The biggest threat to Indian cricket

I was quite glad when Mukul Kesavan shifted the focus of the discussion, with the last post, from the Indian cricket team to Indian cricket. In the long run, Indian cricket has greater problems than whether the Dravid-Chappell duo is better than the Ganguly-Wright duo. So here's a larger question I'd like to raise: Will cricket survive in India, and if so, in what form?

Why do I raise the issue of cricket's survival before you? After all, isn't the game thriving in the subcontinent? Well, yes, at the moment. But my hypothesis is that the same process - one that I support wholeheartedly, by the way - that has made the subcontinent the commercial centre of cricket is the biggest threat to the game here: globalisation. Let me explain.

A couple of decades ago, Indians had just two options of entertainment: cricket and Bollywood. India's middle class was relatively small and subdued, and its purchasing power wasn't too great. So it wasn't a commercial force in the world of cricket. This changed when India began to liberalise, however half-heartedly, in 1991, and one of the world's largest latent markets opened up to the world. The middle class burgeoned, as did the purchasing power of cricket fans across the country, and satellite television made cricket easy to commercialise. Everything came together well, and cricket in India became big money. All of that is oft-repeated and well documented.

But something else also began to happen, albiet more slowly and less visibly. The alternatives to cricket as entertainment increased. It wasn't just cricket and Bollywood anymore: there were a host of things to watch on satellite television, and many more places to hang out in one's free time. The implication of that is that when I watch a game of cricket today - whether it lasts five days or one - I ignore many more claimants to my time than I did two decades ago. The opportunity cost of my watching cricket goes up all the time.

(When it comes to playing cricket instead of just watching it, this could also explain why the best young cricketers today are coming from the smaller towns of India, not from the big cities. The big cities have developed more rapidly, and cricket faces much more competition for young people's time there than in small cities, which are still on an upward curve.)

So here's what I see happening in the next few years: as the country keeps developing and opening up (and I hope it does!), people will find more and more ways of spending their time. Cricket viewership will decline. This will especially affect Test cricket, but it will affect one-day cricket as well - who can spend eight to ten hours watching a mere game of cricket? (I remember Mukul making this point on a TV show as well.) This process could be exacerbated if India performs badly over an extended period of time, or stretched out if India has a couple of good years, but it is hard to see how it will halt. Revenues from cricket will go down. And all of this will be a darned good thing, because it will force the BCCI into action.

Today, when the game is lucrative by default, the BCCI has no incentive to reform itself and become more professional. It effectively has a monopoly over the game in India. But while the BCCI has no competition as far as administering the game is concerned, cricket itself does. And when that competition begins to affect the bottomline, the BCCI will react, for its own sake. That's when it will take measures to make the game thrive again. And what will those measures be?

The BCCI will look at cricket's biggest weakness - the long time that it takes to play a game of cricket and the costs it imposes on viewers - and conclude that a shorter form of the game is necessary to bring the crowds in again. It will promote Twenty20 cricket heavily. It might even bring in overseas players and try to create the kind of cricketing league Mukul had envisaged in this essay.

If enough people want to watch the longer forms of the game, they will not die out. I fancy this is far more likely to happen if at least one version of the game draws large audiences and big money. Even if Test cricket is no longer the "default form" of the game, as Mukul puts it, it has benefited from one-day cricket, in two ways. One, it has imbibed values from ODI cricket in terms of fitness, fielding, professionalism and aggression that have made it a better sport. Two, it has benefited from the collateral effect of the big money that one-day cricket has drawn in. The big brandnames created by ODIs also play Test cricket, and that does matter.

What do you think? Where do you think Indian cricket is headed? If you disagree with my hypothesis, then I'd be interested in knowing what kind of reforms you think Indian cricket needs, and where those reforms can realistically emanate from. Or do we have no say in this, and must it all be left to chance?