Satellite television and the neutral cricket encounter

Living in the US has always meant looking homeward for cricket. Thanks to a steady improvement in my cricket watching lot here due to broadband streaming, matters are not quite as desperate as they used to be till a few years ago, when every trip to India was to be evaluated on the basis of just how much live cricket it had afforded. Every time I return to India to find a true cornucopia of cricket on multiple channels (some now in 'High Definition'), I am reminded again, of just what a long way we've come, baby. And nothing quite marks that journey like the presence of the 'neutral' cricketing encounter on Indian television sets.

In 1993, soon after journeying to India for an extended vacation, I found, while perusing the newspaper with my morning cuppa, a listing that scarcely seemed credible: a live telecast of a Pakistan-West Indies encounter. I stared at the unambiguous lettering with some disbelief.

A few days later, I was watching Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis bowling live to Desmond Haynes and Brian Lara at Port of Spain in the first Test of the 1993 series. To say that this was a cricketing feast would be a severe understatement. For as long as I had lived in India, the live telecast from overseas had been a rare treat. The India-Pakistan 1978 series had been the first one in my living memory. After that, it had been the semi-finals and finals of the 1983 World Cup, the one-day internationals from Sharjah, Australia and England during 1985-86.

Other than the Pakistan Tests of 1978, I had never seen a Test involving India, played overseas, being broadcast live back to India, until I left for the US in 1987. And I had certainly never seen any 'neutral' cricket encounter, certainly not a Test, being beamed back live.

But here it was, a golden benefaction, a sprinkling of manna upon the unworthy. I could finally see Akram and Younis bowling in tandem to Haynes, Lara, Richardson and Hooper; Port of Spain was no longer just a name or a picture in a book, it became a real place, populated by cricketing nations, whose exploits I had resigned myself to reading about, whose skills I had thought I would only see exercised against India.

And then a little later that summer, second servings of dessert were handed out. The Ashes was on. And yet again, for those of us raised on the mythology of the Anglo-Australian encounter as the pinnacle of cricket, to think two-hour highlights would be made available on the morning immediately after the day's play was to ascend into the realm of the scarcely believable.

Satellite television made available the neutral cricketing encounter, one that allowed a particular kind of detached cricket consumption (not too detached, mind you, for one still had favourites), one perhaps more permissive of rational evaluation of cricketing skills and abilities. At times it came as a relief to be not subjected to the tensions of watching India play; at yet others, one was grateful for the opportunity it afforded to see a different mix of cricket skills (perhaps two pace-dominated teams going at each other), sometimes in environments I wouldn't have expected (Akram on Indian and Pakistani pitches was fine, but what did he look like bowling in England, Australia or the West Indies?). The cliché about having one's cricketing horizons broadened was applicable here, methinks.

For those that grew up with satellite television in India, the neutral cricketing encounter is no novelty. That's as it should be. The cricket field affords plenty of space for the display of aspirations and skill; to have one's exposure to the varieties of those aspirations and skills narrowed by our national boundaries severely limits the educational possibilities of the game. It also exposes to the contours of the many, storied, cricketing rivalries that make up the cricketing world - Pakistan-England, Australia-New Zealand, England-West Indies - each with a unique history, populated by characters whose feats take on a different hue against the backdrop that the rivalry provides.

The 'neutral' cricket encounter permits a travel to a land beyond one's one own narrow, possibly parochial horizons. Saturation by cricket on the satellite channel is a complaint we can afford to make now, but we'd do well to remember just how limited our view of the cricket world once was, even with the imaginative possibilities of the radio and the library at our disposal.