The War against Shastrisms

Tired of tired commentary, fans are taking matters into their own hands

It’s not yet as fast as a tracer bullet, but the alternative cricket commentary movement is spreading. What started in the UK with Test Match Sofa has now reached India with www.pitchinvasion.in. Anupam Mukerji, who wrote the popular Fake IPL Player blog during IPL 2009, started the site during the current IPL. It does live commentary of the matches and has some interactive fun with its listeners. 

Alternative commentary is a movement against the tedium of mainstream commentary. Many listeners are bored of regulars like Ravi Shastri, Arun Lal and Sunil Gavaskar. The pitchinvasion tagline is, ‘Cricket commentary on TV left us with two options—suicide or Pitch Invasion. We chose the latter.’

At present, the number of listeners is not very high. “When we started off, I thought it would be a crazy wild fire. Things are more realistic now. We have an average of 1,700-2,000 listeners,” Mukerji says.

The site has also changed its approach. Initially, they thought their focus would be on humour. With time, they realised that people want interaction more than jokes.

“Our killer app is not humour or cricketing nuances. It is banter,” he says. “We have a Twitter page open during the matches, which leads to a range of conversations.” 

Nine people operate the site. During matches, two or three do the commentary. In the initial days, they worked from Mukerji’s house in Bangalore. But a sponsorship from Sprite helped them move to Timbre Media Studios, once the home of Worldspace radio.

According to Mukerji, the biggest hurdle is that the audience for internet commentary is limited in India. “Few Indians watch the match on TV and listen to commentary on the net,” he says. “In a typical Indian home, the computer is not even near a TV. This is perhaps why our international listeners have doubled.” Showing the match on pitchinvasion.in is out of the question. They do not have the rights. Mukerji is thinking of approaching Tata Sky. “If we get a medium like TV, we will have millions of listeners. I’m confident of that.”

Asked if teaming up with a big corporation would force them to be politically correct, he says, “Our DNA has to have irreverence. Else, we would have failed our objective.”

bantercricket commentary