Nostalgia Cricket and its Ability to Bowl Out Anxiety

Maintaining a healthy, high-quality sleep cycle has never been my strong suit – by July this year, the problem had reached its lowest ebb. There were new anti-anxiety meds coursing through my body and old one’s were slowly being petered out.

I lay awake each night watching my mind take on unfamiliar contours, drifting in directions from where I simply couldn’t pull it back. It was better to surrender to the storm in my head and accept that it would take three months at least to return to some sense of normalcy, as my psychiatrist had warned. Cursing myself for seeking this new course of treatment out, I submitted to the safety of my bed, barely getting out at all.

I knew that SSRI withdrawal was real and the likely cause of my present condition, but I had idiotically assumed the new meds would easily smoothen this switch. Perhaps they did – the severity of my symptoms could have been much worse were I not taking any SSRIs.

Nonetheless, I spent most nights awake, aware and anxious, with a looming sense of dread. Panic-stricken, I’d google my symptoms each night, scouring Reddit, Quora and Instagram for unlikely solutions, distractions – anything really to stop my mind from spinning out of control.

These deep dives didn’t yield any gatekept resources but they settled my fears of being alone in experiencing something new and bizarre. There is a lot of content out there about every type of peculiar affliction, such that any suffering that feels unique turns out to be quite routine.

Reading Esmé Weijun Wang’s book The Collected Schizophrenias helped in particular, as I found this gem – “I’ve always found comfort in preexisting conditions; I like to know that I’m not pioneering an inexplicable experience.”

So I wasn’t pioneering a new form of misery but how was I to make my way through it?

While the anxiety was bearable in the day thanks to the general noise and chaos of daily life, my mind’s nocturnal wanderings had an undertone of disquiet. I used to love being awake at night, enveloped by a luscious silence in the house.

But now all my symptoms seemed to be coming alive at night. Back pain. Wrist pain. Headaches. Sleepiness, but an inability to doze off. A debilitating sense of anxiety. I’d toss and turn in bed, hoping new angles and folds would relieve some of the discomfort. No such luck.

But then I found the treasure trove of nostalgia cricket.

Researching for a cricket story led me down a very welcome rabbit hole featuring a seemingly endless, bottomless resource of old highlight videos. I began to look for cricket matches from years gone by, that everyone on the internet seemed to remember fondly.

Some of them I remembered having watched as a kid, others I took joy in experiencing for the first time, as if they were live. Tucked away in my blanket, surrounded by the sights and sounds of my childhood, suddenly the noise in my head began to die down and I started being able to fall asleep quietly.

I don’t know if it was the exquisite sound of bat hitting ball, or the ebbs and flows of the crowd’s atmosphere, or even the dulcet tones of Harsha Bhogle or Richie Benaud, knowing that there was a game on and these familiar characters were out there batting, bowling, and commenting on it, brought me a unique sense of relief and calm.

There‘s a cabinet of curiosities to be found in each of these videos. Cricket broadcasting has evolved significantly over the years, for one, making the old school videos appear almost unrecognisable to what you’ll find on Star Sports or Jio Cinema today. As the ball travelled close to the boundary with a fielder giving chase, a small window  would appear on a corner of the screen to show the batters running between the wickets.

Camera movements also seemed to be rather instinctive, with the cameraperson misjudging the trajectory of the ball quite often! The spectators were different too – in a 1996 Titan Cup game between India and Australia, the crowd actually started lighting sparklers in anticipation of India’s win. Imagine walking into a cricket stadium with a pocket full of crackers. Those were different, more fearless times.

Grainy and low-res, these videos forced me to tap into my memories of ‘90s-2000s cricket when more often than not, I heard the match on the radio and never actually got to watch it. It’s interesting to finally put visuals to games that exist in your mind only as stories told by commentators.

One memory stands out particularly fondly here. I bunked school with a friend in early 2005 and listened to the India vs Pakistan ODI match in Kochi on our secretly smuggled in pocket radio. Sehwag had scored a blistering 108 with Dravid contributing 104 to the final score. This came after India lost early wickets and Sehwag was dropped twice in the beginning of the game. Watching the same game twenty years later felt like drawing the outlines of a painting in which the colours had already been filled in.

I suppose watching games where the result was already known made me feel safe as houses. I knew exactly where the challenges would come from, who would succumb to them, and who would emerge victorious. There was no sense of anxiety or doom, only the conviction that Sachin Tendulkar or Harbhajan Singh would save the day.

A favourite video that I played and replayed often was the India vs Australia game at Eden Gardens in 2001 when VVS Laxman scored a sublime 281. His wristy stroke play and ability to find the gaps with ease made this match an absolute treat for the senses. On the other end, Rahul Dravid put up a mighty 180, which took the team’s collective lead against the Aussies to a mammoth 384, after having also played through a follow on.

The message was clear: you play each ball on its merits, get through the hard overs and eventually you will emerge on the other side with plenty of runs and a stadium applauding your efforts. Surely, all I too had to do was defend against intrusive thoughts with a straight bat.

My go to videos were of test matches where nothing really happened for large swathes of time. Ball after ball defended or left. “Well left,” the commentators chirped every time a batter decided not to play the ball.

Cricket might be the only team game where doing absolutely nothing is also considered a skill of endurance and concentration. A skill that I, in the pits of my anxiety, was excelling at. It was decided I was going to ‘leave’ all deliveries for the time being, until I found my footing and had settled at the crease.

Five days of cricket at a blindingly boring pace where – suddenly on the second day – the story would get interesting, the tides having turned, the winds having shifted. A spell of a few overs would bring well settled batters into attempting reckless shots and out of nowhere, the bowling side would gain momentum.

Earlier you might have been nodding off slightly, but now you sat up to take notice. Act one had introduced all the characters and set the scene.Act two presented complications and demanded heroic action. Would the new batter walking to the crease be able to live up to expectations or would their fate end in Shakespearean tragedy?

The fourth and final test of the 2020-21 Border-Gavaskar series between India and Australia brought this kind of narrative tension in spades. Both teams had won a test each and the third test in Sydney petered out to a draw, making this encounter at The Gabba the series decider. Australia hadn’t lost a men’s Test here since 1988 and by the second day, had cruised past 300.

But seamer Shardul Thakur had other ideas, dismissing  captain Tim Paine, after which rookie allrounder Cameron Green and fast bowler Pat Cummins lost their wickets too in a span of just four overs. Tailenders Nathan Lyon and Josh Hazlewood fell shortly after, with Australia setting a first innings total of 369. Things remained bleak for India, as their  top order was sent packing by the Aussies by the third, leaving the lower order to step up and get India to 336.

Australia were coasting again through the fourth day, when things began to turn in India’s favour. Beginning with Marcus Harris’ wicket, Thakur and Mohammad Siraj picked their way through the batting line up, restricting Australia to a lead of 327.

The stakes were high, victory within reach of either side, and the stage set for a classic final day nailbiter. Until the last few moments when India needed just 30 from 38 balls, things could have gone either way. With an unbeaten 85, wicketkeeper Rishabh Pant guided India to both the match and series win. The test had it all – grit, drama, despair, and hope – all the things that make up an engaging story.

And that is ultimately what elite-level sports like cricket are – storytelling. Despite the rules and settings remaining the same, the ‘feel’ of each game is different, played out in a new and unique narrative each time.

Some matches play out in slow motion, with your home team marching past each obstacle, every milestone seeping into your memory. Others are over in a flash, the opposing team’s onslaught feeling unreal and catastrophic (this is how I experienced the World Cup final on November 19, 2023). Every cricket match is then just a chance to tell a different story.

To an anxious mind, there is nothing more calming than becoming enveloped in a story completely different from your own. It hardly matters whether your team wins or loses. You are invested in the game, its ups and downs, its meandering sub-plots, and its various interesting characters, compared to the final result.

For hours a day, you imbue the unfolding game of cricket with meaning and significance far greater than your own struggles. How the batter plays each deceptive ball, how the bowler gets under the batter’s skin, these are the questions that pervade your mind. And for that brief interlude of time, the anxiety too sits back and watches you watch the most sublime game known to humankind.

Tanushree Bhasin is an independent writer and photographer based in New Delhi.