by Mohsin Ansa » Mon, 22 Feb 1999 04:00:00
This is to mourn the sad demise of our dear friend, Sportsmanship,
which breathed its last on Feb 19, 1999 in Calcutta after Wasim Akram
chose not to recall Sachin Tendulkar. During it's short and troubled
life, Sportsmanship was badly weakened by the many ***s it faced
each time it was asked to visit an India-Pakistan encounter. The
earliest signs of trouble in its modern day life, were sighted when the
Pakistan bowlers hurled in some short ones in a 1978 one-day.
Thereafter, Sportsmanship continued to steadily lose health due to,
among other things, excessive shows of dissent, appeals for bumped
catches, extraordinary appealing theatrics, and of course, the many,
many non-walks when batsmen knew they had well and truly got some bat
on it. Sportsmanship spent the last few years of its life in a coma
after Sunil Gavaskar had pronounced it clinically dead when he wrote
something to the effect, "You never walk in an India-Pakistan match".
Of course, there are many who continue to doubt that Sportsmanship ever
existed when cricket's version of war is going on, and I would have
felt the same were it not for that one incident in 1979 involving
Dilip Doshi and Asif Iqbal.
