‘LBW: Love Beyond Wicket’ Series Review: The Unlikely Comforts of TV-Serial Storytelling

Growing up in the 1990s, I spent many summer evenings fiddling with a Panasonic remote and searching for a very specific brand of TV entertainment. My father had his old movies and news channels, my mother had her Hollywood soaps, but my obsession with sports led me to expect that elusive beast on the small screen: an Indian cricket-themed serial. There were plenty of army stories, family sitcoms, horror shows, mythological dramas, campus romcoms. But not enough cricket stories were being told in a decade where Sachin Tendulkar had elevated the game to mythical heights; it's almost like filmmakers were afraid to mess with India's newest religion. So I settled for Bodyline reruns instead. LBW: Love Beyond Wicket is probably the kind of serial my 11-year-old self was craving for — a slice-of-life, tacky, tropey, clumsy, but oddly sweet college-cricket television serial (not web series, mind you) with bite-sized episodes, Disney-coded stakes and a soap-opera aesthetic.

It’s three decades too late, the craft is dated, the dubbing is off, the writing is predictable, and the characters are stereotypes, but I won’t be surprised to find myself casually following the weekly episode drops for those exact reasons. Personal nostalgia? Maybe. Temporary insanity? Perhaps. But also more like comfort-food viewing in an era where everything arrives with hidden terms and conditions. This review is based on the first four episodes only, though it might not take a rocket scientist to decode the future of a minor-key underdog story. I’ll pretend like the title hasn’t been conceived by a creative school-kid (“Leg Before Wicket” should ideally mutate into “Love Before Wicket”). It revolves around a group of teenagers from across Tamil Nadu — a talented boy looking for love, a superstar’s son looking to forge his own way, a fast-bowling girl disowned by her parents, a fitness-averse and snack-loving roommate — in their first few weeks at a college famous for its cricket academy. The protagonist, of course, is a down-and-out assistant coach named Rangan (Vikranth) who was once a star batsman whose career was derailed by temper issues. He is now a brooding 37-year-old man living with an aunt desperate to find a wife for him. All he cares for, though, is resuscitating the fading academy, lifting the college back to its player-producing glory days, and training this new batch of junior hopers. We know Rangan is serious because he keeps taking notes outside the boundary ropes as if he’s reviewing a movie rather than analyzing aspiring cricketers. When all else fails, those motivational-quote-filled voiceovers appear out of thin air. Some people make history by simply waking up, indeed.

It’s early days for LBW, but I like that the patchy craft doesn’t prevent the serial from creating an immersive campus-core setting: the girls and boys hostels, the humble dorms, the rundown offices, the silly banter, the talkative groundsman, the head coaches who talk in metaphors to hide their incompetence, the cocky seniors. The central characters are young enough to dream of a colourful student life beyond the field. College is both their distraction and their coming-of-age device; cricket is their medium to blend in and stand out. I also like that Rangan has a mentor and believer in the stern college principal, a ‘lonely’ woman as committed to the academy as anyone else. She has tasked him with their comeback; they’re kindred souls connected by their faith in an institution. Their bond is interesting, but I do expect an external “villain” to emerge in future episodes — as is often the case with screenplays that don’t trust the inherent challenges of professional sport in India. Defying public perception, patriarchy, corruption, favouritism and a rigged system doesn't cut it anymore.

The cricket scenes themselves are shot and cut amateurishly: convenient close-ups, iffy techniques, unconvincing camera angles, clunky foley effects, childish background score. The film-making here is lazy at best. But LBW works better — or relatively better — when we see the young cricketers behave like kids in their first year of college: peering up at the night sky, trying to procure hot masala dosas in the mess, finding their tribe, chilling at the gate, being flimsy, resorting to pre-dawn practice only to be spooked out by the mist, getting ragged, and so on. The storytelling is far from polished, but I'll take its old-fashioned naivety in a streaming age that places algorithmic scale over soul. For a while, maybe I can stop fiddling with that Panasonic remote and settle on this 1990s channel while nibbling on my sandwich and plotting a new way to make friends through cricket in my colony. That's not to say LBW: Love Beyond Wicket is good. It's just old enough.