Since the 1983 World Cup win, when the Indian media and fans switched their focus onto the players, demigods have been born into cricket almost as often as in that other field of pageantry — Bollywood. And, the constant innovations in viewing formats have further broadened the scope of its ability to ‘entertain’. Snehal Pradhan examines the formerly unassuming game’s shift from sport to spectacle…
ILLUSTRATIONS BY VISHNU M. NAIR
In October 2015, the usually serene Barabati Stadium in Cuttack was transformed into a cauldron of roiling anger. Usually serene because it is usually empty, but on this warm night, it was packed; all 45,000 seats taken as India hosted South Africa for the first ever T20I at the venue. And roiling in anger because India were in trouble. Big trouble.
After being asked to field first, India had sunk to 92 all out, their lowest T20 total at home at the time. In the innings break, a disgusted fan threw a plastic bottle onto the field of play, and many others followed suit. The projectile violence occurred once more in the game, during South Africa’s facile chase, putting the players at risk and halting play for nearly an hour.
One might look at that incident and bemoan the intolerance that is seeping into our society. I blame something much more pernicious and sinister: Bollywood. For the flawed expectations it breeds. Many of us no longer look at a cricket match as an unscripted event involving 23 variables (22 players and the pitch) where it is normal for one team to lose — our film industry has ensured that. It is, after all, the members of the cult of happily-ever-after who stone houses after big-tournament debacles.
But ever since 1983, cricket has slowly been transforming itself from sport to spectacle. So, it must take some of the blame now too.
Genesis
Sports development managers, the ones responsible for the growth of sport, have tough jobs. They can plan and plot, push and promote, package and polish all they can, but the fate of a sport lies in the hands of its athletes, who are not only employees but also products. No marketing campaign can compete with a winning team, and even the best one cannot make a losing team look good.
While I was playing cricket for India, our women’s team was often treated like the unwanted stepdaughter of the administration. Every time our grumbles became audible, well-wishers within the establishment whispered back, “Win something big; then things will change.”
That formula might work in most countries, but less so in India, and the subcontinent in general. Indian sport grows on the backs of the athletes who win the trophies, not so much the trophies they win. The Indian hockey team brought home six consecutive Olympic golds between 1928 and 1956, and two more since, but the sport hasn’t gripped the nation like it could and should have. And while there are multiple reasons involved, it is no coincidence that most readers will know few names beyond Major Dhyan Chand.
On the 25th of June 1983, the spotlight swivelled onto Indian cricket and allowed the fans to look upon the stars of that World Cup in England in a new light; Kapil Dev and Sunil Gavaskar are etched in our collective memory not just because they beat the invincible West Indies but also because the images of their triumph were captured for posterity. Indian cricket’s golden moment benefitted from the maturity of radio broadcasting and the timely spread of television. And those mediums turned the players into inchoate celebrities; they became ‘personalities’.
And the common Indian loves personalities. On the whole, we watch movies for the stars, not the scripts; the plot need not be watertight as long as there are enough dialogues with a punch. The Indian cricket team had an ODI win percentage of 44 per cent in the ’80s, so they weren’t world beaters (compared to, say, the West Indies, who won 71 per cent), and there are many who consider the 1983 result an anomaly. Nonetheless, the year was a node in the way the sport was perceived.
Consolidation
Dev — as the fast bowling all-rounder capable of smashing sixes as well as stumps attacks — was considered to be the physical apogee of Indian cricket, an ideal few could aspire to. Gavaskar’s skill was as much in his mind as it was in his hands and eyes, his discipline mythical, beyond the reach of all but the enlightened. But neither player won the hearts of the people in the same manner as the 16-year-old Mumbai boy from a middle-class family who could bat. Nor could they have hoped to.
Sachin Tendulkar’s rise should have been predictable; he was precocious yet relatable. His talent was rare, that much was understood, but it came from an upbringing that most of India would consider as common ground. Along with Shah Rukh Khan — the other funnel of attention in the ’90s — Tendulkar shaped cricket not just with his runs but also the financial potential those runs brought.
The universe, too, conspired to magnify his 5’5’’ frame into a million-dollar influence. Doordarshan used to have a monopoly over the rights to televise Indian cricket. But, as India’s markets opened up to the world in 1993, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) tested the waters and found takers. Companies like Trans World International and WorldTel (the company that also managed Tendulkar) had deeper pockets and put their money where it mattered, jostling for the broadcast rights of Indian cricket in the boardroom and in court. As the BCCI laughed its way to the bank, cricket production took a leap forward in terms of quality. Live cricket was now much closer to the experience that the well-produced silver screen offered, taking the sport one step closer to the look and feel of Bollywood. And Tendulkar’s brand value, too, started resembling that of a film star’s, reportedly swelling from INR 16 lakhs per year to INR 5 crore.
As new standards were set in the broadcast industry, and millions leaned further in to watch their hero, the rest was sometimes incidental. Pure sport cannot sustain the common Indian fan, a creature that has been raised on a diet of happy endings. The audience almost always went home sated from a movie hall, with their hero having featured successfully in every scene. And so it was in cricket; the Indian team’s ODI win percentage only improved to 47 per cent in the ’90s, but Tendulkar’s batting average of 44 meant that more often than not, he was among the runs.
Explosion
One of the beauties of sport is that it is unknowable. That is why exorbitant amounts of money are paid to telecast it and even to watch it live (Indian fans at World Cups, I’m looking at you). The hope of victory married to the thrill of uncertainty; that is why people empty their purses. The professional athlete accepts this as her reality; winning and losing is a part of sport.
But think about it from the financial point of view. How do you build a business around a product that loses more often than it wins?
India moved past these limitations with the introduction of the IPL (Indian Premier League), where India wins every day. As new heroes emerged and went on to win the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007, the IPL scattered them and ensured that a star burned bright every night for two months straight. In a country of a billion fans, even divided loyalties can mean a million eyeballs. Many initially wrote it off as a tamasha. Even some overseas players who were involved thought of it as nothing more than a hit and giggle, invitational doubles at Wimbledon meets coloured kits and late night parties.
But despite the initial controversies, the IPL always had all the right ingredients: a tournament immune to loss; emboldened by foreign talent who were forged to Indian loyalties. And so cricket, as a spectacle, was suddenly becoming a safer bet. The IPL insured against the volatility of international cricket, moving the sport from gladiatorial to theatrical, at least from the watchers’ point of view. And in the last few years, it has coincided with (and perhaps contributed to) India’s dominance on the world stage.
A senior journalist once shared an insight gained from the broadcasting industry: a team winning even 55 per cent of the time can still hold the attention of fans. India have won 66 per cent of their ODI games since the last World Cup. They are currently the No. 1 side in Tests, No. 2 in ODIs and a force in T20Is. The recent World Cup semi-final showed that they can have one bad day, but in the long run, India are now a bankable side, not unlike the biggest superstars in Bollywood, who will bring in revenue even if a movie is made about what they had for breakfast.
And so it is not surprising to see cricket, in its various forms, eat ever so slightly into the market share of the General Entertainment Channels (GEC). BARC (Broadcast Audience Research Council) figures reveal that GEC viewership dropped by 3 per cent during the IPL months for both 2016 and 2017. Movie halls in June and July this year were airing live sports instead of celluloid song-and-dance. And just as TV and radio catapulted the 1983 World Cup win, and broadcasting money amplified Tendulkar, the internet revolution has done the same for modern cricket. Rather than eating into the share of the TV market, the availability of mobile data has amplified it. From hundreds of taut white cloths or from lakhs of LCD screens, attention has moved to millions of smartphones in millions of hands. Hotstar recorded more than 100 million daily users during the India-Pakistan game at the 2019 Men’s Cricket World Cup and more than 25.3 million concurrent users for the India-New Zealand semi-final, smashing their previous record of 18.6 million set during the 2019 IPL. Not surprisingly, 60 per cent of cricket viewers also flip channels and consume entertainment content on the platform.
Perhaps two facts plot cricket’s merger with entertainment better than most: First, while the sport itself may be unscripted, the face-offs aren’t always. Just as movie release-dates are scheduled months in advance, India’s matches against Pakistan in multi-team tournaments are ‘arranged’; the ICC, cricket’s regulatory body, recently accepted that they load the dice and try to ensure the two teams have every opportunity to face each other.
Second is a record that Virat Kohli has achieved, something even Tendulkar couldn’t. It’s not being faster to 10,000 runs, not his 25 centuries in chases. It’s the fact that in 2017, he displaced Shah Rukh Khan as the highest earning celebrity in India.
Howzatt?
The author is a former Indian cricketer, and now a freelance journalist and broadcaster based in Pune.
She hosts the YouTube Channel, Cricket WithSnehal, and tweets @SnehalPradhan.