Unexpected Places – The Manual Scoreboard

How many times have you pinched yourself and said ‘well I didn’t expect to be here’?.

In fact up until I was about 25 I thought I would meet a nice man and I would settle down and have children who would go to school in the suburbs of Perth.  A bit earlier than that, I thought I would meet a farmer and settle down and have children, who accompanied me while I rode motorbikes on the farm. Earlier than that I was to be a nanny in Canada.

And when I WAS 25 and thinking about the life in Perth, I was living in Chile.  So yes, I guess the adventure bug had bitten pretty early on.

Eden Gardens is a big old stadium in Kolkata, and is the home of the Cricket Association of Bengal plus arguably the spiritual home of cricket in India. For a couple of months for the last three years I have worked there.

At capacity the stadium seats 67,000 extremely noisy and passionate people. The weather is balmy to hot, and humid so it is no hardship to be outside in the evening. And these people love their cricket. The cricket of choice for most people these days is T20, where two teams each bowl overs of 6 balls twenty times. The team who is not batting is bowling and fielding. Five day test matches are still played and loved by cricket fans, but T20 is an easy and accessible way to enjoy cricket.

When I was a child I went to the stadium run by the Western Australian Cricket Association – the excellently abbreviated ‘WACA’ (pronounced ‘wacka’) with my family. We sat on the grass, and I looked for the faces of the people that manage the scoreboard from the inside, and that occasionally look through the holes to watch the game. The scoreboard is big, the faces tiny and doll-like.

Anyway, so here I am unexpectedly inside the manual scoreboard at Eden Gardens cricket stadium in Kolkata. There is no reason for me to be here, apart from the fact that I like the view. Kolkata Knight Riders are playing Royal Challengers Bangalore in a must win match. The stadium is packed. There is a breeze blowing through the scoreboard which makes the heat and humidity a thing that only people outside the scoreboard have to bear.

To get to it, you have to climb the outside stairs to get up to the top of D-Block, wade through some spectators and then approach from the side. Inside it is three stories tall with a ladder joining the floors.  I havn’t measured it, but the size of the scoreboard itself would be about 10m (h) x 25m (w).

These days there is an electronic scoreboard, actually two electronic scoreboards, a linear scoreboard and perimeter LED boards. The manual scoreboard is a back up, and a nod to history.

I stick my head through the hole in the scoreboard and wonder if anyone can see me.

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If you have come across from this month’s ‘Unexpected Places’ Travel Link up, you can get back here and read some excellent posts from very unexpected places.

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