Frail fodder

Early in the morning, I switch on the TV to find CNN-IBN’s sports section diverting all its attention on Baichung Bhutia, India’s football icon/idol, having missed an exhibition match in favour of attending a celebrity dance show which he also happened to win. I wondered why such a prolific news channel was spending hours together trying to get every scrap of worthless information on the screen – information that somehow concerned Bhutia’s personal life as well. I was also surprised to see a live interview running simultaneously, with the host firing question after question at the poor footballer as to why he decided to take some time off for himself in the middle of a season that didn’t have more than a few league games in the offing.

Dhoni on Times Now

The same thing happened last week when India lost their quarter-finals berth in the ICC T20 World Cup being held in England. Of course, being defenders of the title from the tournament’s debut in 2008, the expectations from the team was high. However, to many, a loss was expected somewhere down the line because the IPL T20 league games had only just finished and many, if not all, of the team players were under considerable stress and fatigue. Once India lost the crucial game to England, both Times Now and CNN-IBN became rife with questions of whether Dhoni (the captain) should be replaced, and how the Indian team was slipping, and how this was wrong and how that was wrong. There are two aberrations I see here. The first is that I’m 100% sure that if we’d won the game with England, Dhoni would have entered his “Poster Boy of India” Phase II and the media persons would have jumped around carrying his image on their heads. And secondly, having spent valuable hours scrounging for information that will (inevitably) soon be forgotten, I’m only led to believe these news channels will popularise anything to make money.

(And before I leave you, there’s another small thing I’d like to bring to light. I, rather we all, learnt that there was a women’s T20 World Cup going on. This came to light only when the men’s tourney showed no signs of progress. Is it that these news channels go solely after the money? Or is it that these news channels are allowed to assume what the viewer wants or does not want to see?)

When cricket lost

CSK’s victory march has been well plotted over the last few days, with their successive toppling of the Royals (Rajasthan), Chargers (AP), Daredevils (Delhi) and Kings Eleven (Punjab) allowing them to jump to the top of the standings table aided solely by their solid run rates. As with the 2008 season, MS Dhoni, the captain of India’s international cricket team, is leading the Super Kings. The team is owned as a franchise by India Cements, and was known in early 2008 for their generous bids for recruiting Dhoni and English all-rounder Andrew Flintoff into the side. When the Indian Premier League was held in India last time round, the burgeoning expectations of the local crowd itself allowed for the game (a shortened version of the one-dayers) to assume an elevated position in the sporting calendar of the nation. Money people never knew existed exchanged hands as elaborate auctions were setup for “purchasing” sportsmen. The country’s then prevalent cricket scenario suddenly assumed the face of a slave market, wherein players were being pushed around by those with the fatter wallets, fortunately or unfortunately being tied to their respective teams by a contract that existed solely on paper, bound to serve just for the money rather than for the love of the game.

The goal of the IPL, so said the authorities, was to “expose the local cricketer to international competition” [paraphrased]. The Twenty20 format was chosen just so the tournament could be done with quickly enough, at the same time ensuring that money was not lost anywhere in between – money that was present in the one-dayers as advertisements. As the popularity of the Twenty20 grew, so did that of the IPL. People no longer seemed patient enough to wait for the results of a 5-day Test match. Although it seems too late to appeal to them that there’s a reason it was called a “Test”, one apparently cannot resist quick results. The crowd has become fonder of the effects rather than the cause itself; for the players on the ground, it is the game that matters, the sportsmanship that they found exhilarating as youngsters. But for the man, woman and child behind the fence, all of this is unpalatable, ergo unfathomable, ergo impossible. When they could have sit at home and watched everything play out on the television, why come to the stadium? Does it make a difference?