Planting Indian flag on Chinese soil reminds Jemimah Rodrigues of 'Chak de!'

Hangzhou: It was in the most unusual setting for cricket that the Indian women's team clinched the country's first ever gold medal in the sport here at the Asian Games on Monday evening. An university campus ground with a capacity of less than a 1000 people with hills on one side and the Pingfeng campus of the Zhejiang University of Technology on the other was the scene of the Indian flag going up after a cricket match at a multi-sporting event for the first time.

For Jemimah Rodrigues, the highest scorer in the tournament with 109 runs in 3 matches, the moment the national anthem started playing as the tricolour started to go up brought a sudden flash of the 2007 Bollywood film 'Chak de! India'.

"For me, it goes back to watching 'Chak de! India' a million times, where Kabir Khan tries to convert his medal into gold. The Asian Games medal was like that for us, after not managing to win the Commonwealth Games gold," Jemimah said at the post-match press conference being held in the university's auditorium hall.

"It was very emotional, I told Smriti (Mandhana), who was standing next to me, 'See, they're going to put the national flag up there and play the anthem'. To be standing on the podium with the gold medal, it is brilliant to get to do this in my lifetime with the team that I love the most," she said.

Jemimah, who also plays hockey occasionally, took to the atmosphere of the Asian Games like a fish to water.

"One of the first things we spoke about the Asian Games was that we were not just the Indian women's cricket team, we were part of the entire Indian contingent - all sportspersons coming together to add to the country's medal tally. This is just the beginning, hope we can win gold at the Olympics and CWG too," she said, adding that though the team did get to see the Indian men's football team in action, they would not stick around to watch the other events as they are scheduled to fly back on Tuesday.

A curious Chinese welcome

Around 500 people turned up to watch the gold medal match between India and Sri Lanka, most of them Chinese locals who had wandered in on a Monday afternoon to see what new sorcery had landed up on their shores.

Abdallah Aymen Gana, one of the students of the Zhejiang University who was a volunteer at the venue on Monday, said he had seen Indian and Bangladeshi immigrants play cricket in his native town of Yiwu, around 150 km from here, before, but that the Asian Games was the first time he saw the sport being played on a field.

"I had heard about cricket before, I know that India, Pakistan, Australia are stong nations. Earlier I thought cricket and baseball are the same, but turns out they are completely different. It would be hard to play such a game for 8-9 hours. I like to play billiards or football, but not for as long as 8 hours," he said.

Indian team coach Hrishikesh Kanitkar said that the conditions of the ground and pitch were very different from what the players are used to, but that he is happy the team was able to live up to expectations and be perfect ambassadors for the sport.

"The nature of the soil and the grass was different here, made pitches and outfield behave differently. The facilities were very good. There were a lot of Chinese citizens coming in on a Monday afternoon to watch a sport not natural to them, we are very happy about that," he said.