TWENTY20 CRICKET

Television, Cricket and Media Frenzy



Another wave of cricket euphoria is sweeping through the subcontinent. India's Twenty20 world cup success has literally swung everyone off their feet and minds with the whole country gloating over it like an adolescent. Though India played much better and exciting cricket against Australia and South Africa, the final was 'the most important' victory obviously because it was against our arch-other, Pakistan. One could virtually feel the nervousness and tension of the players out in the field during the match. Evidently both of them were not playing a game; rather the game was playing them with the wishes, prayers and dreams of millions of their countrymen looming over their heads. Rules of the game do not apply here; it is either glory or ignominy. You are either paraded through the streets, or lynched in public. (The bitter experience that both the teams faced after their unceremonious exit at the WCC should be still fresh in their memory) So, the frenzy that television whipped up cannot just wind up with the end of the game. It went on and on through the night and the following days, with the channels vying with each other to follow the players to their homes. It was as if the channels, akin to adolescents, couldn't come to terms with the fact that the tournament was over.



Witnessing the kind of joy and exuberance in and of the media, one gets the feeling that it was also a desperate exercise in public memory. Television constantly needs such euphoric moments to create an illusion of participation through spectacles. On the one side are the pressures of entertainment industry to innovate new forms of entertainment and thus advertisement revenue. On the other is the frantic effort of the audience to hold on to something, anything that goes beyond the transience and everydayness of life and media that suffocates them. Such moments naturally need its heroes, villains or martyrs – and this game constantly renews itself to cater to this inexorable hunger - of the fans as well as the media. From its often result-less 5 Day version, here cricket has taken the shape and size of a film show, a thriller lasting for three and half hours!



As Rohit Brijnath puts it very insightfully, "it's a game that is the remarkable mix of many stolen parts; it has borrowed the idea that plot is irrelevant from Van Damme movies, it's scrounged the concept of "music at changeovers" from the US Open Tennis; it's spawned its own version of baseball's dancing girls; it's crude version of football's penalty shoot-out, it's got a hockey-style on-ground bench, and bears a resemblance to golf with its bizarre rules.. Its intensity is unrelenting, its no-dawdling pace so wonderfully un-cricketing, its lack of snobbery invigorating, its demand for nerve exhilarating, its improvisation intriguing" (It is Excitable, Unruly, Unsubtle and Fun, Sportstar, September 29. 2007). So, is the game of cricket imitating television, which is a media that picks from any genre, mixes and shuffles them at will, always trying to keep the frenzy alive at any cost?



And he goes on to say, "Twenty20 is the future, but it's also the past. The game we embrace now is the one we left behind. Every shot played by Yuvraj that night against England was only an echo of our boyhood..Gully cricket was not about accumulation but explosions..We played Twenty20 before it was invented" Maybe it is this very immediacy, intimacy and spontaneity, and the boyishness of the players (players like Hayden and Gilchrist look like Dinosaurs) that prompts us to take on to it so easily and compulsively. Maybe it is this feeling of participating in yet another reality show, where your gully and neighbourhood are the arena, that makes it so TV-friendly, full of excitement and frenzy as it happens, and totally forgotten the moment the wave passes by. So, it may not be a coincidence that this victory was constantly compared with film narratives like Lagaan, Chak De India, etc where a rabble comes together to gain victory. Is art/media imitating life or is it the other way round?

WCC - The Cup of Blood and Tears

The Abyss of Hype – Cricket and its Martyrs

With World Cup Cricket, sports seems to be turning into the primal spectacle that it was in the beginning. Here also, you either lose your scalp or win it.

First came the debacle of the Indian team. They were defeated by the young Bangladeshis for a convincing margin. Then came the reports about the murder of Bob Woolmer, coach to the Pakistan team. Both these have sent tremours through the cricketing establishment in the sub continent. For, in the sub continent, cricket is not just another game but a religion that vegetates on the fanatic. And this religion is one which in turn is sponsored and fuelled by the media and the advertisement industry.



These two incidents throw sinister light on the financial and moral economy of the game as it is 'played' at present. According to reports, if Indian team fails to make it to the Super Eight stage, it is going to topple the apple cart. It will affect the revenue – advertisements, television rights etc – to a huge extent. Some predict that it could be as high as 70 per cent of the revenues expected from the tournament. According to industry sources, a ten seconds advertisement on television during a match in which India is participating has been sold for as much as Rs.5 lakhs plus. And for the other games it is around Rs 1.50 lakhs. This has been marketed and sold in the belief that india would play as many games, or all the games at least upto the Super Eight league stage. Ironically, we are witness to a strange situation where the very people who created the hype ending up believing in it themselves! Only the media and the corporates seems to have the stupidity to bank on the talents of the tigers our players have been made out to be! The debacle of Team India at the hands of Bangladesh got all the real players into a panic - the sponsors, media buyers, the ICC, the travel trade, ad agencies, TV channels etc. It is estimated that if India fails to qualify for the Super Eight "it would put into jeopardy about Rs 350 crores worth of television money, roughly $300 million of sponsorship money, and ICC's forthcoming global sponsorship deals, bids for which are currently open at $60 - $80 million per sponsor" (Economic Times, 19 th March 2007).

Obviously, it is not an open, gentleman's game of fair chances any more. It has turned out to be a gambler's den where fortunes are made and ruined. In this frenzy, the first casualty is sense of proportion and priority. Our players, who earn more from advertisements than from the game, are made out to be crusaders, out on the war front to win the scalp for India. Only by creating such a mass frenzy and desire to win the cup can the viewership be maintained. And for that, one needs heroes to sustain the frenzy and the hope. Obviously, the match is played not on the pitch but outside the stadium; it is a game played by sycophants, jingoists, and fanatics on the one side and ad agencies, speculators and corporates on the other. Only casualty is the spirit of the game. This is something that became heartwrenchingly evident in the tragic event of the death of Woolmer at the tournament. If it is an indicator of things to come, the dark side seems to have won over this 'gentleman's game'. Ultimately, the game is finding itself in the morass and abyss of the hype that it has begun to believe in.