Collateral Longevity

It must have been sometime right at the beginning of the 1980s when a neighbour, who was the public relations head of a company called Nirlon, brought a couple of Indian national cricketers to his home for dinner. In pre-liberalisation India, there were not many companies that spent on sport, either by way of sponsoring or advertising that involved sportspersons. Nirlon was one of the few that did and that explains the neighbour’s association with cricketers. But what strikes me when I remember that episode is the absence of mania. No charged crowd thronged below the window. Sure, many in that building were excited but consider if Virat Kolhi were to come to a housing society in Mumbai today. I can’t even remember who came then, perhaps it included Sunil Gavaskar.

But you didn’t have to wait too long for the deification of Indian cricketers to begin. It came within a couple of years and the reason was the 1983 One Day International (ODI) World Cup victory. It is hard to imagine now a time when Indian hockey and cricket were almost neck-and-neck in popular appeal but that was how it was right up to 1983. But then hockey never won an Olympic gold after 1980 and, almost in tandem, there was 1983 for cricket followed by the Benson & Hedges World Championship two years later. It was the first time that most people in India heard of a car called Audi because Ravi Shastri won one in that tournament. This reversal of fortunes for hockey and cricket happened exactly as television, a new medium that would dominate Indian homes, took off.

Indians didn’t win much in anything in those days. We were avowedly third world underachievers but nevertheless with enormous national pride, perhaps an inheritance of energies let loose by the freedom movement. That pride desperately sought for something to be proud of; effect searching for cause. A Russian spacecraft taking an Indian astronaut as a passenger was for the same reason etched as a milestone. Except that, the victories of Indian cricket in the mid-1980s were altogether homegrown and delightfully unexpected, even if it would take a quarter of a century for us to be reliable world beaters. Then, a few sporadic achievements were enough to slake the thirst of India for new gods.

Test cricket was never crafted for the modern world. Think of the amount of time it asks of its viewer, five full working days. It also demands extensive patience because the rewards are occasional flourishes. It might be the holy grail of authenticity for cricketers but for the viewer it is an encounter of long spells of nothing happening. Half the time, Tests used to end without a decisive result, so you even ventured into it with very little expectation of any gratification. Test cricket belonged to an era of laidback unambitious men employed in undemanding professions with all the time in the world to watch one of the slowest moving games in the galaxy of sports. Does anyone know anyone who has sat through all five days of a Test match before a television? The moving image came with attention deficit to Indian homes. At least in the stadium, there were the atmospherics. Without them, the pleasures of long-distance viewing from Tests were limited. ODIs, on the other hand, seemed made for it. And when they started playing in the nights too, it was an evolutionary leap for the game’s commerce. As the time available for an Indian to give to cricket decreased further with the demands of a prospering economy, T20 was as natural an evolution as business travel moving from shipping to flight.

 

An advantage that India had in becoming the cricketing headquarters of the world is simply that only a handful of countries play the game. The International Cricket Council (ICC) has 12 full-time members at present but even they are not all taken seriously. Bangladesh could on a good day pull off an unexpected win but no one expects any miracles from Afghanistan, Ireland or Zimbabwe. What you are left with are eight nations. Becoming top three out of eight is achievable for all of them. The Chinese don’t play cricket, neither does the US. When Russia was a sport superpower, it didn’t play cricket either. The competition is tough among the handful that play cricket but the peak is a shorter climb for any country which did get cricket as part of its inheritance. The victories of cricket that triggered the Indian obsession with the game were always within the bounds of probability. It came at the right moment in history.

There was another factor for cricket’s dominance in India—the participation of businessmen in its administration. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is seen as a rotating cabal of power brokers but it had men who understood the value of a product and how to optimise it. This is elemental to the world of business. From Jagmohan Dalmiya to N Srinivasan, those who presided over the Board, understood the market and, also, had that unique ability Indian business needs of influencing government policies. The amounts that now come to Indian cricket by way of television rights were unimaginable a few decades ago. In the beginning of the 1990s, Doordarshan would ask for money to telecast each cricket match. In 2018, after an auction, the BCCI got Rs 6,000 crore, or Rs 60 crore for each game, for telecast rights. The BCCI managed to rake in so much that it couldn’t have let the money idle even if it wanted to. It flowed back into the game, created infrastructure, ventured into the interiors of the country. Cricket began as a rich man’s game. It moved gradually into the urban middle class post-Independence. It is only in recent times that small towns and villages took to it. They are now the catchment from where great players like Mahendra Singh Dhoni aspire for a career. Indian cricket administration’s resounding success gets swallowed up by the relentless power struggles within it. But you got an idea of how vital private enterprise has been to the game when the Supreme Court took over its administration and made a mess of it. It reminded you of how hockey began its descent after retired policemen became the ones to steer it into a new India and were left floundering negotiating it.

Test cricket is a little like literary fiction in the world of publishing. Not many read it but there is a dividend to the brand of the publishing house. Popular genre fiction, which brings in the money, subsidises literary fiction. Or auto companies like Honda or Mercedes when they make a Formula 1 car which has little to do with what keeps their real business going. In cricket, Tests ride on the back of ODIs and, increasingly now, on the T20 format with the Indian Premier League. Even in the nature of the game, it gives little to the shorter formats while its own character is changing with every passing year because of the reverse influence. Tests now often give a result because players who live by a win-or-lose mentality for much of the year aren’t able to switch back to a take-your-time, always-keep-the-ball-to-the-ground mode. Tests have become more entertaining but only as compared to the past. It is never going to be anything like a T20. As time goes, even 20 overs per side will become too much. There is a reason why the most popular sports in the world don’t go beyond a couple of hours. As cricket’s time period decreases, the idea of the Test becomes even more anachronistic.

It will still be viewed because there is a viewership for everything. There are people who can stay glued to a Formula 1 race and derive pleasure from what most would think is an endless circling of cars with the actual race crunched to encounters that are a few seconds long. But such an audience is extremely niche. That is the destination for Test cricket too. Perhaps it is already true. Its obsolescence, however, does not mean extinction because Test cricket is now removed from the factors that decide the life and death of a sport. Indian cricket learnt to adapt as a viable concern by taking on new forms and so long as it continues to do that, Test cricket will find collateral longevity.

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