Lost in a dream, nothing's what it seems

Yup, readers will squirm at me reading too much into a cricketing incident and wondering if it mirrors the real world. I accept cricket is not a metaphor for life, but sometimes it comes pretty close.

If you're in India right now you must be sick of Bollyline or Puntergate or whatever the media has chosen to label the Sydney test happenings. I was disturbed. Not merely on a cricketing level. That 'pact' about taking the fielders word, proposed by Ricky Ponting and accepted by Anil Kumble before the game, strangely continues to resonate. It allowed the Aussies to justify the Ganguly dismissal on day 5, and I'm certain they couldn't believe how well it served their purpose. It sure came back to haunt Kumble, didn't it? What was he thinking? It seemed to serve as a reminder that 'trust' is something better left to storybooks, fables and moral science classes. Or maybe it just reiterated a new age truth that anything you 'trust' in may be used against you.

I can see where Kumble was coming from. As a keen student of the game and a great admirer of his opponents, he was all for entering into what seemed like a move towards the right spirit (whatever that means, you might say). Maybe he saw it as a chance to play the game the Aussie way - as a fellow blogger put it? Perhaps he was just being a hopeless romantic, imagining world peace was still a solution. Given the chance I too would like to believe that people around me, friends, competitors or otherwise, are well intentioned and things like 'honesty' and 'integrity' do not exist merely in the corporate sense. But ever so often we are forced to re-evaluate and lower our expectations of individuals because, well, a Puntergate happens. I guess there's only so much any of us are willing to live up to.

We live in an era where how you say it is sometimes more important than what you say, or what you do. Ricky Ponting's success, particularly in the way he dictated that umpiring verdict and the way he was able to sway the match referee's decision to punish Harbhajan Singh, bears this out. The guy (before this game, anyway) was an expert at talking to the media and saying all the right things, being the perfect ambassador and all that. It took a Puntergate to know the real Punter behind the smiling skipper. And I am pretty unhappy about this because I believed, or wanted to believe in his nice-guy image.

Am I being naive, or just too much of a cricket tragic?