Irfan Farooq |
There are certain relationships in life that never completely leave you. No matter how far you walk away from them, some fragment of your soul continues living there, like an old photograph forgotten inside a drawer. Cricket is that relationship for me.
I no longer follow the game the way I once did. I no longer wait eagerly for series schedules, study scorecards late into the night, or arrange entire days around a Test match session. The game that once consumed my imagination has slowly drifted away from me. Or perhaps I am the one who drifted away from it.
Today’s cricket feels louder, faster and strangely unfamiliar. Every week brings another league, another franchise, another carefully manufactured rivalry wrapped in fireworks, branding and marketing slogans. The sport I once loved with almost religious devotion now often feels like an endless spectacle designed for shrinking attention spans. Somewhere along the way, cricket stopped breathing — or at least the cricket I grew up loving did.
I belong to the generation that experienced cricket in the 90’s, when the game still carried mystery. Back then, cricket did not flood your phone every minute of the day. You waited for it. Tours felt significant, and overseas series carried romance, difficulty and narrative. Even a triangular tournament in Australia could feel as important as a World Cup because cricket still possessed rarity, and rarity gave it emotional weight.
Growing up in Dubai, my world revolved around cricket. With limited access to live television coverage, I spent hours re-reading cricket magazines, studying match reports, player profiles and historical features with the obsession of someone trying to understand an entire civilization. At school, break-time conversations revolved around recent matches, batting averages and bowling actions. Entire weeks were spent anticipating a single series. Half the pleasure lay in imagination itself.
Back then, cricket was not merely content to be consumed. It was atmosphere. The game unfolded with patience, allowing moments to breathe.
I still remember watching Wasim Akram reverse the ball with almost supernatural mastery, or seeing Shane Warne turn a cricket ball as though he were bending reality itself. Sachin Tendulkar carried the expectations of millions every time he walked to the crease, while Brian Lara batted with the freedom and elegance of an artist unconcerned with consequence. Those players were not merely athletes. They became emotional landmarks in my youth.
Cricket shaped my personality more than I realized at the time. Test cricket taught patience in a world that had not yet become addicted to speed. Radio commentary and newspaper reports taught imagination because so much of the game still had to be mentally constructed. Cricket taught drama, uncertainty, heartbreak and beauty. Even my love for reading and writing emerged through the game.
I began searching for scorebooks, magazines and cricket literature with extraordinary intensity. Writers like Neville Cardus and C. L. R. James made me realize that cricket could become memory, literature, philosophy and art. Match reports were no longer just reports. They became stories about time, place, character and emotion.
In those years, cricket still allowed room for contemplation. Today, everything feels accelerated. T20 cricket did not destroy my relationship with the game overnight. At first, I enjoyed its freshness and energy. The packed stadiums, innovations and intensity all felt exciting. But gradually, almost invisibly, it began swallowing everything around it. Technique became secondary to entertainment, patience became unfashionable, and context slowly disappeared beneath the demand for constant stimulation.
A brilliant Test innings now struggles for attention in an era built around instant highlights and endless clips. Sometimes I watch a few minutes of franchise cricket online and feel strangely disconnected from it. The relentless music, branding, statistics and social media noise make the sport feel emotionally exhausting. Every player now seems to exist simultaneously as athlete, influencer and commercial property. Every tournament feels engineered by marketing departments before it is experienced by supporters.
There was a time when I knew every touring squad, every domestic competition and every batting average worth remembering. Now entire series pass without me noticing. The intimacy I once shared with cricket has faded, and perhaps that is what saddens me most. Losing interest in a sport is one thing. Losing emotional intimacy with something that once shaped your inner life feels entirely different.
And yet, despite all this, I cannot truly let cricket go because first love never disappears completely. Every now and then, memory returns unexpectedly: a faded photograph in a retro magazine, a clip from the 1992 World Cup, the voices of Tony Greig and Richie Benaud, the sight of a red ball swinging beneath cloudy skies. Suddenly the years collapse, and for a brief moment I am no longer the older man exhausted by modern cricket. I become the boy who spent his evenings imagining an ongoing Test match and studying newspaper scorecards line by line because cricket once felt like the most beautiful thing in the world.
Perhaps that is why my separation from cricket feels so personal. I did not merely lose interest in a game. I lost a version of myself. The sport once gave rhythm to my summers and structure to my emotions. It shaped conversations with friends, moments with family and even my understanding of beauty itself. Some people remember their youth through songs or photographs. I remember mine through cricket matches.
The older I grow, the more I realize nostalgia is rarely about the past itself. It is about mourning the person you once were. When I think about 90’s cricket, I am not only remembering cover drives, reverse swing or commentary voices. I am remembering innocence. I am remembering a slower world before algorithms, before outrage became a permanent condition of public life, before every beautiful thing was immediately monetized and consumed to exhaustion.
Cricket, in those days, felt human because life itself still felt more human.
Perhaps younger generations will one day feel the same attachment to the modern game. Decades from now, someone may remember today’s T20 leagues with affection because every generation protects its own version of sport from the erosion of time. Memory has a way of turning ordinary things into sacred objects. But for me, the deepest emotional connection will always belong to another era — an era when cricket unfolded slowly enough to become part of your emotional landscape.
And perhaps that is the real reason certain passions fade with age. It is not always because the thing itself has changed beyond recognition. Sometimes we change quietly without noticing. The world moves forward while a part of us remains seated in another time, still searching for emotions that can no longer fully return. What we mourn is not simply a sport, but the vanished atmosphere surrounding it — the people we were, the world we inhabited and the illusions we once carried without embarrassment.
I no longer follow cricket closely, yet I still carry it somewhere within me. It survives through fragments: a nostalgic article, a vintage YouTube clip, a retro photograph. These memories endure because certain passions never entirely disappear. They simply retreat deeper into the self, becoming quieter with time.
