Shukri Conrad spared the jaded English-speaking cricket fans from dipping into the clichéd, tiresome and unfactual resort to the ‘choking’ word, and offered delightful alternatives. Which actually conveys the result more accurately. South Africa got “bloody wallopped”, he admitted, unfurling his multilingual wry wit, before the “chokers”-bandwagon started chugging from the platform of the ponderously prosaic.
A ‘choke’ even in the strictest taunting terms as the host broadcaster foolishly portrayed in an ad, needed the said choking team to get a “sniff” at a win, which Aiden Markram’s batters, let alone the Finn Allen-battered bowlers, got anywhere close to.
The ongoing T20 World Cup in fact, was given delightful additions of verbs in languages that love the game and express it, but are not widely known beyond their geography: Afrikaans and Italian. Not many can match Pakistani ex-cricketers at their determined, delicious take-downs of their own team, though you have to wonder what words the Sinhalese said that sent the Sri Lankan captain Dasun Shanaka running to the government, asking for a restraining order on negativity.
But first to wrap up the wallopping theme, the Proteas coach, undoubtedly expecting a stream of criticisms to start after yet another semifinal exit at (at least the 2023 50-overs one wasn’t a wallop), threw ‘snotklap’ into the mix.
Now ‘snotklap’, according to renowned cricket writer Telford Vice, means struck so hard that snot from the nose flies everywhere. “We chose a pretty crappy time to have a poor night,” said the coach weaned away from their comfortable , and facing one tight whack at Kolkata, where the Proteas just can’t seem to catch a break. Snotkop, though, is a famous hip hop singer in Afrikaans known for his scalding lyrics on more important things than cricket.
Trouble with “choking” is it’s a real, serious respiratory condition of the food pipe or airpipe, and you have to be really brainless to show an ad where someone chokes on a cupcake. The cultural reference or meaning of what some Indians think ‘cupcake’ means is hugely hazy, given their grievous usage of the word ‘choke’ loosely. But in some meta way, ‘cupcake’ was meant to trigger the Saffers. This choke-joke didn’t land. Conrad brought the grammar of losing along with him. “We didn’t have a sniff. In South Africa, we’d say we got moered,” he said.
Vice in his Cricbuzz explainer, wrote, “Some explanation is in order. Moer, moered or gemoer are mild Afrikaans epithets that can be deployed in all sorts of situations. Nothing in English comes close to its juicy earthiness. In the sense Conrad used it, it means a beat down.” Nine-wicket loss, no repeat final, is what it effectively meant. Lessons don’t lessen the operative part. But Conrad was on top of the vernacular vocabulary of loss, or losing, since we are on verbs.
And Then Come The Italians
The Italians had nothing to lose.
They brought their own flavour and fervour to the T20 Word Cup, liberating it from its fatigued Inglese-tapestry of cricketing terms. Gli Azzurri (Gli only means ‘The’ sadly), only defeated Nepal in their first ever cricket World Cup outing, and that isn’t enough to bring up the gladiator-lexicon. Bookending losses to Scotland and West Indies were empathic, but they did briefly scare the English – though who doesn’t these days?
You cannot accuse Italians of being men of few words, so in their 4 games, the Azzurra sketched out a good little novella out of their experiences, all narrated with elan in La Gazetta dello Sport.
Because cricket is so Anglicised and trenched up in Commonwealth contours, it might miss out on how the game gets described in other tongues, though the ICC and broadcasters did well to take it to South America, complete with Portuguese commentary. But the Italians, actually living the World Cup, are filling their cricket dictionaries with colorful ditties.
“La storia ha bussato, e l’Italia ha aperto,” Simone Gambino, the outgoing president of Cricket Italy declared to the sports paper after the Nepal win, their first at a World Cup. Bussato is (history) knocked. Aperto is door opened. (“History knocked, and Italy opened the door.”)
But the language that goes phonetic on English terms to incorporate them easily without any fuss, has different words for some basic cricket terms. Bowlers are called “lanciatore”, probably borrowed from pitcher in baseball, but basically meaning lace-man, or lance hurler.
A catch is a “presa” – a press in sporting terms. “Difficile e spettacolare presa di Justin Mosca” sounds grand (difficult and spectacular), but Kushal Bhurtel’s dismissal did mean much to the Italians keen on getting into this sport.
Ofcourse, the Italians brought back from the archives, the “eye of the tiger Sandokan” – a miniseries from the 70s, where Kabir Bedi played a patch-eyed pirate fighting British imperialists – as the actor cheered them on from the Wankhede stands. (“Kabir Bedi, elegantissimo eppure esaltato a fine match, in tribuna”, elegant but ecstatic, as the Gazetta described).
But in the lead-up to the World Cup, the Italian sports ministry had been emphatic about how they saw cricket as a sincere outreach to the immigrant and overseas communities of and from Italy. They were determined to embellish their culture with this strange sport. So they got talking about it.
The Italians don’t simply dismiss a batsman or get him ‘Out’. They “sedere” them – or ‘sit them down.’ La Gazetta dello Sport would write “…che ha messo a sedere l’opener” when an opener was packed off.
There’s a more brutal alternative. “L’eliminazione”. Eliminate. The Italians do tend to be literal, but it’s a typical sporting hyperbole.
But the King of Grand Italien Cricket Proclamations, has to be a boundary – a 4. The “maximum 6” is merely a 6 (or ‘6 punti’ – points) for them, and ‘runs’ are points on the whole. But the 4 gets a glorious description. “Fuoricampo rimbalzanti” it is called, rimbalzanti meaning a shot reaching its destination on the bounce. But again, it’s not just any bounce. That ‘rimbalzanti’ implies a ‘pound a ground 4’. No English would have bothered to lionise the impact of the ball thudding the ground, leaving imprints on the outfield before racing away to the fence. But the team that bonded over memories of “lasagna made by Nana (grandmother)”, are gleefully equipped to walk into the cricket multiverse with their poetic 4s.
