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        It is an agonisingly surreal experience to read reams and reams of crime reports from the cricket World Cup. More is certainly to follow as Jamaican police have confirmed that Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was indeed strangled to death. And whoever wins the World Cup, would take home the trophy that contains a cricket lover's blood.

        Already the rumour mills have started to work overtime, throwing up names of gangsters and players in the same sentence. A murder in cricket setting is something that even the most imaginative of fiction writers have not thought of. But life is always disturbingly stranger than any work of wild fantasy.

        Like in the match-fixing scandal, the truth in Woolmer's murder can be expected to come only in irritating instalments, and the real picture may not emerge at all. But that is the way life pans out. Many truths have died a silent death for, as the James Hadley Chase's novel had it, 'The Dead Stay Dumb'.

        But fans staying dumb and dangerous is more worrisome. Woolmer's murder, shocking as it may sound, owes it to the sub-continent fans' misplaced passion raising the stakes of the game. The connection is not convoluted.

        It is perhaps illustrative to realise that fans always want the teams that they support to win at all times. And most fans also understand that it is impossible to keep doing that always. A good example of that would be the Barmy Army, the loud-mouthed but fun-loving England supporters, who always tag their team wherever it plays. The English cricket team has very seldom (at any rate, much less than what the Indian team has) given its supporters consistent moments of cheer. Sure, the Barmy Armymen show their displeasure against their team. But the criticism is mostly at acceptable level and is never mean or violent. This from a group which spends money from its own pocket to travel and support the team.

        Contrast it with the sub-continent fans. Except a handful of exceptions, most of them are from the TV-watching segment. In other words, they are couch potatoes, the fickle ones whose attention-span would be lesser than that of fleas, are the ones making impossible demands on their cricketers. These fans, lazy and shambolic, think nothing wrong in wanting, as if it is their right to do so, their team to win at all times.

        As Mukul Kesavan, a historian and a true cricket lover, writes: 'The sub-continental cricket fan is a lazy, pampered know-nothing who thinks he owns the cricket teams that he supports. His sense of proprietorship is so developed that when his team loses, he speaks (or writes) of being betrayed without a tremor of self-consciousness.'

        Like people getting the government they deserve, fans too, in a sense, come to define their team. If Indian cricketers are inconsistent and exasperating, then by definition, its fans are. One begets the other.

        This truth is perhaps a good bed-time information to go to sleep with tonight as India and Sri Lanka will fight it out at Port of Spain. At stake is not a place in the Super eights of this World Cup. But the properties and places of Indian cricketers.