If you love cricket but live in Bangkok, where the city’s sports bars focus mainly on football, it’s easy to feel like a member of an obscure subculture. That was how I felt in early November as I resumed a familiar search: checking for sports bars that planned to screen a match in India that I was eager to watch on a big screen.

That game in Mumbai was the last in a three-match series of tests — a form of cricket that takes up to five days to play and is regarded as the most outstanding form of the sport — between India and New Zealand. In a momentous reversal of form, unfancied New Zealand had already beaten the top-ranked Indians twice, winning the series. Now they were on the verge of a historic 3-0 series victory.