The Hindu Business Line : Cricket viewers being served trash this season

On the first day of the World Cup at the Caribbean one saw more ads on SET Max than cricket between West Indies and Pakistan. The Pepsi ad with tigers roaming the field is insulting and it is doubtful whether the viewers grasped the message; other commercials are just as bad. One has decided not to buy a single product beamed between overs (or is it between balls). The replays are sloppy and the viewers are being treated unfairly by SET Max.

The one-hour chat ahead of a match hurts body and brain with Mandira Bedi and Charu Sharma (the poor man's Harsha Bhogle, says my nephew Ravi Krishnan) chewing up cricket. Sorry, one does not want to hurt them or the channel. It has to be said as viewers are not to be faulted for sitting in front of their TV sets to watch cricket. One fears the day when TV channels may not show any cricket; only ads will be thrown at the audience. The print media is no better.

Every base or senile comment from anyone remotely linked to World Cup is headlined to catch the reader, who flips the sports pages in disgust.

The reader is being dunked in crap. For whom was the Sunil Gavaskar-Ponting face off? Is Sunil Gavaskar feeling left out, missing all the action? How does it help anyone? Who cares? One has yet to read an intelligent or a sane analysis of the World Cup cricket being played.

That takes one to the night before a black and white TV channel in 1983 when India put away a strong West Indies team to win the World Cup. Cricket action and cricket action alone was served to the viewers. The Srikkanth square cut was there in all its splendour. One did not have a TV then and Thatiya, my landlord, invited me to watch the match. He was not sure of the niceties of the game, but he spent the late night, smoking bidis, with me.

My friends think one is being unreasonable, or worse, outdated. If all the ads are not there, cricketers will not be paid the crores they pocket with ease. They catch currency better than the lofted ball on the cricket ground. Even granting the point that players need to be served up currency during the lunch break, one is not sure of the business link between a boring ad repeatedly flashed and money spent on the product by the viewers. Is there even a tenuous thread tying an ad spend with a viewer spend? Have Pepsi sales gone up or has LIC sold more insurance policies?

Also, one needs to study the impact of corporate sponsors on running of the game, in this instance cricket. They say grounds are getting smaller to accommodate billboards and the manner 20-20 cricket is being pushed, there may not be any cricket left, as played at least till the early 90s. Any game, leave alone cricket, bereft of nuances is no game.

Let's admit one simple fact. West Indies made cricket exciting. Till they walked the cricket grounds, the game had little of spice and pepper. Like the Brazilians in football, the West Indians brought body, soul and sporting spirit to the cricket pitches. Cricket lost its stale staidness. The game, matured as it were, when Frank Worrell captained a fine bunch of West Indians to play Australia under Richie Benaud and tie the first test at Brisbane.

That Test match made the future for the game. The future became the West Indian side under Clive Lloyd and till today, every other cricketing nation has been trying to touch their legacy of game and glamour. They talk of Steve Waugh and his Invincibles. If that be so, poetry and prose fails to docket the West Indians of the 80s and 90s. For me, West Indian cricket was a mix of Hemingway and Graham Greene spiced with the poetry of Pablo Neruda.

With Brian Lara it is not so as he cannot tear up a bowler, fast or spin, in style. Yet, there is the sophistication, which comes with caution. In his latest essay in Sportstar (March 17, 2007), Frank Tyson writes: "Good cricket coaching places the interests of the team above those of the individual. It trumpets the time-honoured, winning aphorism that a champion team will always beat a team of champions."

Going by Tyson's measure, Australia, England and South Africa fit the bill; none else. Then, there is the piece by Bob Simpson, in the same issue, where an interesting statistic has been offered. Simpson writes: "Perhaps, the most worrying and telling aspect has been Australia's poor performance in the last 10 overs of a match. With 6.64 runs per over in those vital times, Australia figure at the bottom of the list of top nations as far as the economy rate is concerned. Only New Zealand, with 6.68 runs per over, are behind them, while the West Indies, surprisingly, are at the top, conceding only 5.85 runs per over."

Simpson has not talked about India. One would like Simpson's view on the Indian cricket team coached experimentally by an Australian called Greg Chappell. In recent days, one has been reading Steve Waugh's near-800 pages book (one has not done with it): Out of My Comfort Zone, the autobiography. Waugh writes: "Simmo (Simpson) highlighted the fact that nine times out of 10 the team scoring the most singles in one-dayers wins, so we quickly realised that running between the wickets was an area in which we could dominate and give ourselves an advantage."

Can the Indian cricket team catch up. We are slow runners, poor fielders (going by Greg Chappell) and give away too many runs in the last 10 overs. India has champion players. Is it a champion team?

P. Devarajan

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