Here is the near statistical impossibility to contend with even before the first shot is fired. There are about 100-150 cricket academies around in the city of all stripes, catering to everyone from dabblers to enthusiasts to serious pursuers. If each academy churns out at least 2-3 good to seriously good players per season, from at the basic level (7 years old), that's about 200 players per season. Running these 200 through every known obstacle course of societal pressures for the next 5-6 years - financial, familial, religious, self-disciplinary, and yes, even luck too - whittles the group down to only dedicated, committed and passionate. Let's peg that number to about 20. So each place in the country, on an average, throws up about 20 candidates destined for a professional life in cricket. Now, multiply this number with the number of cities/towns/villages in the country, having some sort of ecosystem to spot, nurture and groom talent and turn it over to the next step in the long ladder of professional sport. Suppose that equation as 20 X 500 = 10,000 . So, the talent pool available for selection to play at any professional level - city, district, state or country - swells by about 10,000 EVERY SINGLE YEAR. By the time, the promise becomes potential and potential turns into a powerhouse of some repute (which happens usually around 15-17 years), the person in question is already in contention with not only his pool of 10,000 that locked in step with him all these years, but also the years of backlogs of 17-20 year olds, whose promise of greatness dissipated with each passing year, for a variety of reasons, and who now are simply waiting their turn to be picked up purely as worthy accompaniments, a literal also-ran's. Running the numbers once again, each year around 50,000 (very very conservatively speaking, of course) put their hands up hoping to get noticed, picked up and delivered at the door step of their dreams and destinies. And the journey gets even tougher from there - from wherever his station in professional life is, at the age of 17, to the final destination for professional sport in the country, a place in the national team. The path to greatness gets narrower, crowded, suffocating and excruciating with each passing step. And then finally from out of those 50,000 who began the lonely journey, waking up ungoldly hours in the mornings, and missing every single beat of normal childhood, from the tender age of 7, there emerges ONE who gets handed out the most coveted cap. That's the best case scenario - 1 in 50,000. Try explaining that to a kid who looks at his hero crack a cover drive on the television wide-eyed, and decides right at that moment that he too is going to follow the footsteps of his hero right into open arms of screaming public! Try dampening his spirit with the unforgiving and soulless mathematics. Try making him see that the road to greatness is littered with broken shells of shattered dreams and withered promises....

And 'Jersey' is just that, a story of one such broken shell.

A career in sports comes with a built-in expiration switch, one that has nothing to do with talent, discipline, focus or dedication. Keeping one step ahead of the fast running clock is something that none has mastered. When, even the best in sport has to contend with a gradual slow down of his physical and mental faculties and therefore has to hangup his shoes sooner than later, what hope is there to the rest who haven't gotten to the promised land yet and are still clawing and fighting and groping their way there to the continuous drum beat of the tick of the winding down clock? While the rest of the world starts peaking at the age of 35, the sportsperson at that same (st)age stares at his descent into the inevitable decline. And all these are just on one side of the equation, the one restricted to sport. On the other side of the equation stands life, constantly picking on the other side to balance the equation out, with a good job, secured life and a decent future after the sport that involves wife, kids, responsibilities and a respectable role in the society. Considering the sheer number of hurdles a sportsman crosses from when he picked the sport first - his interest, parents' pressure, punishing schedules, personal and professional disappointments, peer pressure, societal demands, coaches personal preferences, institutional prejudices and biases, professional jealousies, mental and physical exhaution, demands of success, tedium, relationships and above all, LUCK and LIFE - to be able to see all of them off successfully and walk out into the proverbial sunset is nothing short of miraculous. During his journey, even if ONE of the above plays truant, the life of high hopes turns into a cautionary tale at the turn of the dime. Vinod Kambli had been touted as someone more talented than Tendulkar, and when he too made his way into the national team, to join his school mate albeit a little later, it seemed a classic case of manifest destiny. Why, of course! And then just a few years later, Kambli fell from grace unable to cope with the success and stardom, shunning self-discipline in the process and losing his professional edge as a result. Broken shells of another kind, this time of unfulfilled ambitions and unforgiving circumstances

And 'Jersey' is also that, a tale of one such unrequited love for sport.

'Jersey' is a nice companion piece to (or a clever reworking of) M.Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable", in both of which the son goads on the supremely gifted father, who has since given up his ways and settled into a life of dull rhythm and a drab routine, to return to his old ways of vigor and power. Though the pace appears uneven in the first half, while settling into a more comfortable groove in the latter one, 'Jersey' sticks to the same understated, even muted, tone of "Unbreakable", steadfastly refusing to reveal its cards upfront and holding off on the payoff till the very end, sport-wise and plotwise. The marital discord, the suppressed angst of the hero, the doting kid who thinks the world of his dad, and finally the dad, who gives in and embraces his destiny - the plot had all the potential to be loud, excessive and jarring, and yet the director deliberately dials it down bringing the action closer to reality where resignation to one's fate feels as natural as reconciliation and rapproachment part of the relationship. While there seem to be quite a lot of (technical) missteps in the presentation, specially the framing, editing, pacing and even some of the performances (like in the sequences where Nani goes to his girl friend's place to ask her father her hand in marriage, or the time where both of the coaches sit across the table and review film deciding on Nani's selection, and almost the entire first half which could not settle on a proper rhythm not allowing the scenes to build as though in a hurry to get to the story fast) where 'Jersey' really shines is in its writing, Nani's acting, the gorgeous photography and the splendid production design, in that order. Nani is certainly a revelation perfecting the art of simmering to a fine degree - angst, frustration, rage, torture and failure - without overdoing any of these even (by) a bit. 'Restraint' seems to the mantra of the entire presentation - delay the immediate payoff to cash in on the potential later. And when the potential is realized, like the hero's at the end, the result is pure delight. Quite a rare feat this, in telugu, when a movie involving cricket has more heart than the sport.

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