Solo woman fan
Meet Dr Pratibha Salvi. She is all of 78 and happily punctuating the stands at the Cricket World Cup all alone, all the way from Goa. She has done so since 2003, rating the Jo’burg Final as the biggest Indian disaster. For 78, she is pretty young at heart and full of praise for MS Dhoni. “He has brought me here,” she tells you with typical fan passion. Not that her association with cricket is at only from the stand level. She happened to be Clive Lloyd's physician at Manchester when he played for Lancashire alongside Farooq Engineer. “If you see Clive around tell him the doc is here and he will know,” she says. Salvi’s son Neil played for Oxford Blue and figures in the 1987 Wisden edition. Salvi travels alone for all the big-ticket games and is the proud owner of a bat signed by the entire West Indies and India cricket teams of 1983 on one side and the English and Australian teams at the back. “I don’t think I will be at the next World Cup. I am already 78,” she laments. So, she plans to auction this precious bat once this World Cup is over. “Cricket is no longer the same. Gone is that groovy West Indian era of pace and fun. But India is in its best phase,” she concludes.
The Belgian Take
Then there is other lady Sujata Ghatoskar who stepped out of the straitjacket to have launched a cricket team in Belgium some 25 years back, if you please! Now Belgium is about everything other than cricket. It is about football, rugby,hockey and a lot of diamonds. “You will be amazed to know that they did not do cricket but were absolutely passionate about Kho-Kho and had an international team for it,” Sujata tells you. Not that cricket was alien to her. She is the proud daughter-in- law of the legendary Test match umpire of the 60s, 70s and 80s MV Ghatoskar. “We made an under-19 team in Belgium and my son, then 15, was a member of it,” she tells you from the Hampshire Bowl stands.
The team’s coach was former West Indies player Fazal Mahmood.
So, who did they play against? “We played against Israel for which I was the official scorer. But the most amazing thing was that some of the Israeli players spoke fluent Marathi and then I discovered most of them were from Kolhapur, Thane, Pune and that zone,” she recalls. And who funded the games? “Diamond merchants, of course,” she says, refusing to say if Nirav Modi’s father was one of them! Sadly, Belgium has no trace of cricket on its soil today.
Bald & not beautiful
Startlingly, India's first match in this tournament did not draw a full house. The picturesque Hampshire Bowl had balding stands much into the game after South Africa won the toss and elected to bat. Hearteningly, however, much of the strength present was Blue in colour and 17,000-capacity stadium had many empty patches, especially on the Westend side. The total crowd strength was 11,500. Maybe at The Oval where India meets its toughest opponent Australia, it will be a fuller more handsome fan story to narrate.