Batting for Sachin in Jaipur

Liverpool fans who went to Istanbul, despite 21 years of despair, for the Champions League final against AC Milan in 2004, will tell you. Boston Red Sox fans, who waited 86 seasons at Fenway Park for a World Series title, will tell you some more. They had stuck it out through the bad times; that’s why they wept on the streets in the good.

It’s on this sentiment of ecstasy in agony that club sport is based. It takes time — years, decades — to get such loyalty. And it takes as long for that devotion to translate into good business for those who own the clubs from the day of their inception.

When you support a club, you love everything about it — the players, no matter what creed or colour they belong to; a great manager in a game such as football becomes a father figure; and the stadium is a holy shrine whose mud you proudly smear on your forehead.

So, sorry for being a voice of dissent in these times when everyone wants to celebrate the power of India’s Cricket economy, but true loyalty is not easy to buy — especially not in a country such as ours, where cricket is linked so closely with national pride.

Think about it. Indian cricket is almost jingoistic. We feel shame as a nation when the team loses, so we go into the streets to burn effigies and carry out mock funerals. When Harbhajan Singh is charged with racism, we forget that he’s an individual and react as if the whole country has been called racist. The print and TV media show us non-stop live coverage of a victory march following the Twenty20 World Cup victory, and programmes such as Match ka Mujrim become instant TRP leaders.

Picture this: if Brett Lee of Mohali is bowling to M.S. Dhoni of Chennai,...