Open Mic : My Lasting Memories of Cricket: Good and Bad!

India is a cricket-crazy nation. There's no doubt about that fact. But I suppose each one of us has a story as to how we actually stumbled upon watching the game.

I, for one, was never interested in cricket and never understood the game until the 1996 World Cup here in India. The first match I watched completely was the famous Indo-Pak clash in the quarter-finals of that tournament.

Even though cricket was my favourite sport, a move to Singapore got me interested in football. I started supporting Arsenal because my neighbours did (funny, I know!). This caused my interest in cricket to slacken.

A move back to India meant that I got a chance to revive some of that lost interest. The first tournament I followed closely was the Natwest Trophy of 2002.

I remember that in the finals, we were chasing 320 odd runs and were 120/5 - with Yuvraj Singh and Mohammed Kaif rescuing India from a situation of certain defeat. I switched off my television the moment Sachin Tendulkar got out, and I regretted that decision the next morning!

The biggest high, without a doubt though came last year when a youthful Indian outfit won the T-20 World Cup in South Africa. Nobody ever believed that we could do it at the beginning of the tournament,  including me.

I didn't even think we could make it into the semi-finals, let alone beat Australia! It was a truly fantastic tournament to watch and follow and led most people, including me (again) to admire MS Dhoni's captaincy.

He is cool, calm and composed all the time. He even admitted after one IPL game that if he shows his tension to the bowlers, they would lose faith in him. How correct was he!

He is the proverbial "Captain Cool," and his rise to captaincy has been a pleasure to watch.

But despite all that euphoria, the most embarrassing moment for me and surely, every Indian was the fact that we got knocked out of the World Cup 2007 in the very first round.

With all due respect to Bangladesh, they shouldn't have beaten us in the first match and Indian players somehow capitulated under pressure and returned home to burning effigies and houses torn down (in the case of MS Dhoni).

India has grown from a team relying on one man, Sachin Tendulkar, to becoming a team relying on 11 players. The entire evolution of this team over the past five years has been interesting to watch.

Ups and downs are a part of sport, but the Indian cricket team seems to provide extreme ups and downs to all their fans!

Watching India play cricket now is fantastic, because the Indian team in the late 1990s were the epitome of inconsistency (if there ever was an epitome of inconsistency!). Today's team seems to be very confident in their own abilities to succeed and are incredibly positive.

So my biggest high has been to watch us win the T-20 World Cup without a doubt and biggest low was getting dumped out of the World Cup of Cricket in the same year, 2007, which to me is the biggest irony of this whole story!