Time was when such teams as the Mohammedans and Abahani and Brothers Union and Wari, besides many more, kept the energy in us going, and in a very big way made us remember that masculinity, even in a game, was all that mattered. There were the lovely moments of good-natured ill-temper we relished, perhaps even took part in, when the team we thought should have won unexpectedly lost, and so broke our hearts into a thousand pieces.

But, of course, much as the players on the losing side were to be blamed for the defeat, our angry gaze was always directed at the referee. It was his wrong decision, as we wrongly supposed, that was to blame for the humiliation of the team we adored. Of course, it was much, much later that we knew the referee had little to do with the defeat. It was the failing stamina of our favourite players that had been responsible for the mishap.

Be that as it may, there was something of verve, a good lot of electricity that coursed through all of us when, in the football season, we watched the many teams sweat it out in their attempts to beat one another out of contention for the championship, move heaven and earth to stay on top until, finally, there were two teams to choose from.

We prayed hard for our team. We expected God Almighty to be on our side, just as those others prayed seriously for the Lord of the Worlds to look kindly on the team they identified with. Not one of us was ever willing to admit, in this frenzy of prayers, the fact that God was above all such mundane things of life, that He had more precious preoccupations to look to other than making a choice between two soccer teams playing hard ball on some insignificant corner of the earth. But these thoughts did not worry us.

In our teens or adolescence or even middle age, all we cared about was football, the spirit which came into it. The centre forward, the player at the back, the goalkeeper, all in their sweaty, smelly shirts, were our heroes. We sent up a deafening roar every time they landed a goal, or prevented one from undercutting them.

Sometimes, as one of our heroic players dribbled his way through the field of the enemy and approached that goal post, we barely restrained our own enthusiasm. Raising our excitable posteriors off the gallery, we lifted a foot in sheer imitation of that breezy hero of ours. And just as he kicked that ball into that goal, the goalkeeper having nervously dived to the wrong side of the bar, we landed a terrific kick on the back of the man occupying the space in front of us. He let out a single, heart-rending "oooh," and we quickly went down on all fours, as it were, to say sorry and massage his insulted back.

These are tales that come alive every time you think of the days that used to be. When you watch the Bangladesh cricket team wallowing through one humiliation after another, day in and day out, you cannot but ask yourself why the nation's cricket had to arrive at such a pass.

Such a pass? You suddenly remember that maybe it is just as well, for after all no one in this country ever really thought Bangladesh's cricket would amount to anything much in a long, long time. When, in the late 1990s, some rather enthusiastic people in our midst told us that cricket was what we ought to be playing, we tried telling them that we were not prepared for it.

Football was a far better proposition. It was a gloomy Gordon Greenidge who told amazed sports reporters in London, right there with the team he was coaching gathered around him, that Bangladesh was not ready for the cricket big league. His remarks were dismissed as those coming from a conspiracy theorist. In a couple of weeks, he was unceremoniously dumped as Bangladesh's cricket coach.

All these years after Greenidge, it makes sense to ask if cricket is something we have mastered enough not to make a silly spectacle of ourselves in the global sporting arena. The defeat by the Indians, on our home ground, the other day was not merely an instance of unmitigated humiliation. It also raises some very crucial questions about the course our cricket should take in future.

Blame the captain all you can for the debacle. Point the finger at the departing coach. Beyond the matter of captaincy and coaching, however, lies a much more critical question. It is simply this: why do our cricketers keep slipping? Agreed that they have sometimes played well, but sometimes is not good enough. Exceptions cannot, and must not, be allowed to be the rule.

When you defeat India once, and then an entire nation goes into a spin of celebratory torpor, you have that pretty constricting feeling somewhere inside you that the ecstasy is misplaced, that sooner rather than later your cricket players would go back to where they are generally wont to be.

Soon enough, before you even know it is actually happening, the very players you lionised as heroes all across the streets of your town only the other day are taking a huge drubbing at the hands of the self-same Indians you thought were finished at the hands of your tigers. It is a curious thing, this business of deciding to call yourselves tigers when you are not sure that you can live up to that symbolism.

The record of the past decade demonstrates, to our intense regret and even shame, that we have inflicted unnecessary humiliation on a species that has always deserved better. You celebrate the Royal Bengal. If you do, why must you bring its dignity down a number of notches every now and then through playing bad cricket?

It all takes us back to the football question. Where, in your schooldays, you ran through the hard, fallow fields in your village pretending to play football with that much knocked about jamboora fruit, and all the while your fellow villagers cheering you on, today you see elitism of a kind creeping its way into that old rural locale.

There is no more any talk of football, of the hundred and one ways in which you can manoeuvre the ball past your rivals before kicking it firmly into that waiting goal. In your urban setting, the terrific roars that went up, year after year, through the streets of the city as the nation's football teams clashed mightily, in the manner of the Greek gods of legend, are sounds you seem to hear only in the dark recesses of fading memory.

The stadia are empty, the festivities are no more. The milling crowds that turned themselves into spectators, sometimes into well-meaning mobs, have given way to men and women generationally and psychologically removed from the times of their parents, of their elderly siblings.

No, we do not advocate a requiem for our cricket. But that it is in bad need of a life support system should be obvious to anyone. And our football? Our links with the game have always been umbilical. Our love affair with it is as old as the hills. It has regularly been part of our tradition.

Your brother, in his youth, traversed many villages and crossed many rivers to get into a football tangle with my uncle's team in a faraway hamlet. They are both old men now, inhabitants of a strip of mental geography we call memory land, telling us over and over again of their old glory days. Where have their soul children, those who could have carried the tradition farther down the lanes and by-lanes of sports history, gone missing?

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.