Mumbai, April 22: WHILE others tear off their shirts, wave flags and scream till they are hoarse for cricket, some artists strive to cling to their nonchalant, slightly irreverent stance on the game.

‘‘Actually I hate cricket,’’ says M F Husain. That’s a little hard to swallow since he’s painted two walls measuring 38 x 6 and 35 x 8 feet at the Polly Umrigar Sports Bar in Cricket Club India (CCI)—for free!

‘‘Painting Gavaskar or Tendulkar would have been cliched, so when CCI approached me for the mural, I decided to portray the sport as if it were a ballet,’’ says Husain adding, ‘‘Sometimes it takes an outsider to bring a new interpretation.”

And what is his take? The Indian team in a procession that comes to a crescendo after winning the match. There’s a woman leading the team. No, not Mandira Bedi, but none other than (of course) Madhuri Dixit Nene, all decked out with knee pads and a bat.

Another artist in the city has thrown a googly. Anandajit Ray’s exhibition at Sakshi Art Gallery, For the Future XI, only ‘‘uses the sport as a take-off point’’. ‘‘The show has less to do with the actual sport. It focuses on its paraphernalia,’’ he says.

Ray has embellished dhoka bats (used to ‘beat’ dirty clothes), with trinkets.

Sample this: An 18-inch bat turned upside down. The top serves as a body sawed into three parts—chest, torso and pelvis. The handle has been fashioned into a penis, topped off with a bush of artificial orange hair. From the base of the handle, artificial pearls strung on thin wire sprout out in what appears to be a fountain of urine. ‘‘This one is less about the machismo of cricket and more about fright,’’ he chortles.

Irreverent or what?

Yusuf Arakkal, on the other hand, is a huge fan. ‘‘John Wright is a close friend and I’d done a portrait of him a year ago,’’ says the artist, who had also painted portraits of Tendulkar, Gavaskar and Kapil Dev for industrialist Harsh Goenka.

georginalmaddox@expressindia.com