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What are the prospects of cricket in America? I couldn’t care less about the answer. But the question intrigues me. What does it really mean to ask this? Does it mean 'will cricket be a lucrative business in America?' Does it mean 'will children play cricket in America in the future, much as they play soccer or softball today?' Does it mean that one day a grand final between San Francisco and Boston will bring the nation to a standstill much like the Super Bowl does today? What does cricket mean here? Actual cricket? Or the dumbed down T20 form?
If Cricket is the Mahabharat , then T20 is a one-sentence precis which says, “Two sets of privileged, immature friends fought over some silly stuff and things got out of hand.” This sounds like a Hollywood film of the Hangover genre, but it is still pregnant with possibilities. To my mind, T20 isn’t. Next month, Sachin Tendulkar and Shane Warne will lead 26 other retired players on a three-match T20 tour of America. Between them, these players account for one in 12 all-time international runs and one in 10 wickets. They hold every world record except those held by Bradman. In America, they will play at the most 720 unusually terse deliveries of cricket between them. On a per-delivery basis, it is probably the most lucrative ‘cricket’ many of them have ever played.
Despite the overwhelming cricketing muscle on offer, as an introduction to cricket, this tour is less than serious. The idea that T20 might be a gateway drug to the real thing is equally unserious. If the justification for developing T20 is that the longer form is too long and too boring, why would anybody who has been successfully introduced to the apparently more exciting form move on to the apparently less exciting one?
As a business proposition, cricket may well succeed in America. It is a big country — 5 times the size of the biggest Test-playing nation outside Asia. Nearly 9 million people living in America today were born in one of the 10 major cricket-playing countries. Even if cricket matches don’t ever make front-page news in The New York Times , America has a large number of people who have heard of cricket and could offer up a substantial number of fans with the capacity to pay first-world prices for the privilege of watching it. Notwithstanding the tendency of immigrant populations to assimilate, it is a safe bet that there will always be sufficient numbers of cricket fans in the United States. Given the Internet, moving to the U.S. no longer means leaving cricket behind as it did 30 years ago.
Earlier this year, ESPN paid $12.4 million for exclusive media rights to the IPL in the U.S. for three years. As a comparison, in 2011, Taj Television committed to paying $20 million over 8 years for the TV rights to Zimbabwe cricket. Zimbabwe is a poor country with a population of nearly 15 million people and an advanced cricketing tradition. It has five first-class teams and cricket has been a part of Zimbabwean life for much of the 20th Century. That ESPN should pay $4 million a year to show a franchise league in India from a country which does not even have a third-tier cricket team suggests that the business proposition and the sporting proposition have little to do with each other.
What of the sporting proposition? Do the very economies of attention and experience which dominate the post-industrial landscape of late-capitalism, which came to us from America, get in the way of cricket staying a truly popular sport? With cable television, the Internet, malls and other attractions competing for our attention and coveting our potential experiences, the traditional picture of cricket being played on every street on public holidays and bandhs, and otherwise every evening and every weekend in increasingly anachronistic in India.
With increasing wealth, increasing supervision and structured activities like coaching classes and music lessons confront children earlier in life than they used to. When I think back to my childhood, I remember being left to my own devices and gravitating towards cricket with other kids my age who were similarly left to their own devices much of the time. Younger kids would join in through the osmotic alchemy of peer pressure, free time and the clear evidence of fun. Cricket was just one of the games we played.
In a world in which someone or the other is constantly trying to make a profit out of both our work and our leisure, is there still space for cricket? The question of whether or not cricket will take root in America leads me to the far more troubling question about the fate of the sport in the cricket-playing world.
Perhaps that’s why the dumbing down of the sport in T20 does not bother people as much as it otherwise would. When we played cricket as children, we would argue endlessly about lines and lengths and footwork and field placings and the parts of our “pitch” which used to be a narrow tar road (which crossed from cover to square leg on a goodish length). Just like Sunil Gavaskar and his friends did in the chawl in Chikhalwadi where he grew up a long generation before us. Three hours would go by in the blink of an eye and it never even occurred to us that cricket in any form could ever be boring. In the IPL, they feel the need to have cheerleaders and lively film music and movie stars and a game which is dumb and short because otherwise it would be too complicated and too long for the people watching it.
Which of these are we thinking of sending to America?
(This article has been republished to rectify factual inaccuracies due to inadvertent editing errors. thREAD regrets any wrong impressions formed as a result.)
