indian cricket fans who crashed the cricinfo servers also died. This was the moment I wished I had a plan C ready but unfortunately I didn’t, so googled for cricket score, found few websites and settled for Yahoo cricket because it was still alive. 

At the end of the match there was some drama but it was nothing compared to what was happening at my desk. Me and one of my colleagues were refreshing the yahoo page again and again trying to get the latest score but even after refreshing it two to three times we were seeing the same number of balls being bowled. Either Australia was blowing in slow motion due to which each ball took 2 minutes to deliver or the commentary on yahoo was slow. 30 years back my father used to beat his radio to get the score and I felt I too needed to so the same. Unfortunately, my father owned the radio and I don’t own the office PC so I decided to check the score at cricinfo, cricbuzz, yahoo, rediff, indiatimes etc etc simultaneously only to hear a colleague shout Yaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy, WE WON.

To sum up

Every Indian loves cricket and loves it even more when India wins and for our love of the game cricinfo needs to buy few more servers.