The 22 Yards of Our Lives

I think anyone who knows me decently well knows that I love cricket. It is a sport that I played religiously in school, and I would give anything to be able to do the same right now. Quite often, the greatest thrill comes from playing that exquisite cover drive and knowing you have struck the perfect balance between timing and placement. It could even come from the sight of a cartwheeling off-stump for a fast bowler, or deceiving the batsmen with flight and turn, or the lack of it, if you are a spinner. There are all these little moments on the field that give cricketers and cricket lovers a real adrenaline rush that can be very addictive. It is not too hard to see why one would love this game.

That being said, I honestly believe that my love for this game goes even deeper than that, and if you are still reading this, you now get to find out why.  

I have come to realise that the true beauty of this game lies in how relatable it is to life itself. As someone who loves to bat, I will come at this from a batsmen’s perspective. I know with absolute certainty that if I get a half-volley outside off-stump, my best bet is to get on the front foot at play the drive, either through the covers or past point, just like I know a short ball in the same region is best met with a square cut behind point. I know this in theory, and I could probably write this in a Board exam and pass with flying colours (if only they ever asked such questions!). But getting this through my head will not help me one bit when I am batting in a game and I have got a split second to decide how to address the ball coming at me. I’ve also got no way of knowing where to expect the ball before its bowled (though I could take an educated guess based on the field setting and a few mind games, but there is risk involved there too). At the same time, I must decide, failing which I could lose anything from my wicket up to possibly my life too. So how do I call on my theoretical knowledge of how to bat in that fraction of a second that matters most?

As one digs deeper into this, it could lead to a newfound appreciation for someone like Virat Kohli, arguably the greatest batsmen of this era. With the few milliseconds that he probably gets to make the right or wrong decision, he would merely be reacting to the ball coming at him. How does he get it right more often than not? The answer is simple: He has worked extensively on his game to find a method that works for him that gives him the best chance of making the right decisions at the right time. He has also put that into practice day-in and day-out to a point where he just reacts while he is batting purely based off a combination of instinct and muscle memory.

This is where the game starts to sound a lot like life itself. As human beings, we are a product of our environment, our exposure and our experiences. As we go through each day, we are merely reacting to the situations we find ourselves in. The way we choose to react often defines what comes next for us and what we do or do not achieve, which is similarly applicable in the art of batsmanship too. We prepare by mentally equipping ourselves in a manner that gives us the best chance of making better decisions when it counts based on our understanding of ourselves. This is done in an astoundingly similar fashion to all the background work and understanding of his game that makes Kohli a better batsman.

If you are still reading this, I appreciate you making it through what is a lot of detail I have gone into to explain why I am able to relate many situations in my life to a game of cricket. A colleague of mine will tell you that I tend to refer to a tense situation in the office like the last four overs of a T20 game. I hope that the realisation of the evident similarities between the generic approach to batting and the generic approach to life gives you the kind of perspective it has given me.