Watching cricket in the USA is a scramble

It was recently reported that a deal between Neo Cricket and Comcast means that cricket will now be available on cable in the USA. This is exciting news, of course, but it prompted me to think about the trials and tribulations involved in getting to watch international cricket in the US, in the past.

When I left India to come to the USA for graduate studies in 1998, I had no idea when next I would be able to watch a cricket match live on television. In India of course, every high profile series from anywhere in the world is telecast live on cable. Happily for me though, Mick Jagger came to my rescue. His internet media company Jagged Internetworks had just begun covering international cricket, and I watched the sheer miracle of live video streaming of Sachin Tendulkar's 141 and 4/38 vs. Australia at Dhaka. It was the first cricket game I saw live since arriving in the US. I have never been more grateful for Mick Jagger than I was then, not even when I first heard “Ruby Tuesday”. I can still remember sitting all night in front of a high-end PC with three friends in an empty programming lab, turning the volume way up, and celebrating each and every Tendulkar boundary.

Watching cricket live was a novelty when I got here, but for those who got here before the world wide web (WWW) took off, just obtaining scores in real-time was difficult. There was obviously no Cricinfo or any of the other websites that provide live commentary and scorecards. Scores for high-profile games were obtained via internet relay chat (IRC), by asking someone in the chat room from somewhere in Asia, Australia, or England, who also happened to be watching the game. Scorecards for international matches were distributed via file transfer protocol (FTP) and Gopher in the years preceding the web browser. Scorecards for lower-profile domestic games could be obtained after the season was over, from someone who went back to India or Australia for a vacation.

In fact, it was some die-hard expats in the US, with their IRC and Gopher buddies, who started Cricinfo when the (WWW) took off. Thanks to these intrepid and ingenious cricket lovers, at least cricket news and scorecards - if not live telecasts - were now instantly available worldwide.

Live telecasts though, have remained hard to get. As of now, cricket is not telecast at all on cable here in the US, not live or recorded. The most popular sports in the US are football (American), baseball and basketball, in that order. Cricket wouldn't compare with these in terms of US viewership, of course. But - and I'm no expert on the economics of sports telecasts - would cricket not even be as viable a business proposition for the cable channels as some of the extreme or outdoor sports like, say, bass fishing?

Anyway, in this last decade, one was left to satellite television or internet streaming to catch live cricket. In both cases, one had to pay to purchase a package comprising a series or tournament, or some subset thereof. Not everyone has satellite television. Those who do, have either Dish Network or DirecTV. If a game was telecast on one of those, people who had the other were left out. Many series were actually available on neither, or the package was not worth the price quoted.

Some internet sites that stream live cricket are quite shady; not worth trusting your credit card and your computer with. Luckily highlights are usually available free online a day or two after a game. Thus in the days preceding any major cricket series or tournament, fans in the US made frantic enquiries and urgent arrangements, to be able to watch the game live. Where is the game available? What is the package structure? Can I watch only the Tests and not the one-day-internationals? How much does it cost? If you only had Dish Network, and it was being carried on DirecTV, you had to find a friend who had DirecTV, and was willing to buy the package.

I watched the 2000 ICC Knock Out tournament in Kenya with 20 others at a friend's small apartment. My wife and I watched Dinesh Mongia carve 159 off Zimbabwe, at the home of a team-mate, keeping his wife and two cranky Doberman Pinschers awake beyond midnight. I watched India fighting to save the 2002 Trent Bridge Test at my wife's uncle's home. I saw the finals of both the 1999 and 2003 World Cups at the homes of people whom I had not met before, and haven't met since. I had travelled out of town for work, during both the finals, and had to rely on friends of friends to watch the games. The thirst for cricket made a gregarious and outgoing person out of a nerd like me, if only for a few hours! I hope I remembered to thank my hosts.

In Chicago, I watched both India v Pakistan series of 2005 and 2006 at a restaurant on Devon Street, with my friend Sadiq Yusuf, one of the intrepid IRCers from the early 1990s, and an early contributor to Cricinfo. While I had my fill of cricket, he devoured humongous plates of biryani. Temperatures outside in January 2006 were around -25 degrees Celsius, but that didn't keep us from driving down to Devon Street. I even saw the 2009 Twenty20 World Cup over working lunches with my office colleagues, here in Seattle, since my employer agreed to telecast the cricket on the TV screens in the cafeteria.

Watching a game with a large group of friends is always entertaining. There are fearless predictions, spot-betting, and always a bit of banter between supporters of rival teams, or, uniquely with India, between fans of Rahul Dravid and Tendulkar. I recall one evening as Virender Sehwag and Dravid walked out to open for India against Pakistan, someone in the audience said: "I have come to watch Tendulkar bat." To which one wag replied: "Go away and come back day after tomorrow." Amazingly, Sehwag and Dravid put on 400 runs, and Tendulkar never got a chance to bat!

If one was lucky, the games were available on willow.tv, and one could watch them on one's own PC, in the comfort of one's home, with one's own family. Better still, you could hook up your PC to your big-screen television and watch, thus incurring the wrath of your wife for monopolising both. I have pleasant memories of watching both the 2000-01 and 2003-04 India vs. Australia series via willow.tv. But I still have bad memories of the 2002-03 India tour of New Zealand in which the two Test matches were over in two-and-a-half and two days respectively. Never mind that India lost, I was livid at the amount of money I lost, having paid for 10 days of cricket, and received four-and-a-half.

In the end, while cricket on cable here in the US is definitely welcome, we expats have made do even in its absence. More than made do, I have actually enjoyed every opportunity to watch cricket, sometimes with family and friends, and often in the company of total strangers.