Wilting Willow

The Gentleman’s game is witnessing a rather un-gentlemanly change. Cricket is increasingly administered and ‘owned’ by bureaucrats, politicians and movie stars. Spot fixing is turning out to be more than a one-off incident, threatening to consume young players interested in the frills of life outside the game. On the field, one can see the evolution of a rather shameful correlation between venues and playing standards. Almost all cricketing nations excel at home, only to flop abysmally on tour. Players’ behaviour on-field is anything but gentlemanly. Gone (ok, at least vanishing!) are the days of showing respect to the opposition. Forget confrontations between players; today, even the spectator gets the middle finger salute for needling a player. Of course, there are exceptions to all this, but the drop in cricketing standards cannot be denied. The game is evolving into a boring, money-minting business; in stark contrast to the passionate, adrenalin-gushing rage that it was in the nineties and early 2000s. This, in spite of India’s so-called resurgence – two World Cup triumphs in the last five years, a year at the top of the Test cricket table and a cricket league that rivals EPL and NBA in terms of prize money and fan following. I say this not only because I am an Indian and, like most in my age-group, grew up on a fair amount of playing and watching the game. India is world cricket’s biggest pot of gold. India’s success on the field means more money comes into the coffers of cricket agencies everywhere.

While I reserve an in-depth analysis of the ‘why’s and ‘why not’s of cricket’s looming decline for later, here, I outline three possible reasons that cannot be missed.

First, Cricket’s outreach has been extremely poor. It is perhaps an exception if you compare the money it generates worldwide with the number of teams that play the game (you can count them on your fingers). Over the last two decades, only a handful (South Africa, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh) of teams have entered the mainstream and managed to stay there. Even among these, the latter two have remained in the big league largely due to the lack of any other competitor, and for the need of the game’s bosses to show on paper that they are making efforts to reach out. The few minnows that make up the numbers in World Cups have not managed to come through so far. If so few teams play the game, it is inevitable that decay creeps in.

Second, with satellite TV and the internet, people have more access to watching other sports than ever before. The shorter, faster and more exciting games like tennis, motorsport, soccer, basketball, etc. are eating up cricket’s time and space. (Of course, ‘exciting’ is a subjective term. For some, nothing can be more exciting than an Indian batsman pounding the hell out of an Australian pacer, even if it is on the dustbowls of Kotla where such a result is a foregone conclusion nine times out of ten.) To counter this challenge, a new form of cricket has evolved; which has added to the decay. I discuss this next.

Third, the emergence of the slam-bang T20 has made watching cricket so so boring, quite contrary to its initial view of making the game shorter (from 8-9 hrs to under 3 hrs). T20s are heavily loaded in favour of batsmen. Rarely does one see a T20 game being played on a green top. A low scoring T20 is termed boring, as if all that is there to cricket is boundaries and more boundaries. As a result, young batsmen are getting used to batting on hard, bald wickets that offer little to no assistance to bowlers. When the same batsmen play one day cricket, or the more classical (did someone say classy?) Test cricket, they are sitting ducks to seam-and-swing bowling. Nothing exemplifies this more than India’s recent tours to England and Australia; and England’s test matches against Pakistan in Dubai.

Cricket needs to be administered by people who know the game, the players. While it is great to make money out of it, this shouldn’t happen at the cost of the quality of play. Visionary planning and execution is required to save cricket from decaying into a boring, predictable sport.