Brave New Pitch by Samir Chopra

Author:Samir Chopra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperSport
Published: 2011-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Cricket and Media

One-day cricket turned India into a cricketing superpower. This oft-made statement needs slight qualification. First, India became an economic force to reckon with in cricket before it became a genuinely sporting one. Second, it was the media that really did it; more specifically, satellite television, whose twenty-four hour sports channels thrived on a steady diet of limited-overs cricket—first of the fifty-over variety and lately Twenty20—and helped create the world’s biggest market for cricket (Test cricket took a back seat—a five-Test series is now virtually unknown in India). Lastly, if the success of ESPN and the NBA is plausibly analysed as driven by Michael Jordan’s career, then Sachin Tendulkar, the Star Network and modern Indian cricket have had a similar symbiotic relationship, worthy of commemoration in the annals of media studies, and fully deserving of the gallons of ink that might be spilled on it by scholars of cricket.

Satellite television also made possible telecasts of overseas games, and not just those that featured India. Indian youngsters playing cricket in the streets and gallis so beloved of photographers and Coke commercial-makers, now suddenly found a species of game not seen before. This had many far-reaching effects: some sacred idols were carefully dismantled as Indian fans, used to lionizing international players, were exposed to extensive coverage of their actions and words, thus displaying imperfections and foibles in those previously imagined perfect; it also built other ones, for it enhanced the celebrity status of cricketers and turned them into entertainers and pitchmen. Indian youngsters aped the mannerisms and modes of behaviour of their heroes and sometimes villains. They began to internalize the aspirations linked with the achievements now visible, day and night, in their living rooms. At least some of the change of the demeanour of the Indian cricketer and the Indian fan, much commented on by opponents, whether on cricket teams or in Internet-argument forums, finds its origin in their exposure to a world of cricket made available by satellite television’s plentiful offerings.

But most importantly, the satellite and one-day international era reinforced a role long played by television in the modern age of cricket: the financial puppeteer.

The Modern Master

Cricket has flirted with insolvency in the past; when Jagmohan Dalmiya took over as ICC President in 1997, its coffers could only cough up some $30,000,1 but his rapid wheeling and dealing, entrepreneurial acumen, and cricket’s television audience, the majority of which is resident in India, assures its present flirting-with-the-billions prosperity. This economic revolution, kicked off by Dalmiya and continued by Lalit Modi, ensures that the story of modern cricket is punctuated by media dollar signs as much as playing statistics. The litany of high-value deals, especially those made by the BCCI, is never-ending. The influence of the massive amounts paid for television rights ensures that a primary concern is the engineering of the spectacle to keep the money flowing in. Every single instance of Golden Goose Homicide alluded to this book—the over-scheduled one-day international, the length of the IPL season, and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.