Cricket Attitude Quotes

It was when the sun gently slipped off the backside of the horizon and slowly drew the light of the day in it’s train that everything went quiet. And before the assorted choruses of crickets and spring peepers rose to greet the night, nature nodded at a day well done. And regardless of whether my day had come with rain or sunshine, I find few things as healing as lifting my soul above my circumstances and bringing the day to a close by nodding at a day well done.

My grateful mental state lets in a different view of reality than is otherwise possible....And when I am thus conscious of my life and the world as a gift, I am less preoccupied with self. My attention focuses elsewhere. I am more alert to other people's needs and virtues. I find my wonder awakened by just about everything: the engineering behind the physique of a cricket or a fly, for instance, or the beauty in even a pebble. In other words, when I am grateful, I tend toward a higher mental (and spiritual) state. I take things--people, order, air, roundness, everything--less for granted. Hence I notice things otherwise invisible to me. It is as if I have a sixth sense, taking in more context, more reality. If my temporary taste of gratitude becomes a disciplined habit, an ongoing attitude and state of mind, I am 'smarter,' more aware, than if this were not so. To the extent that I become a habitually grateful person, I engage a different and richer reality than the 'me' who is less grateful.

His forehands are nothing less than cricket shots. His single-handed backhand is like a game of table tennis return. I want to burst into laughter. His shots touch the Sky… His returns reach up to the Sun… His serves tread unknown paths…

In a privately printed work entitled Paneros, author Norman Douglas cautions his readers against putting their trust . . . in Arabian skink, in Roman goose-fat or Roman goose tongues, in the Arplan of China . . . in spicy culinary dishes, erongoe root, or the brains of lovemaking sparrows . . . in pine nuts, the blood of bats mingled with asses’ milk, root of valerian, dried salamander, cyclamen, menstrual fluid of man or beast, tulip bulbs, fat of camel’s hump, parsnips, hyssop, gall of children, salted crocodile, the aquamarine stone, pollen of date palm, the pounded tooth of a corpse, wings of bees, jasmine, turtles’ eggs, applications of henna, brayed crickets, or spiders or ants, garlic, the genitals of hedgehogs, Siberian iris, rhinoceros horn, the blood of slaughtered animals, artichokes, honey compounded with camel’s milk, oil of champak, liquid gold, swallows’ hearts, vineyard snails, fennel-juice, certain bones of the toad, sulphurous waters and other aquae amatrices, skirret-tubers or stag’s horn crushed to powder: aphrodisiacs all, and all impostures.

Cricket was a manly game. Manly masters spoke of the 'discipline of the hard ball'. Schools preferred manly games. Games were only manly if it was possible while playing them to be killed or drowned or at the very least badly maimed. Cricket could be splendidly dangerous. Tennis was not manly, and if a boy had asked permission to spend the afternoon playing croquet he would have been instantly punished for his 'general attitude'. Athletics were admitted into the charmed lethal circle as a boy could, with a little ingenuity, get impaled during the pole-vault or be decapitated by a discus and did a manly death. Fives were thought to be rather tame until one boy ran his head into a stone buttress and got concussion and another fainted dead away from heat and fatigue. Then everybody cheered up about fives.

I remember Manjrekar admonishing me for rolling the ball back down the pitch. (I was keeping wickets with our regular keeper injured.) Polly Umrigar in a friendly match at CCI, as soon as he came in, would not play balls on his leg toward short leg preferring to take them on his thigh-pad till he was set; such was the seriousness and professional attitude the Bombay player displayed. And the more senior you were, the greater was the discipline for they saw themselves as role models. This was not evident in Madras or Bangalore where players who had made the grade often thought they were above the law and the code of conduct that was preached. Venkataraghavan was the exception—apart from talent, his discipline, fitness and work ethic has ensured that he is till today, the most successful cricketer from Tamil Nadu.