The Eleventh Man

The game of cricket did not fade away from the world. It went up in flames in a matter of months. It all started on a November evening under lights at Mumbai's Wankhade Stadium. India was playing England in a one day international. Harsha B, a ripe 65 year old on the verge of retirement was holding forth on TV in his patented faux mix of Cardus and Arlott. Suddenly the producer's voice broke in "Hey Harsha count the English team on the field. I think there are only on ten". Jolted out of his reverie Harsha got back to the job of describing the action on the field. As the bowler got ready to deliver the next ball, Harsha started describing the field setting while bringing up the graphic showing the field positions occupied. The producer was right. There will be 10 Englishmen on the field including the wicket-keeper and the bowler. Harsha started ticking of the names in his head to locate the missing eleventh man. That was the start of the worldwide befuddlement that ensued. Try as hard as he may, Harsha just could not figure out who was the missing eleventh man. His mind would identify a player and the next moment, lo and behold, the guy would be there lurking at third man or patrolling long on. Besides the producer and now Harsha nobody else seemed to have yet noticed the missing eleventh man. The match halted for the drinks break and Harsha alerted his fellow commentators to the mystery. Over the next one hour, each one of the team of six tried to identify the missing eleventh man and failed to. As strange to everyone of them was that neither the players on the field, the umpires, the players and officials in the pavilion, or any of the 16,433 spectators or the millions watching on TV had noticed the anomaly! The commentary team decided to keep the mystery to themselves and let the match finish. As the players started trudging back to the pavilion and the spectators started vacating the stands, Harsha ran down to the ground and caught hold of the English manager and asked him whether any of his players were missing. The manager was befuddled by the question but since it came from a man he both liked and respected he went around counting his boys. Since England had lost the match, the counting job was easy as all the players huddled around inside the dressing room. There were sixteen in the squad and the manager could count only 15. He brought out a list started ticking down the names. There it was. There was one person missing. It was James Gray, the stocky spinner. But Gray was in the playing eleven and would have been on the field just moments ago. Where was James Gray? The question haunted everybody left on the ground for the next hour so and then the question started reverberating across the world. Mumbai was being searched with a tooth comb 30 minutes after it was noticed that John Gray was missing with all exits from Mumbai blocked. "John Gray had to be somewhere in Mumbai wouldn't he?" "Where else could he be? He just did not have the time to get to anywhere else, did he?" "And any way why would he run away? So what if he got hammered for 45 in 5 overs, it had been done to him and worse before". However the biggest mystery and befuddlement and mystery of all was unfolding in the TV studio. The footage of the match was being examined in the minutest details. Footage from twelve high-definition cameras focused unblinkingly on that less than 2 acres of turf, examined and re-examined. And what happened to Harsha, happened to a team of 30 highly alter individuals over the next 4 hours. In the last 90 minutes of playing time, there were only 14 people, including the two batsmen and the two umpires on the ground, instead of the 15 that should have been there. And the biggest puzzle was no amount of list checking could identify who was the missing eleventh person. Every time a count was taken, James Gray was lurking somewhere on the field. Every time one of the other 10 was assumed was missing, there he was lurking somewhere on the field. Nobody was missing yet the count added up to one missing. Over the next 3 days the hunt for James Gray was expanded worldwide. John Gray was nowhere to be found. The world media was agog even while the mystery of the TV footage was kept from the world.But that was the least of the questions bothering world governments and intelligence agencies. The rationalist were called in but no fraud or trick in the TV footage was exposed. The scientists and the strategist tried to construct explanatory scenarios but none could be created that did not cross the outer boundaries of humanity knowledge. And then on the sixth day it happened again. This time it was in the West Indies during a West Indies versus Australia Test Match. In broad daylight!. This time the world governments and the intelligence agencies were ready. The incident was kept under wraps. The missing player, a Trinidadian fast bowler, disappeared from the face of the world without a whimper in the media. A tightly controlled 230 people knew about the incident. The others were paid-off or intimated or both to keep quiet. And when it happened the sixth time within nine months of the Wankhade incident, the world governments got together and banned international cricket. In a scenario created by a brilliant strategist from British intelligence, rumours about a worldwide betting syndicate that regularly fixed international matches was started soon after the Wankhade Incident and fanned. The formidable propaganda machinery of the Western powers revved up after the second incident and the decision by cricket boards and governments across the world, soon after the sixth incident,to ban international cricket for the foreseeable future was, with the exception of peaceful protests in cities like Mumbai. Kolkata, Sydney and London, accepted by the people and media of the world. And without the fuel of international cricket, in a few years, all cricket died. The world now had 230 more football stadiums. It was nearly two centuries, before the world officially recognized the Wankhade Incident as the first of several botched attempts by the super-computers of the sixth planet around the distant sun Alpha Nova to contact the human race. By then it was much too late to revive the lovely game of cricket.