Nagpur is a city built on the promise of heat and oranges, but on March 12, 2011, it mostly delivered a very public nervous breakdown.

I remember the vibe. It was the middle of the 2011 World Cup. India was supposed to be a juggernaut, a collection of multimillionaire demi-gods who had finally figured out how to win under pressure. They were playing South Africa, a team perpetually branded with the "choker" label—a term that has become a lazy shorthand for any team that forgets how to use their hands in a crisis.

But that afternoon, the script flipped.

At one point, India was 267 for 1. Sachin Tendulkar had just hit his 99th international century. The stadium was vibrating. If you were watching on one of those chunky CCFL-backlit LCDs that passed for high-end tech back then, the colors were blown out and the motion blur was terrible, but it didn't matter. The math was simple. India was going to put up 350. They were going to humiliate the Proteas.

Then, the glitch happened.

India lost nine wickets for 29 runs. It wasn't a tactical retreat; it was a structural collapse. It was the sporting equivalent of a server farm catching fire because someone tripped over a cooling fan. They went from 267 for 1 to 296 all out in the blink of a corrupted eye.

We didn't have the sophisticated outrage tools we have today. In 2011, the iPhone 4 was the peak of mobile hardware. Instagram was barely five months old and mostly consisted of blurry photos of lattes with grainy filters. We weren't Doomscrolling yet; we were just regular-scrolling, mostly on Blackberries that still felt like real business tools. The anger was analog. It was felt in the silences between overs and the way people threw their remotes onto sofas.

The game came down to the final over. Ashish Nehra had the ball. South Africa needed 13 runs. Robin Peterson was at the crease, a man whose name doesn't exactly strike terror into the hearts of bowlers.

Nehra, bless him, looked like a man trying to solve a Rubik’s cube in a wind tunnel. He pushed the ball wide. He missed his lengths. Peterson didn’t even have to be a genius; he just had to stay upright. South Africa won with two balls to spare.

The immediate fallout was a peculiar mix of panic and tech-literate cynicism. This was the first World Cup where the internet really started to eat the conversation. We were dealing with the early friction of the digital divide. If you were lucky enough to have a 3G connection—which cost a small fortune and worked about 40% of the time—you were checking scores on a mobile browser that looked like it was designed in 1996. The rest of the country was tethered to the television, trapped in a cycle of commercials for cement and sugary sodas.

The loss didn't actually derail India's campaign—they famously went on to win the whole thing in Mumbai—but it exposed the fragility of the hype machine. It was a reminder that even when you have the best hardware (Tendulkar, Sehwag, Dhoni) and the most expensive operating system (the BCCI’s bottomless pockets), the software can still crash.

The price of that loss wasn't just points on a table. It was a loss of innocence for a generation of fans who thought that home advantage was a literal cheat code. We learned that Nagpur’s humidity is an equalizer that doesn't care about your IPL valuation.

Looking back, that match was the last time a loss felt like a localized tragedy rather than a global trending topic. Today, a collapse like that would generate three billion impressions, six thousand "reaction" videos on YouTube, and a dozen think-pieces about the psychological weight of the "Home World Cup" narrative. In 2011, we just sat in the dark, waited for the power cut to end, and wondered if Ashish Nehra was ever going to get a decent night's sleep again.

We’re back in that cycle now. The stakes are higher, the cameras are 4K, and the betting apps have turned every ball into a financial transaction. We like to think we’ve moved past the "Nagpur Meltdown" era, that the systems are more robust and the players are more "clinical"—another word we use when we want to pretend sports is just data entry.

But the ghost of 2011 still lingers in the stadium air. It’s the quiet realization that no matter how much you optimize the roster or polish the brand, you're still just one bad over away from a total system failure.

Does the algorithm have a plan for when the middle order decides to stop existing?