“Jeetega Bhai Jeetega. India Jeetega.”
We will win brother, we will win. India will win.
Nary an “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” in sight.
Were the Swami Army a real army, their conquest of Driver Avenue would be complete, and the tricolour would be waving over the Brewongle stand.
The SCG has been washed blue for the evening. And it has been a noisy annexation.
Hours before the game begins, rapturous cheers erupt from the stadium just for 11 Indian men going for a lazy jog across the turf to warm up.
“This is going to be like a home game for us,” Ganesh Jaygan, bedecked in a blue Team India shirt, says in a broad Australian accent, momentarily confusing your correspondent.
India, he clarifies, is his team. “It’s where your heart goes, that’s who you have to support. It doesn’t matter your citizenship, it’s where your heart goes.”
He says the Australian team will feel the weight of expectation, and the pressure of a restless, relentless Indian crowd.
“It will feel like a home game. Seventy per cent of the crowd will be Indian.”
“Eighty per cent,” says Sudhi Prasad, an Indian who lives in Germany, and who has travelled from just outside Frankfurt to be in Sydney for the match. “Eighty-20 support for India.”
“Kohli is due for a big score,” he promises, “and Dhoni, this will be his last World Cup, he is a big game player.”
Your correspondent was living in Delhi in 2011 when Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s imperious six lifted India back to the mantle of world champions.
Even as that ball was still sailing standwards, chaotic celebrations broke out across the country – a festival of fireworks and bhangara – that roiled with impossible energy.
For hours – all night and well into the next day – intersections in the capital were impassable for the mass of humanity, chanting and cheering and alighting and singing.
Should India win, the celebrations in Sydney will be something to behold.
The party that follows a World Cup win is one India would be gladly repeat, but beyond that, this is a country, and a cricket team, with a position to defend.
The title of world champions is one its cricketers, and fans, are anxious to maintain.
Dozens of signs around the ground feature an image of the World Cup, and read beneath: “We won’t give it back”.
In geopolitical circles, it is fashionable to refer to India as an “emerging superpower”.
In cricketing terms it has already well and truly arrived. Off-field, it is the dominant nation internationally, the country that controls and contorts the direction of the sport. The changes that have revolutionised the game in recent years have emerged from India, or only succeeded with its imprimatur.
The 11 men it sent onto the SCG on Thursday afternoon are seeking to cement that reputation on-field too.
Much is made by commentators from both countries about how much Australia and India share: a coincident national day, a Commonwealth heritage, a common language and, of course, this game, cricket.
But one thing they can’t share is a spot in the World Cup final.
Tonight, it can only be one.
