A cricket fan blackens a poster displaying the faces of Indian cricket team players in Mumbai yesterday. Hundreds of cricket fans across India burnt effigies, defaced posters and held mock funeral processions of the national team, a day after their defeat to Sri Lanka in the World Cup match.

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (Reuters)

When Bob Woolmer was appointed Pakistan coach in 2004 he entered a part of the world where only religion exceeds the importance of cricket - and a casual bystander could be forgiven for mixing up the two.

In the sub-continent where the annual per capita income amounts to just US$500, cricket offers one of the very few distractions from the daily grind of surviving on or below the breadline.

Introduced by the British as a "gentlemen's game", it is a passion which unites more than one billion people - rich and poor, educated and illiterate, adults and children.

When India or Pakistan are in action, daily lives are put on hold and people gravitate towards their television sets to follow every run, delivery, wicket with bated breath.

Roads normally crammed with millions of pedestrians and cars, hooting and fighting for every inch of space, are suddenly eerily deserted. There is no better time to go sight-seeing.

When things go right for their teams, cities around the sub-continent are lit up with impromptu firework displays as people stream out of their houses to rejoice on the streets but when things go wrong, a very different picture emerges.

While stoning players' houses and burning their effigies have almost become the norm over the past 20 years, for some even that is not enough to vent their frustrations.

COMMITTED SUICIDE

In the 1996 World Cup, Pakistan cricket fans smashed television sets and one committed suicide amid national gloom over the country's defeat by arch rivals India in the quarter-finals.

College student Jaffer Khan fired a burst of Kalashnikov bullets into his TV screen before turning the gun on himself in the town of Mardan in North West Frontier Province.

A front-page cartoon in the English-language Frontier Post showed a row of freshly dug graves with a sign reading "a plot for each player" - a reference to incentives of land and cash offered to Pakistani cricketers if they had retained the Cup.

Worse was to follow when spectators started rioting at Kolkata's Eden Gardens just days later once it became apparent that India were heading for defeat in the semi-finals against eventual champions Sri Lanka.

Plastic bottles, fruit and stones were thrown on to the field, forcing the Sri Lankans to huddle in the middle of the pitch for safety, while fires were started in the stands.