Rick’s Cafe: Cricket … now with cheerleaders and naked supermodels

I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but it seemed a bit gratuitous when top Indian model Poonam Pandey (pictured) promised to strip naked if India wins the cricket World Cup on Saturday. Or, as All Voices.com so clearly explains it:

As promised earlier on the mainstream media by the 20 years old hot and sexiest Indian model that she will go “All Nude” and strip in the dressing room of Team India or in front of the whole stadium if BCCI permits her to do so, if the Indian Cricket Team won ICC World Cup 2011, Poonam Pandey is all set to go nude since the chances for Indian Cricket team have brightened after the their victory over Pakistan in semi-finals.

Poonam Pandey has been on the covers of one of the most popular magazines and calendars through out 2011 and is famous for her appearance in Swimwear Calendars where she has tried to expose her body as much as she can in a swim suit.

We all appreciate her efforts.

But India doesn’t need extra prodding to get worked up over the final with Sri Lanka: it would be like FDR offering everyone ten bucks to go outside and celebrate VE Day. The frenzied passion in India is already at Slumdog Millionaire pitch … where else would you find a fan willing to trade a kidney for a ticket to the World Cup? What we’ve got here is a nation of 1.2 billion people with only one major sport. Imagine if the folks in the condo next door are having a World Cup party, and a billion people show up. In addition to quickly running out of guacamole, there’s going to be noise.

How much noise? About 115 million people watched the Super Bowl this year. The India-Pakistan World Cup semifinal TV audience was estimated at 1 billion.

As for the level of excitement for the World Cup outside of India and Pakistan, yeah, we’ll probably need to see the breasts. But that doesn’t make us bad people.

To get you ready for the big day, and gain some perspective on cricket in India, here’s a quick report by my friend Rajesh Kannan, a writer for the cricket blog 99.94.

“The streets were utterly deserted in India yesterday for the India-Pakistan game, and companies gave everyone a half day off, knowing that no one was going to show up anyway,” Kannan said.

“Brazil is a successful sporting country — Brazilians excel in volleyball, basketball, tennis and a host of other sports, but their passion for football is unparalleled. India, with five times the population, has just the one sport. And that is the one sporting conduit through which Indians can look the world in the eye. And while in the past, cricketing excellence was seen as a thumb in the eye of the colonial masters, the chip on India’s shoulder is being whittled off with increasing self-confidence, both in cricket and in the world at large.

“Before the mid-1980s, cricket was a genteel game in India, and the stereotype of Indian players as mysterious Oriental spin bowlers with little fight in them took hold. All that changed when India, from nowhere, won the ODI World Cup in 1983. Coinciding with the liberalization of the Indian economy in a few years, the whole of India has been hooked on cricket ever since — not least because the ODI form of the game, in which India seemed to excel. That’s a shorter version rather than the five-day (mostly) snoozefests that used to hold sway earlier.”

That’s the thing: While baseball seasons get longer and we struggle to find ways to shave five or six minutes from the typical game, India has invented a whole new version of cricket in which matches take one-fifth the time.

“To hold sway over more than a billion people, the game has to cater to the casual fans as well as the hardcore ones,” Kannan said. “T20 — the newest version — is replete with cheerleaders and all the associated razzmatazz you see in American sports. So while the fan base for each form of the game exists in plenty, the newest and shortest form is the one luring people in.”

Plus there are the cheerleaders, such as White Mischief, the official cheerleaders of the Royal Challengers Bangalore of the Indian Premier League.

We welcome our new India cricket overlords.

“From 1995-2008, Australia was the nonpareil in world cricket,” Kannan said. “They boasted 5-6 of the greatest players to ever play the game, and were so far ahead of the pack that the ODI World Cups held in 2003 and 2007 were embarrassingly one-sided victories for the Australians.

“With the retirements of these greats (Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Matthew Hayden, Adam Gilchrist et al), the team has suffered a slump in form. It is currently ranked #5 in Test cricket (out of 9; India is ranked #1) and India dumped them out in the quarterfinals a few days ago.”

Plus, Australia doesn’t seem to have that one attractive fan willing to go the extra mile and strip for her team. Pandey:

“I’m a cricket fanatic and I’m a diehard supporter of my nation. India needs a lot of support and this is my way of supporting the team. I’m confident of my body and I’m doing this to excite our boys to play better.”

You may insert your own joke here, using only two of the following cricket terms:

Bang it in
Cart-wheeling stump
Dibbly dobbly
Golden pair
Wicket maiden
Beat the bat
Duckworth-Lewis Method
Break the wicket

Good luck!

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Rick’s Cafe Americain appears each Thursday. Contact: Rickchand@gmail.com.