I spent the good part of saturday in the Charles Dickens Tavern on Collins St. The screen here was all washed out. The cricketers blurred across the screen, their whites stretched thin and without faces. The cricketer’s were transparent faceless ghosts, there was nothing but shadow under their hats, and an occassional glinting tooth or white of the eye. This screen brought an element of horror to the game. Harbhajan would float into the crease soundlessly flapping and spit ferocious lines at the insubstantial batsmen. The hungry figure Aakash Chopra sat virtually upon the batsmen’s necks and sprang about gathering rebounds and deflections with a delirious precision that accounted for at least 95% of all fielding done on the day. I became acutely aware of how incredibly easy it is to be dismissed and the thought was terrifying.

Later that night Ano and i found ourselves outside the Oxford Scholar on Swanston St. It was closed for a private function but through the large untinted windows we had a perfect view of a large screen with perfect contrast and colour. The segment of play we witnessed standing in the street here differed from the first segment in some sort of relation to the screens upon which the play was televised. Now the cricket was all shenanigans. The Indian batting had been destroyed but the Indian crowd was still singing and dancing. Their sadness was evident but they were partying on anyway, all sorts of makeshift banners were springing up with hilarious, good humouredly self-deprecatory couplets scribbled on them. “East or West, India are the best” from earlier in the match had been altered by squeezing a small “2nd” in between ‘the’ & ‘best’ – and was being held aloft no less proudly for it. The Australian fielders were larking about, Warney and Haydos were in competition to see who could wear the most caps on their heads at once. And we were standing in the street watching through a window. During the ads I would become uncomfortable, thinking how desperate I must seem, but each time the telecast resumed I would forget these petty concerns once more and become happily absorbed in the circus.