Lesson from 'Narendra Modi stadium' -- Sport in 'increasingly managed' world of elite competitions, still has the final word : 'The Guardian'

"If there is a lesson to be learned from a day when the volume veered between 11 and zero, it is a reminder that sport, the most vital commodity here, a little glow of freedom in the increasingly managed world of elite competitions, will still have the final word."

The Guardian piece penned by Barney Ronay says:

"There is a scientific paper to be written on the optics and the team energy of the batsman’s walk-off. Act out a tragedy and it must be a bit more likely you’re ushering one in. Two hours later Kohli was there again as the loudest noise of the day erupted, taking the catch at second slip as David Warner prodded vaguely at Mohammed Shami, and just for a moment it looked as though Australia’s chase of 241 might be consumed in the ambient energy.

"The noise was wonderful, emerging in rolling, tumbling waves, then fusing into one giant field of static. Bodies tumbled in the stands. A previously impassive soldier performed a furious, high-speed fist-pumping dance. 

"This was pure joy, the kind of energy you just want to take a bite out of, hungry for another hit. Cricket doesn’t do this often; or indeed anywhere else. It was an isolated note. The switch was flicked again. Mitch Marsh lifted Shami high over the fence at long-off as plumes of smoke drifted through that densely peopled silence like tumbleweed. 

At the other end Travis Head began to beat the ball, and beat the energy out of the day, en route to one of the great ODI innings of all time, a match-winning 137 of startling verve and skill."

"Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Stop all the clocks. Rename the stadium. Prevent the DJ from pumping out his relentlessly upbeat musical blurts. On a day of light, fury and also silence, India’s World Cup, the World Cup of the Invincibles, ran out of road at the Narendra Modi Stadium.

This was a piano forte kind of final, a day defined by extremes of noise and silence, expressed in volume rather than pictures, sound rather than light. 

The start was all noise, from the thrillingly sui generis energy of a 92,453 cricket crowd, to the jets pirouetting in the Ahmedabad sky, to Ravi Shastri’s hype-man shtick at the toss, a feverish, panama-hatted figure, arms revolving like an amphetamine-crazed general in the wreckage of Stalingrad.

But it was the silences that came to define the day...".