As most of you would have expected after reading my last post, I was super-excited about the India Pakistan match. So much so that I actually felt butterflies in my stomach the night before and could barely get a good sleep. The morning of the match was better – there was some sort of strange smile on my face bordering to depicting confidence that I felt for the Indian cricket team. As usual I had the colleague at work to banter with about the match. I went to work and she said that she would like India to win the toss and bat second because of the strong Indian batting line up. However I did not agree, I said if India wins the toss they should bat first precisely because of the strong batting line up. India chasing can be a little dicy because of a very good Pakistani bowling attack. Thankfully Dhoni saw the same argument and India decided to bat first.
As usual this gave me a lot of time to finish off some critical work on my plate and have a lighter second half. I trusted that Sachin will bat fearlessly and with élan and he has never disappointed me. The catches being dropped one after another played the role of a cameo in the middle of a horror film (so called because of the huge amount of tension on the field). 280 on the board would have helped, but with 260 I felt India needed my attention. I started concentrating on the strategies of the game and the performance of the players on field. I started concentrating on the available statistics. I started building a model in my mind, a forecasting model.
It was time to test my model. When I saw 3 dot balls to Younis Khan from Yuvraj Singh, I told my colleague that the next bowl will be out. Bang on target! My next prediction was the next time Harbhajan Singh comes to bowl, he will take a wicket. He came after a few overs as Yuvraj Singh and Munaf Patel were taking turns at that point, and giving away lots of runs, and just as per prediction when Bhajji came, a wicket fell down. And similarly I kept on making predictions to her, and wickets kept on falling, however after a couple of more predictions, I started putting a confidence interval around them. I know most of you would not believe me, but what I experienced yesterday was divine. The colleague of mine to whom I was communicating them was aghast in disbelief, but had no option but to believe at the same time.
Word spread around and everybody started trying to understand how I was actually doing it. Questions like if I have to bet my own money on my next prediction, how much I would be willing to put came up, as this would help get an ordinal measure of the confidence I have on my predictions. Even though I had convinced everybody that I have built a sophisticated model in my mind which was using all the statistical measures on the screen in front of me to analyse and come up with a prediction, the truth of the matter is that I believe it was simply something divine. I wanted India to win so badly, that just with my mental strength of wanting a wicket to fall down; I was actually making it happen. Can anybody justify how Sachin could get so many life lines in yesterday’s match? Probably not! The only answer could be that so many Indians around the world wanted India to win, implying Sachin to continue batting, that divinity had no option but to surrender again and again and again.
I want all the divine powers to come together stronger than before and make India win the World Cup. What a treat that would be to all of us who have worked as hard mentally as the cricketers on the field to help them move forward every step!