The venue of India's 500th Test was Kanpur. How and why it was chosen as the host for a milestone Test can be answered only by the BCCI, with a lot of people raising questions about its stature. Now, Green Park is a ground that has quite a bit of history attached to it. The first Test in India with a turf wicket was played here. It was here that Mohammad Azharuddin scored his third consecutive Test ton before going on to chart a rather successful international career.
But for a while, the venue wasn't considered for the longest format. Seven years to be precise. But Test cricket came back here for the 500th.
Regular visitors here say that the venue has undergone a sea change in terms of facilities but what was observed for a first-timer was also a travel back in time. Not many venues in India still have open press boxes. Not many have limited security hassles and not many Test-match cities still have an old-world charm about them. The move to bring Tests back to Kanpur was also BCCI's way of trying to attract bigger crowds at the venues. Taking it to smaller centres, they felt, would bring them back.
Now the logic behind that doesn't seem entirely convincing. As Ravichandran Ashwin pointed out in his press conference on the fourth day, "Chennai and Bangalore still fill up for Test matches." That doesn't take away the fact that Kanpur has a cricket-mad crowd as well. If the BCCI is right, then we will see the same happening in cities like Indore, Ranchi and Dharamsala as well but that can be answered only at the end of the season.
What sets Kanpur apart though is that it gives you a sense of a bygone era. Time, seemingly, runs slower here for everyone. The town isn't awake even by 8AM. Non-motorised vehicles such as the 'cycle rickshaw' are still a central part of the public transport system. So much so that motorized ones ply predominantly on a 'shared' basis. The people of Kanpur, like most small towns, are a friendly lot. Although, some of them can lie without the blink of an eye.
After a long working day, I had ordered dinner to my room while still wrapping up copies. But for some reason, it didn't arrive even after two hours of my initial order. A call to the room service didn't go unanswered and the Hindi spoken here has a distinctly friendlier tone than normal. Courtesy is inbred, you might think. But the answered call was one of flat denial. 'Koi order tho nahi aaya' (English translation) said the man at the other end. He was convincing me that the conversation I had over the phone a few hours earlier never took place! With no proof to fall back on (faulty journalism?), and the night too late already, I had to be happy with glasses of water instead. But thanks to the heavy lunch spread available everyday at Green Park, it made the night easier.
Food is what anyone would recommend to you before a visit to this part of India. The kebabs are to die for, they tell you and rave about the aloo tikkis that have to be had. Both of which I agree with, and having visited the place, I would recommend the same but not so much so because it is so good (which it is) but also because there's not much else as good.
But Green Park offered a lot of respite through the cricket and a lot else, after the match started. There is a certain flavour to these smaller venues that has totally vanished from other cities. You cannot get close to the pitch in most other centers before the match day because of the high-security protocol. But here even at the end of the day's play journalists could walk up to the pitch, if needed and have a chat with the groundsmen, who would, in turn, shy away from answering any difficult questions, just at the last moment. Off the record, they'll give you a lot more but stoic silence or friendly laughter dominated much of the conversation. He'd be an expert in tackling the difficult ones on the surface he'd produced.
The staff here work hard and try to convince you that everything is alright even though, sometimes, it clearly isn't. But you give in, and let them do their work at their own pace.
Now the security hassles found here are of a different kind. Not so much so to get inside the stadium premises but to get closer to the practice sessions you would have to go out again onto the road and enter through another gate. The policemen were politely uncompromising. It might have helped if they had more Tests here to understand how things worked, I thought. One of those forced trudges made me feel that I had watched all 500 Tests at one go.
Now you'd think that it seems a pain in many ways but it definitely didn't feel so. And one reason for that was the deafening crowd that created a din much unlike what you hear in a lot of other venues, particularly for Test matches. That Green Park falls under the category of grounds that has a history of big turnouts isn't to be under-appreciated. They didn't let anyone down on this occasion as well. The open press box certainly made it easier to appreciate them and for a 500th Test, it was they who made the occasion special despite the presence of a galaxy of stars, who were brought in at the start of the game.
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