Penultimate destination
While most of England’s squad boarded the team bus from their hotel to the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi for their first training session at the ground, Joe Root, Harry Brook and the batting coach, Marcus Trescothick, squeezed in a round of golf at the nearby DLF Golf & Country Club – designed by Arnold Palmer and “bloody difficult”, apparently – before making their own way there. They were instructed to head to Gate Four, and their driver duly dropped them at the appropriate sign. Brook was first to go inside, but popped back out a minute later and reported that not only was there nobody to be seen, it appeared to be a football ground. It turned out they had been deposited at Gate Four of the neighbouring Ambedkar Stadium, and thus two members of the England team and one of their predecessors set off on foot down one of the busiest roads in central Delhi, golf clubs slung over their shoulders, to astonished looks from cricket-savvy local people. As the players walked across a petrol station forecourt, after a couple of failed attempts to get in to the right ground through closed gates, Root struck a deal with a selfie-seeker: he could have a photo, but he’d have to show them the right way in.
Playing politics at the tournament
If it is possible to travel around much of Ahmedabad, England’s first World Cup destination, without any indication that a World Cup is happening, the same is not true of Dharamsala, the second city on their itinerary. The area is absolutely littered with signs bearing the tournament logo, welcoming visitors to the region – most of them dominated by a picture of Anurag Thakur, local MP and the government’s minister of information and broadcasting and youth affairs and sports. The ground itself features (at least) two enormous murals of Thakur, one on the side of the pavilion and another taking up a whole wall on the ground floor of the media centre. (Some signs instead feature a picture of Arun Dhumal, IPL chairman, former BCCI treasurer, and Thakur’s younger brother.) This is all handy publicity, with an election coincidentally due next spring. “It has been reported that various agencies have conveyed their concerns about this excessive branding to the state headquarters,” reads one local news report, “but administrators appear to be powerless in this matter.”
