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Sunday Reading
New Delhi, 29 April 2011
Cricket Craze
ALL ABOUT MONEY,
FAME
By Proloy Bagchi
Cricket seems to be the flavour of the season, despite the
onset of summer. Barely had the dust settled down after the World Cup, the
Indian Premier League’s (IPL) twenty-twenty (T-20) tournament kicked off.
Today, cricket is again monopolising TV channels.
The media hype during the Word Cup played out in the Indian
sub-Continent was almost like “carpet bombing”. The print and electronic media
“bombed” the reader/viewer with everything, all to soften, if not demolish, the
viewer/ reader’s faculty of reason. The print media had pages dedicated to the
World Cup and TV news channels mounted discussion programmes, talk-shows and telly-conferences
with catchy names like “Power Play”, “Fourth Umpire”, “Kings of Cricket” etc.
The programmes, much like unguided bombs, obliterated
regular news-and-views schedules and bombarded viewers with cricketing trivia,
anecdotes, opinions et al. To add a touch of glamour, they even inducted two
very attractive young ladies, one an actor and a cricket-lover and the other a
former Captain of the Indian women’s cricket team.
Undoubtedly, the idea of the promoters of various channels’ seemed
geared towards force-feeding TV audiences, with cricketing stuff they had taken
pains to muster by spending millions of dollars. Much like the famed Peking Duck
or Kobe beef.
Recall, in the past, only channels that telecast a match would
assemble a few experts and air discussions before the commencement of play,
during intervals or breaks and at the end of the game. In the case of a test
match, only at the end of the day’s play.
This is no longer so. While channels that buy the rights to
telecast the matches or tournament continue with their rigmarole, others
attracted by the target rating points (TRP), especially the English and
vernacular languages news channels, too, have climbed on to the bandwagon.
During the recent World Cup, therefore, at any hour of the day or night one or
the other or several channels would be inflicting cricket on the unwary surfer.
While the vernacular channels could manage only some former
local heroes, the English channels assembled a large number of retired national
and international cricketers and commentators from all parts of the cricketing
world. They would expound ad nauseam on
the finer points of the games played, strengths and weaknesses of various
players as also the teams in the fray and their prospects of advancing in the
tournament.
As hiring ex-foreign cricketing greats meant enormous
outflow of cash, channels would put them on the air most of the time, sometimes
even during prime time. Whereby, news was pushed into the background. During
the World Cup news channels all but forgot about Japan’s
Fukushima nuclear disaster and the war in Libya. Nothing
seemed news-worthy other than what transpired on the cricket field.
Notwithstanding, that one felt like kicking the TV, fed up with this overdose.
It’s not that I am not a cricket buff. In my younger days not
only did I play cricket in school and college, but would also listen to the
running commentary of matches over the radio, apart from reading books on
cricket. We would tune in to Radio Australia
early in the morning to catch the Australia-England “Ashes” series or listen to
BBC till late into the night for matches played in England with edifying comments in
‘poetic’ prose by legendary John Arlott.
The All India Radio would broadcast running commentaries
when matches were played in India.
I remember with nostalgia the delightful commentating of Dev Raj Puri who had
mastered the art of giving ball-to-ball commentary, effectively conveying the
atmosphere on the ground. Most interesting, however, used to be the chats of
AFS Talyarkhan, a one-time marathon commentator, with other commentators during
the tea-break around the early 1950s.
Cricket was earlier quintessentially a sport indulged in by
the upper and middle classes. Patronised by the maharajas and nawabs, it used to be played mostly by the feudals and
their progeny. Even the radio commentaries were listened to by them and the
middle classes who possessed the radio-receivers, a rarity in those days.
The common man and the deprived masses could never afford a
radio, and, hence, never showed any interest in the game. This changed after the
‘transistorisation’ of the radio. Whereby, a transistor became cheap,
affordable and portable. Also, running commentaries in Hindi extended the reach
of cricket making it more fathomable to the non-English crowd.
The game received a big boost in popularity when India won the
third edition of the Cricket World Cup in 1983. Advancement in technology gave
it a further push with proliferation of TV sets, cable and satellite channels
carrying live images of matches into the living rooms. Today, cricket is
watched on TV by millions of Indians in high-end houses as also in rural and
urban shanties. Pertinently, a once-aristocratic game has been taken by TV to
the plebeians, who simply love it. Specially post the Hindi blockbuster Lagaan which centred on cricket.
Besides, the multi-million viewership generates billions of
dollars in advertisement revenues. It has made the country’s apex cricketing
body, Board of Control for Cricket in India, cash-rich, giving it an
enormous clout in international cricket. India may not be a world economic
power yet, but it surely is a world cricketing power. And, before anybody could
blink, cricket’s centre of power has shifted from England
to India.
Any wonder, the ICC World Cup was played out in the sub-Continent
for the second time. Call it coincidence or what you may, two sub-Continental
teams, India and Sri Lanka fought for the top slot with India winning
the Cup.
This is not all. Succumbing to the crazy hype, the Central
and some State Governments gave a day off to cricket-mad staffers to cheer the
home team, even if they did so from the comfort of their homes. Not to say any
work would have been done in offices even otherwise.
In sum, with the kind of money cricket now generates it is
no longer a sport played out during three-four winter months as was the case
previously. Today, it has become a year-round circus. With everyone raking in big
money nobody is complaining. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the media hype for the
IPL continues feeding the craze for cricket. ----- INFA
(Copyright,
India News and Feature Alliance)
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