The Big Easy

Ganguly can make talking to the media—a mandatory ritual as per ICC's conditions—look like a favour royalty is doing to the free world. If his answers are anything to go by, it seems that by now he knows all the questions. His refrains at this World Cup: "We have to bat well, field well and bowl well", "We have to play as a unit", "The team that plays better will win". Despite his unconcealed boredom at having to explain a sport to the kind of professionals whom Steve Waugh once described as "a room full of cockheads", Ganguly does make strong points when he wants to, like his takes on commentators and 'violent' Indian fans. But, except for these retaliatory flashes, he's not a troubled man plotting ways to fight injustice and his own bad patch. Sometimes he looks introspective at the nets or when he walks back from practice carrying five bats with a journalist horde shadowing him like visible death, but he's never as isolated as Azharuddin was during his last years.

At the batting crease, Sachin Tendulkar may appear to be wrapped in some devious plan devised to plunder the opposition but when he is with the team, he is convincingly one of the boys. Especially when playing volleyball which they all so religiously do these days. There is no cultivated dignity then that he tries to carry himself with. He screams in excitement when a point is scored, his distinct voice piercing through the general celebration as a shrill squeal. When he is with strangers like journalists, though, you can sense a touch of discomfort, as if he is suffering an intrusion.

That's a layer of sophistication that good friend Sehwag doesn't possess. On a bright morning in Pretoria, when most of the team has left for sightseeing, he saunters lazily out of the lift, leans on the wall and chats with journalists about a Chinese meal he and other cricketers had in Harare for 150,000 Zimbabwe dollars, about how he discovered that some Pakistani bowlers were "needlessly abusive", how they were "uncultured and uneducated", about how it's good that Shoaib Akhtar is so quick because the ball goes that much faster to the ropes. As he is chatting, Yuvraj Singh walks in a bit lost: "Someone told me I was supposed to be at a press conference but when I went to the room there was not a single reporter."

When the journalists say they weren't informed and are all ready now, he runs into the lift screaming "Later!", happy at having escaped an ordeal. But they manage to get him back to the conference room where he clearly has nothing much to say. The team's media manager usually "delivers" an Indian player to the press before a match. Yuvraj and Kaif are the most dreaded because they make bad copy.

Anil Kumble uses seniority to reject any demand to be so delivered. There is a certain way he looks at the media these days—almost overt contempt. As he waits for the team bus, he spots a senior photographer hanging around. "Where do you think you are going with the camera?" Kumble asks. "I'm following the team," says the lenseye. "You can't," Kumble says. "This is a personal trip. I'm serious. You can't follow us." But he's kinder to the lensmen than to the wordsmiths. Sometimes he poses sportingly for the flash bulbs, choosing a picture over a 1,000-word equivalent that normally mulls over why he is ineffective outside India. A team official says he sports a long face these days because he's not assured of a place in the playing eleven. With Ganguly clearly stating that he will go in with only one spinner, Kumble's brooding may continue.

The man who will continue to hold his place in some of the remaining matches, Harbhajan, is clearly more easygoing, though he has transformed from being a meek subject of media scrutiny. Having acquired a fondness for gadgets, he sometimes asks how much a fancy cellphone costs or what kind of camera he should buy. After the nets, he likes to see his own pictures sometimes, on photographers' laptops. He does dine with pretty women, safely inviting two of them on occasions, presumably to kill the excitement among the crawling reporters.

Nehra is far less flamboyant, a late riser given suitable conditions. He normally steps into the lobby uncombed and seemingly straight out of bed, as though searching for his immediate family to give him coffee and food. When he is working, however, he pushes the limits of human endurance. In Ganguly's eyes, "nobody tries harder than him to be in the eleven". Javagal Srinath comes from behind like a giant, now casting a shadow then hugging his friends, both famous and unknown, with the warmth of a free man who has nothing to lose. For someone who surprised everyone with his pointed rebuke of commentators, even blaming them for the violent reactions back home, Srinath essentially is a pleasant rib-poker and extremely efficient when he wants to pull someone forcefully into the lift.

In a strictly non-cricketing analysis, this is a team that in its freer moments belies the perception that it's quivering under the pressure of one billion expectations. Media manager Amrit Mathur says, "This is the most united team I have seen in years." It's also the team people in South Africa are praying will finally humble Australia. If it happens, flamboyance would have triumphed over ruthless efficiency. In a perfect world, Brazil beats Germany, Kasparov checks Deep Blue.Another contest unfolds in the impending future.