Cricket as caricature

In India, cricket is not a noun. It is a verb. And so is hype. The two feed off each other. It is an old compact designed to maximise pecuniary gains – on the field and off it. In the bargain, a 1.2 billion-strong nation can only watch bleary-eyed as cricket is reduced to a circus that trundles into town every other month with its panoply of tired tropes and tricks. Understandably, the appeal is beginning to wear thin.

The game's administrators, advertisers and the mass media, however, seem oblivious of their fast declining stocks. As the tenth Cricket World Cup unfolds across three nations of the subcontinent, the hype-meisters are out again in full strength, seeking desperately to put a kinetic spin on a tournament that is hopelessly low on excitement. The hardsell, as always, hinges on overstatement. How we love superlatives. Cricket is a religion, Sachin is God, BCCI is the wealthiest outfit in the business, and this World Cup is the biggest, brightest, boldest... The spin doctors stop at nothing.

But the reality on the ground tells a different story. World Cup 2011 will see the staging of 49 matches over 40-odd days. Forty-two of the games – all the way until the March 20 India-West Indies encounter in Chennai – would be well-nigh inconsequential. Such is the format. So, in the first week of the World Cup, the Australia versus Zimbabwe clash took place before a near-empty stadium in Ahmedabad. The pulsating England-Netherlands game in Nagpur – ditto. This is pretty much what it will be like, except when the co-hosts are playing, until the tournament reaches its business end: the quarter finals.

Rajesh Patel, secretary, Gujarat Cricket Association, isn't the least bit surprised. "You can't expect a full house when India isn't involved," he says. "The Australia-Zimbabwe game did attract over 10,000 spectators and that was pretty good." Not surprisingly, Patel dismisses the suggestion that the World Cup is something akin to a damp squib. "Interest levels will peak as the tournament progresses," he adds. But that, at best, is a full month away.

The worthies who run the game are determined to ensure that the top cricket nations – India, Australia, South Africa, England, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – make it to the last eight without any hitch. So the 14 teams in the fray have been divided into two groups of seven each. What that means is that even if the Indians were to have two bad days as they infamously did in the more sensibly formatted 2007 World Cup they would still sail through to the knockout stage.

We know that world cricket’s nerve centre has shifted lock, stock and barrel to India. This is where the numbers and, by extension, the money reside. It isn’t love of sport that drives the game anymore. It’s greed. “There’s too much cricket going on,” says Jwala Singh, managing director, Mumbai Cricket Club.

“Some of the ICC tournaments like the Champions Trophy," adds the one-time cricketer, "are rather useless. The shrinking gap between T20 World Cups is harming the 50-overs-a-side World Cup. The cricket calendar is far too crowded for the good of the sport. IPL and T20 cricket might be a boon for the players, but ICC and BCCI would do well not to let the sport degenerate into just a game of money.”    

Sadly, that is precisely what seems to be happening. Cricket lovers are being force-fed a pumped-up parade of powerhouses and pretenders engaged in bogus battle. We are party to the sham as much as anyone else. It is easy to beguile us. The game has become a caricature of itself and we are playing along.

Every sport has the right to keep pace with the times. But when the process of essential evolution mutates into crass compromise with the soul of the game, we need to worry. As the game’s guardians seek new converts by tinkering with cricket’s core character, aficionados who would rather sway to a purer rhythm are getting a short shrift. The unending whirligig is hurting.

ICC is an evidently pliable body today. A cabal of powerful Indian cricket administrators and their cohorts are calling the shots. In contrast, FIFA, football's governing association, is always on top of the national bodies, be it Brazilian, German, Italian or English. FIFA periodically ushers in rule changes to make soccer more spectator-friendly, but the alterations are never at the cost of the game itself. The essence of the beautiful game is preserved at all cost. Can we say the same about cricket?

Had rules been adhered to, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh wouldn't have been hosting the 2011 World Cup in the first place. The subcontinent had missed the bid deadline – March 1, 2006. The tournament should have been played in Australia and New Zealand, whose joint application was the only one that had reached the ICC headquarters before the closing date.

When the ICC members assembled for a 'vote' on the sole legal bid, they approved the hastily rustled up application of the four subcontinental nations (Pakistan was subsequently dropped from the list after the 2009 terrorist attack on a visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore). Once the decision was sealed, it was going to be downhill all the way.

ICC did not want a repeat of the 2007 'disaster' that sent India and Pakistan back home even before the World Cup had warmed up. This time around, the number of participating nations has been reduced from 16 to 14 (Scotland and Bermuda, the only team India defeated in the West Indies four years ago, lost out), the number of groups has been cut from four to two, and each group has been sprinkled with enough whipping boys for the big guys to toy with when push comes to shove.   

Indian hockey legend Pargat Singh says: "Excess cannot necessarily guarantee success. In Ambala, where I am at present, I can see the deleterious effect of the surfeit of cricket. There was far greater euphoria here for last year's soccer World Cup. The best cricketers are playing in the subcontinent but life hasn't come to a standstill as it used to once upon a time." 

That’s lost on the Indian media. It has been telling us day in and day out for many months now that Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s boys pack too much firepower for the rest of the world and that the Cup is as good as ours already. Then why play at all? We are willing participants in this fraudulent build-up aimed at capturing eyeballs, squeezing out the last advertising penny and bolstering broadcasting bottomlines, to hell with the spirit and substance of the game.

"The overdose of cricket has definitely taken away much of the charm," says Dheeraj Mathur, executive director, KPMG. "This tournament is far too long, but I guess as long as India is playing people will watch."

There’s worse. The subliminal suggestion behind all the media hoopla is that nothing else matters to this country at this point – not the Maoist problem, not the farmer suicides, not the rampant corruption, not the question of food security – and that a World Cup triumph would give the frayed-at-the-edges India story a new, shiny sequinned coat.   

Who says it’s only a ballgame? Cricket is something we do all the time – as exponents, as consumers, as armchair know-alls, as reluctant captives, even as haters of the game. It’s a bit like breathing. You breathe even if the air is fusty. There is no way you can escape the cricket blitzkrieg, no matter how appalled you might feel about the game and the myriad money-spinning forms it has assumed in recent years.

Says Sunil Raina, product head, international business, Lava Mobiles: “The World Cup is certainly losing its sheen. It’s not due to the Twenty20 format but because of the amount of cricket that's being played. Simply put, it’s a demand-supply gap. People are consuming more cricket than they can actually take.”

In the wake of the Lalit Modi-scripted IPL scam and the shoddy repair job undertaken by the powers that be, cricket’s credibility is at an all-time low. Does that have anything to do with the fact that Indian cricket’s governing body is today dominated by Maharashtra, a state that in recent years has arguably produced some of the nation’s most corrupt politicians and seen the most shocking scams? That suspicion may be misplaced but cannot be downplayed either.

It is pretty common in Mumbai, one-time cradle of Indian cricket, for the wealthy to corner the cream and then pretend that they are doing the hoi polloi a favour. Pretty much the same insouciance pervades the way Indian cricket is governed today. The game we all love is being pulverised by naked avarice. Even as Mumbai’s dominance on the field has diminished steadily, off the arena it has grown in leaps and bounds – from the corridors of administrative power to the cushy commentary boxes. While one bunch wields untrammelled authority and guides the destiny of the game as a whole, the other uses the airwaves to make or mar cricket careers. Neither can see beyond their noses and bank balances. 

Many of the anomalies that we confront today as a nation stem from the “profit above all else” ethos that the Maximum City represents. India ranks fifth in the world on the list of dollar billionaires but it is a lowly 134th on the Human Development Index, a slot below Laos and two below Bhutan, and an equally abysmal 67th out of 84 nations in the Global Hunger Index.

One can go on. Of the 49 billionaires who contribute to one-fourth of India’s GDP, as many of 23 have addresses in Mumbai, the capital of a state where 44,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1995. If we don’t watch our backs, politicians could end up doing to cricket what they’ve done to Maharashtra.

Rules are bent but no eyebrows are raised. Take the case of N. Srinivasan. He is the BCCI secretary and president-elect. He is also a member of the IPL governing council, which frames the rules of the T20 tournament. As a majority stakeholder in India Cements, he is the owner of Chennai Super Kings (CSK), which is led by the India captain, Dhoni.

Even more interestingly, Srinivasan has roped in the chairman of the national selection committee, Krishnamachari Srikkanth, as a brand ambassador of CSK. It is a convenient arrangement that has been questioned by many but challenged by few. So the senior cricket board official is in total control – he makes the very rules that he and the others in his league play by. That is the kind of exercise IPL is.

The ongoing World Cup is only marginally better. But it is clearly a manipulated affair propelled by the need to secure the biggest television audience possible and the biggest profits. So, of the 32,000 seats in Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium, which will host the final on April 2, only 3000 are for sale to the public. Obviously, the sponsors, cricket officials and their pals will fill up the stands and the other enclosures.

If you haven't cottoned on yet, World Cup 2011 is a made-for-TV tamasha. The true cricket lover figures in the tournament's scheme of things only as a couch potato. So, stay at home, watch the game on the idiot box if you will, and keep praying for the sake of ICC and BCCI that the Indian team goes all the way to the final. If the Cup of joy brims over, the coffers will too.

(With inputs from TSI news bureaus)

The Bane of Pawar Play

Shyam Sundar Ghosh, former cricketer and veteran Kolkata sports journalist, on why cricket politics isn't quite cricket.

Politicians have taken over not only the sports bodies, but sports too. There have always been politicians and politics in the cricket board, but in the past they did not tinker with the game itself. They were engaged in jousting for personal power within the Board but took care to keep cricket alive. The situation has changed markedly since Sharad Pawar took control of BCCI.

Today, our cricket board is under the total control of the western lobby. Some quarters call it the Mumbai lobby, but I regard it as the western lobby because the board also has people who don’t belong to Mumbai or Maharashtra but are close to the man at the top. Since the current era began, money and politics have overrun the game of cricket. We don't have the power to rescue the game from the clutches of politicians.

One may remember Pawar's defeat in the election for the post of BCCI president in 2003. Jagmohan Dalmiya played the crucial role in his defeat through the casting vote on behalf of Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) and National Cricket Club (NCC). Pawar took a year to gear up for another shot and in 2004, he being a Union Minister, managed three captive votes of the central government (Railways, Services and Universities). The grapevine has it that he also managed to use the good offices of Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to secure Tripura's vote. Apparently, there were some more clauses, which unfolded later.

Once Pawar got the power he desired in BCCI, there was no love lost for Dalmiya. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee nominated Kolkata police commissioner Prasun Mukherjee for the CAB president's post. When Prasun Mukherjee was defeated, Buddhadeb termed Dalmiya’s win as a “victory of unholy forces’.

The Pawar era has, not necessarily by choice, seen some of the most unmemorable moments of Indian cricket, from Eden Gardens – one of the best cricket grounds in the world – being denied its due share of international matches, to funding and player compensation becoming more and more ambiguous and less and less transparent – look at the way IPL is being conducted; there is so much subterfuge in team funding and ownership patterns.

It’s finally a matter of making big bucks. Some portions of the money are being gifted to smaller states, ostensibly for promotion of cricket. But what is the result? The politicians are doing what they are best at. They wreck everything they touch. They are now destroying the game they control. Be it the Bihar Cricket Association or the Delhi & Districts Cricket Association. And, as we all know, it isn't just cricket that is being trifled with those that don't have the interest of sport at heart. In every sport in this country, the story is the same.

Give cricket a miss... get a life!

The bored and the busy tell TSI what they’d rather do than waste their time on the willow wielders

Pargat Singh, Former Indian hockey captain

To make a success of anything today, one needs a clear vision and marketing muscle. Cricket has always had the market on its side. That is why the game has reached such heights. In India, we don’t see the same passion for other sports. But that doesn’t mean nothing is happening outside of cricket. People tend to feel that all work will come to a halt when cricket is on. I will, as always, be busy with hockey. Yes, I will follow the cricket World Cup but only through newspapers and TV highlights. There is more to life than cricket.

Ravi Kishen, Film actor

Cricket frenzy is a reality in India. But for the country to grow, we need passion for work. So I will continue working full steam. For me nothing is more exciting than cinema. Cricket is a distant second on my list of priorities. The World Cup might be on, but I will be in the dubbing studio tomorrow. The producer has invested money in the project, so how can I leave him in the lurch simply because of cricket? One aspect of the game that I hate is the jingoism that it evokes. Why should a win or loss in a cricket match be linked to national pride?

Alex von Tunzelmann, Author of the controversial book 'Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire'
I’m running away to a place where I think I’ll be safe from the cricket coverage. I have taken a travel writing assignment in Svalbard, a frozen Norwegian archipelago deep in the Arctic Circle. It will be just me, a photographer, a few polar bears and the Northern Lights. My father is a New Zealander, my mother is English. I’ve written one book about India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and I’ve just finished another book about the West Indies, so I have impossibly divided cricket loyalties. Basically, as long as Australia doesn’t win, I’ll be happy.

Sajan Raj Kurup, Founder & Creative Chairman, Creativeland Asia
The things I’ll do while the cricket World Cup is on:
Watch football for sure, EPL! nWatch some 3D movies. Sadistically watch Sagarika Ghosh and her high decibels on 'Face the Nation'. nConstantly follow Lalit Modi on Twitter! Go onion shopping, great time to shop otherwise as well.  Spend some time unearthing new scams. nWatch Sheila ki Jawani, probably a sequel to it. Go on a pilgrimage. Spend some time alone, since everybody else would be watching cricket! Visit one of the railway stations in Mumbai to see how the usually crowded scenario changes during the Cricket World Cup.

Max Hegerman, President, Tribal DDB
Here are my thoughts in terms of the things I would rather do than watch cricket. I have listed them in ascending order (#1 being what I would least like to do instead of watching cricket), just like David Letterman. I hope that makes sense...
Watch an episode of Zor Ka Jhatka. Prepare for the Mumbai Cyclathon. Watch an ESPN re-run of Super Bowl XI (my Vikings lost again). Watch re-runs of Dukes of Hazzard. Get a manicure/pedicure. Read gardening blogs. Read an issue of Filmfare – cover to cover. Take a nap on a park bench, next to a dog. Play Farmville. Wax my chest hair.

Faiza S Khan, Karachi-based columnist and literary and film critic
I have been busy getting married the last few days, and am still in a bit of a whirl. However, it is worth mentioning that I didn't notice the World Cup was on before your mail arrived!I have been busy getting married the last few days, and am still in a bit of a whirl. However, it is worth mentioning that I didn't notice the World Cup was on before your mail arrived!