MUMBAI - On
Friday, the biennial six-nation Asia Cup cricket
tournament in Sri Lanka, also featuring India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong,
resumes the cricket season on the subcontinent and the
mass mania that it engenders.
India pays
a frenzied, cross-cultural obeisance to cricket that
is worshipped more as a national religion than merely as
a game played under sunshine and blue skies, or
under blazing floodlights at night, with 22 players, a
green field, a willow bat, a leather-covered ball
and intricate rules. And over the past decade, cricket
has enjoyed boom times as a multimillion-dollar industry.
Although the total prize money for the
tournament will be a modest US$180,000, the highest
amount in the history of the tournament, it is the
related activities that make the big bucks.
Cricket
generates more than $150 million in business
annually, a conservative figure estimated primarily on
sales of TV rights. Media baron Rupert Murdoch's
ESPN-STAR bagged rights for the Asia Cup at $13.8
million for exclusive television and radio broadcasts
worldwide, and on-ground sponsorships for a tournament
not involving the other big cricketing nations such as
Australia, South Africa and England.
Cricket leaped into the big-money league when sponsors, mostly
Indian, paid $550 million to the International Cricket
Council (ICC), the game's premier governing body, for
three Champions Trophy and two World Cup events until
2007. The ICC reported $161 million as its 2003-year end
balance sheet footing, with mostly liquid cash
investments.
India's cricket market dominates
the business worldwide, with television advertising
rates during India's tour of Australia last winter
estimated at $23,500 for a 30-second spot. The last
India-Pakistan series a few months ago scorched a new
high, with ad rates of $11,000 per 10 seconds.
In a country convulsed with contrasts and
contradictions, cricket also serves as India's
unification glue, dissolving religious, lingual and even
political differences. Last December 16, the Indian
parliament interrupted proceedings to break into
applause when India beat long-standing world champions
Australia in Adelaide in a five-day Test match - the
Asian Cup is played in the one-day version of the game.
Former Indian cricketer and maverick commentator Navjot
Singh Siddhu was elected to parliament this March,
following former players Chetan Chauhan and Kirti Azad.
In its darker side, cricket saps India's
already not-so-strong work ethic, offering
escapist entertainment, pseudo-nationalistic fervor that
apparently justifies skipping out on the office or
getting distracted all day at work keeping tabs on
cricket scores and heatedly debating playing strategies.
At peak season, as when
India hosts Australia this winter, reigning playing deities
such as millionaire superstar Sachin Tendulkar
and Virender Sehwag, the new swashbuckling hero and
unabashed hick, will take over Indian media headlines and
sitting-room chatter. Politicians, movie stars and
corruption scandals move into the sideshow bin.
London-based Wisden Cricinfo.com, the world's
largest sports website and part of the premier cricket
media group Wisden, told Asia Times Online that it
averages more than 2 million unique page views during peak season
matches involving India. During big matches, the site
barely copes with traffic overload, mostly from
non-resident Indians in North America.
Cricket
has begun to enjoy a growing global appeal, being played
in more than 120 countries. On June 24, the New York
Times reported on a new professional cricket league in
the United States. Traditionally, the duration of
cricket contests ranges from the connoisseur's choice of five-day
Test matches to the three- and four-day "first class"
matches, and widely popular "one-day" internationals
such as in the forthcoming Asia Cup and the quadrennial
World Cup.
But the new American Pro Cricket
league favors a three-hour rollicking condensation that
appears likely to be the favored cricket flavor later
this millennium, as the huge success of the shortened
Twenty20 format in England proved last summer.
Realistically, cricket cannot hope to survive for too
long as a serious business proposition in its all-day
long version. More time-conscious future generations
would be aghast at the idea of spending six hours a day,
five days a week watching a game, fascinating though it
may be.
But at present, nothing worldwide
compares to the cricket mania in India, where fans
routinely conduct elaborate poojas (religious
ceremonies) in temples, undertake fasts to bring good
luck to the national team before big matches, or even
commit suicide when India loses.
Often, tragically, India's games end with nail-biting
finishes and losses, followed by media reports the next day of
a fan or more dying of a heart attack or worse after
watching the game.
Four fans
died in the southeastern state of Orissa after India's
defeat in the March 2003 World Cup final in
South Africa. Police reported that two fans committed
suicide and two others died of heart attack after watching
the match live on TV from Johannesburg.
Sankarsan Parija, a 32-year-old villager in the Kendrapada district,
hanged himself from a tree, leaving a suicide note that
said, "I am dying because of India's defeat, please take
care of my son and wife."
Less insanely in the
next few months, India's social schedules, marketing
events, travel plans, leave from office, and Bollywood movie
and TV soap releases will be worked out after carefully
consulting cricket schedules, in much the same way
as India, for timeless centuries, fixed
important ceremonies after peering at astrology charts.
India's breakthrough peace initiatives with Pakistan in
March centered on a bilateral cricket series.
The era of
big-time sponsorships arrived in the 1990s with
satellite TV and the charismatic Tendulkar, one of the
all-time greats in the game and who, at age 31, still
has enormous undelivered potential. Tendulkar, the first
Indian sportsman to feature on a Time magazine cover,
lived up to his promise as a teenage prodigy when he
made his international debut against Pakistan in 1989 as
a squeaky-voiced, curly-haired schoolboy who
courageously stood up against lightning-fast fast
bowling. The world's fastest bowlers can deliver a
cricket ball, made of hard leather and weighing 156-163
grams, at speeds over 190 km/h down a 22-yard
(20.1-meter) pitch, giving the nervous helmeted
batsman about a quarter of a second to react.
In the
1990s, Tendulkar took off as a one-man multimillion-dollar
industry and the flagship face of Indian cricket, much
the same way as movie icon Amitabh Bachchan did in the
1970s in Bollywood.
But the money angle threatened
to destroy cricket when a match-fixing scandal
broke out in April 2000, after Indian police in New
Delhi tapped phone conversations that visiting South African
cricketers allegedly had with bookmakers. Investigations
that followed resulted in the life ban of
former Indian captain Mohammad Azharuddin and the late
South African captain Hanse Cronje, who died in an air
crash on June 1, 2002.
Match-fixing allegations
again surfaced during India's triumphant tour of
Pakistan this March, with Pakistani players accused of
tanking matches. The joint commissioner of police
(crime) in Mumbai, Satya Pal Singh, was reported as
saying that betting turnover in a single cricket match
involving India runs over $90 million. And India plays
about 50 matches annually. About 150 international
matches are played in a calendar year.
Match-fixing or not, cricket fever is a fixed
part of India's turbulent seasons and a game as
difficult to understand but as enriching to experience
as India itself - one legacy from the British that the
country has embraced with undisguised passion.
Raja M is an independent writer based
in India.
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