World Cup - The Aftermath
The Cricket world cup came to an end on Sunday, 14th July 2019. By a quirk of fate, the game was decided by a technicality in the rules which was thought out by the game's governing body. England and New Zealand were the contesting teams.
Monday, the 15th - The game was widely reported by the media, the winning team had several engagements to celebrate the win, the losing team boarded a flight back home. English fans discussed the win in offices, colleges and schools. In New Zealand, at offices, schools and colleges, the subject of discussion was the same but the mood, subdued.
Tuesday the 16th - Almost the entire population of England and New Zealand had put the game behind them and went about their daily lives. The players and the coach had discussions with their respective cricket associations for a debrief.
Wednesday the 17th - The victory celebrations of the English team came to a stop, after three days of felicitations by various organisations. The celebrations culminated in a meeting with the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. New Zealand players accepted the last of the commiserations and spent time with families.
Thursday the 18th - The English players with the exceptions of Moeen Ali and Adil Rashid got over their hangovers. for they had imbibed copious litres of alcohol over the past few days. Out also went the hangover of euphoria and the emotions and the rigours of the tournament. They began to look at life ahead and started mental preparations for the forthcoming Ashes. Some players went back to their counties. New Zealand players did likewise.
Friday, the 19th of July dawned.
There was no talk of World cup in any corner of England or New Zealand.
Meanwhile on the same day, in another part of the globe, roughly 1.3 billion people (130 crores in their own speak) were engaged in various activities.
Many were discussing the merits and demerits of cricket games being decided on the number of boundaries
Street corners, coffee shops and other meeting places had little groups of people voicing indignation at the “unfair” treatment meted out to poor New Zealand – the country which had a “decent and humane” Prime Minister
Some were lamenting how Britishers used boundaries to annex and partition colonies in the past and now using the same concept to win cricket world cups
An enterprising selection of writers were busy writing a never ending stream of jokes about cricket and ICC in particular and the British in general
The tech whizkids among them were busy creating photo-shopped images, animating such mages and providing audio soundtracks based on the jokes written by the above literary glitterati
The social media savvy group was circulating the jokes, images and animations to ensure maximum public coverage. The more enterprising amongst them cleverly passed off forwarded jokes as creations of their own
Netizens were trawling the internet to find interesting tidbits about how various celebrities reacted to the world cup and doing cut-paste jobs on Facebook and WhatsApp in an eagerness to be the first to have "discovered" whatever they had
The Twitterati were trawling through the work of other Twitterati to unearth hitherto un-noticed gems about the world cup result so that this could be spread to yet more Twitterati
Television channels were still holding panel discussions about the world cup result
Newspapers were still turning down pieces written on politics, nuclear disarmament, global warming and such subjects to devote more column inches to the world cup result.
And so, life goes on in various parts of the globe.