Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: BCCI

  • A stage-managed World Cup

    I’m glad the ICC Cricket World Cup ended the way it did, with good cricket on show. I’m disappointed that India lost but, to echo Sunil Gavaskar at the post-match show, I’m glad it was only to a better team. But during the World Cup itself, there were many signs that it was stage-managed in ways that left an off-putting aftertaste, like a mix of jingoism, political interference, and flashiness. The following is a short list of examples.

    1. Sundays for India: Sundays were reserved for India versus X games, whereas other teams’ games happened on the other days. The BCCI did this presumably to ensure the stadiums for the India games were full, at the expense of half or mostly empty stadiums for games featuring other teams. This is not a good look. In fact, if the BCCI wanted to maximise revenue, it could have scheduled the India games on weekdays, since people will have been willing to plan around the occasion and come to the stadium anyway, and use the Sunday games to showcase teams that won’t tour India in the foreseeable future, like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Netherlands. That could have been a win-win.

    2. Tickets hard to get: Even before the tournament began, fans were neither able to access nor buy tickets for various matches: the former because of glitches in the booking system, including showing a stadium as being full when it actually wasn’t and outright server crashes, and the latter because the BCCI vouchsafed a significant chunk of tickets at stadiums for “sponsors, commercial partners, guests of both the ICC and the Indian board” and also “requested that states release as many tickets as possible meant otherwise for the member clubs, affiliated units, sponsors, former cricketers, life members, police, local government officials, which usually consumes a significant chunk of tickets for both international and IPL matches,” per ESPN Cricinfo.

    3. Police presence: On Twitter, many of those who visited stadiums around the country reported police presence in the seating area, with some personnel taking away posters and placards supporting Pakistan (when the team was playing). Such acts of nationalism pushing the cricket back annulls the principal joy of sport and defeats the purpose of cricket being played in front of such large crowds. The spectating experience was also probably diminished by unreasonable restrictions on what people could take with them (including water bottles).

    4. Cauldrons of nationalism: Australia captain Pat Cummins said before the final that he was looking forward to silencing a crowd of 100,000 people – but the adrenaline it invoked slowly but surely settled into shame. Why would a stadium of 100,000 people who claim to be there to watch a game of cricket fall silent? Australia and India are both great ODI teams and their clash could only produce great cricket, which is always worthy of cheer. But the Narendra Modi Stadium did fall silent, as if the spectators were there only to watch India win. There wasn’t a peep when Travis Head reached his century. Such silence befell many other stadiums through the tournament, especially when “jai shree Ram”s weren’t also ringing out.

    5. Symbols and glam: The World Cup was, on screens, occupied with glam. The broadcaster’s cameras in all games, but especially during the final, kept focusing on the faces of film stars in the stands when they weren’t trained on the cricketers. It became kind of toxic together with – in this order – the Air Force jets’ fly past (reminiscent of nationalism’s foundational ties with sports as well as military might), the stadium-wide silence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promised presence that turned into an absence around the same time India’s defence started to go downhill, and, beyond the field, many being unaware of knowing how to lose with grace.

  • Dream11: How hard should we work to play cricket for India?

    The TV ads for the fantasy cricket app Dream11 seem objectionable, to my mind. Thus far, I’ve seen three high-profile players of the Indian men’s cricket team in these ads: Rohit Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan and Jasprit Bumrah (there may be others). Each player stars in a version of the ad in which the ad summarily chronicles their childhood pursuits of becoming a professional cricketer. Dhawan’s and Sharma’s ads both extol lots of hard work and commitment to the demands of the sport, as does Bumrah’s ad but I think to a lesser extent.

    What the ads fail to mention is that India is a country of 717 million men (2020) but for all of whom there is only one men’s cricket team. We’ll obviously need to subtract those younger than 18 years and older than 40 years, but assuming a highly conservative estimate that men of the ‘admissible’ age make up only 10% of the total, we are still left with 71.7 million men. Consider New Zealand, on the other hand, which had almost 250,000 men in 2020 – including those on either side of the 18-40 group – and still fielded a cricket team among the world’s best in that year.

    Simple logic dictates that by virtue of having a larger pool of talent to pick from, the Indian men’s cricket team should be orders of magnitude better than those fielded by other countries – and simple logic is clearly wrong. The exploits of the Indian men’s cricket team have demonstrated, repeatedly, that if you put 11 sufficiently talented and qualified players together, train them, and give them the resources and the opportunities to get better, they will get better. And the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has the money, the political heft and talent pool to achieve this – but it won’t.

    Instead, by considering only 11 (or 15, 21 or whatever) players at a time, the BCCI has created a hyper-competitive environment that is conducive neither to the fair selection of cricketing talent at the bottom rungs nor the selection and retention of talented players at the highest level. The abundance of talent only forces players to be in form at all times – or in excellent form sometimes – under threat of being replaced, even as the hierarchy of contracts with the BCCI tapers rapidly towards the top, squeezing more and more resources into fewer and fewer players, and ultimately leaves more for itself. The consequent demand for an intense physical regimen will in turn privilege richer players over poorer ones.

    As such, the BCCI has been administering an unjust model of cricket in India, and which companies like Dream11 are glamourising in uncritical fashion. Dhawan’s Dream11 ad – embedded above – concludes with the man himself saying that he plays for India because he dared to dream that big, in effect saying those who don’t make it didn’t because they didn’t dream, because it’s their fault, because dreaming is all it takes. The inequitable nature of this model only further undermines the knee that the Indian men’s cricket team took ahead of their game against Pakistan on October 24, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement – although we must admit there wasn’t much left to undermine.

    Given India’s population and the popularity of cricket around the country, it should by all means field 10 teams – maybe even 30, one for each state. Uttar Pradesh’s population alone is 40x that of New Zealand, and to echo Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, making better use of so much talent will always be a better idea than to coerce people to reproduce less. In the same vein, brands like Dream11 should stop glorifying the sort of backbreaking work required to break into the top 11. Doing so only glorifies the absurdity of rigging a system to produce only 11 men (or 11 women, for that matter) and then claiming this team is better than every other combination of 11 people drawn from a base of 71.7 million (or 67.6 million).

    By the way, that’s 5.97 x 1028 possible combinations without repetition.