You cannot rid us of cricket. Try as the Pakistan team might, try as hard as they have over the last year, cricket cannot, will not, be expunged. What haven’t they done? They forfeited a Test, two players tested positive for steroids, managed to avoid bans but one ended up hitting the other with a bat. They were bested by Ireland in the World Cup and were almost implicated in the murder-that-never-was of their coach Bob Woolmer.

This isn’t all: the cricket board, essentially an ad hoc institution, underwent its umpteenth overhaul, since when it has U-turned on policies as a matter of policy. Captains have changed, players have happily signed away national futures chasing ghost dollars. Through it all, unease over the religiosity within the team, echoing perhaps a broader, darker, concern, has quietly bubbled away.

It was all enough to crave for a swift presidential promulgation, hereby ordaining all cricket and cricket-related activities to be ceased with immediate effect. Yet, what else is there in this nation if not cricket, politics and cricket’s politics? Hockey dies anew each year, only to keep people vaguely interested, it does so spectacularly. (“Lost to China? No worries, we’ll lose to Japan this time.”) Squash is less sport, more memory, a glory long gone. (“Isn’t that a drink?” I heard a child say recently). Cricket survives because nothing else did.

True, at the peak of chaos, during the World Cup, people were disgusted, but even then, it was of a kind that held them: really, after a point, even we couldn’t wait to see how much lower we could go. Another dawn of another new era was met with the enthusiasm reserved for habitually failed, recovering alcoholics, or chain smokers who give up until the next smoke.

... contd.