The crowds at cricket stadiums are thinning by the day. Is it merely a passing phase or a sign of things to come, wonders Aabhas Sharma
The ongoing three-match Test series between West Indies and India was hyped as the one in which Sachin Tendulkar will complete his century of centuries — a hundred hundreds in international cricket. In any other time, thousands would have thronged the stadium, and then retold the story to friends, family, children and grandchildren — I was there when Tendulkar cut the ball, ran for the single and the whole stadium erupted. People distributed sweets on the streets and there were fireworks at night. At Delhi’s Ferozshah Kotla ground, where the first Test was played, only 9,000 (daily average) turned up to watch what could have been a historic match. Eighty per cent of the seats were vacant. There were no traffic jams or parking woes at the Business Standard office, which is a stone’s throw away from the ground, during the match.
As if on cue, Tendulkar didn’t score a hundred at Delhi. The statistical excitement was carried over to the second Test at the Eden Garden in Kolkata. On the first day, when Tendulkar came out to bat, there were 15,000 in the stadium that can seat over 60,000 spectators. Once Sachin got out, again without scoring a hundred, even those spectators got up and left. When the West Indies batsmen were on the crease, the crowd had thinned to around 1,000.
One of them was Gaurav Kajaria, 33, who imports chemicals in Kolkata. His earliest memory of a cricket match is when India beat West Indies in the epic Hero Cup final in 1993. Kajaria was also there when India beat Australia in 2001. What he saw last week at the Mecca of Indian cricket left him disillusioned. “The atmosphere was worse than a Ranji Trophy match.” Commentator Tony Greig said that Eden Garden “resembled a morgue”. Even Sourav Ganguly, former Indian cricket captain and the poster boy of Kolkata cricket, lamented the state of affairs. He was quoted saying, “It was sad to see an empty Eden Gardens. Something seriously needs to be done to get the crowd back.”
The only saving grace for the third and final test at the Wankhede stadium in Mumbai was that Tendulkar could hit the milestone here. The organisers even announced that they would gift him a hundred gold coins if he were to achieve the feat here. Daily tickets were priced at as low as Rs 50. Yet, there were few takers. Only 7,000 people got into the stadium. Day 3 saw crowds swell up to 20,000 with Tendulkar 35 short of the landmark. Next morning another 20,000 turned up but went disappointed. But then why should this surprise anybody. In 2008, when Tendulkar was close to 12,000 runs, a few hundred came to watch him play at Mohali. When South Africa came to India last year, the series was hyped as the battle for the number one team. But the first Test in Nagpur saw empty stands with official numbers stating only 4,000 people came. The just-concluded South Africa vs Australia second Test match at Johannesburg — a gripping affair and evenly poised going into the last day — too witnessed a minimal turnout.
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India, and the Indian subcontinent, may have become the new home of cricket, but there are fewer and fewer takers for the “purer”, though longer, form of the game. Test cricket is losing its appeal in the age of instant gratification. People are happy with the slam-bam of limited-over cricket; the protracted mind games, guile and slow pace of Test matches seem to be falling out of favour. “This is not the 1990s when you didn’t have anything else to do but watch a cricket match,” says Santosh Desai, CEO of Future Brands and a cricket fan. “People have other things to do and why will they go to a stadium knowing that the experience won’t be pleasant?”
Since September 2010, India has hosted Australia, New Zealand and West Indies for Test series. Not a single Test match, according to state associations, was packed to capacity. There are certain venues where historically crowds turn in less numbers, like Mohali. “It is more of a limited-over venue, yet we played Australia there,” says a former manager of the Indian team. The Board for Control of Cricket in India must ensure that crowds come to watch Test cricket, he adds.
Online ticketing sites like kyazoonga.com which do bookings for cricket matches too see very few people buying tickets. “We’ve sold very few online tickets for the India versus West Indies series,” says Neetu Bhatia, CEO, kyazoonga.com. Bookmyshow.com has tie-ups with the Indian Premier League teams, and says it gets a lot of traffic during these matches. “But there are very few takers for Tests, though during short forms the number does rise,” she adds.
Harsha Bhogle says that maybe if going to the cricket ground was made a pleasant experience, the crowds might turn up. Anyone going to watch a match at the Wankhede stadium will tell you that how parking is a nightmare. It’s the same story at the Chinnaswamy stadium in Chennai. The food is of poor quality, the toilets are filthy and there seems to be apathy from the officials towards rectifying it. “Fans have started to feel that there is such a thing called ‘too much cricket,” adds Kiran More, a former chairman of selectors. More believes that crowds will turn up if teams like South Africa, Australia or England came to India.
It is not just the Test matches which are suffering, though they seem to be affected the most. The India-England one day series saw stadiums half empty as well. And not just in stands, even the TV viewership was extremely low. According to TAM Sports, a television sports viewership tracker, the recent India versus England one-day series had an average rating of 3.07 — only this percentage of the cable TV homes tuned in. The viewership figures for IPL declined compared to the previous season. India’s tour of West Indies had ratings as low as 1.79.
A lot of purists believe that that advent of IPL and T20 has brought Test cricket to its current state. “You see IPL matches and they are played to packed houses because it guarantees entertainment. It’s more like a fun evening for families,” says a state cricket board official. “It is the marquee property of BCCI,” he adds. It appears like the average cricket fan is content watching the game on TV or following it online. If even the prospect of watching Tendulkar score a 100 doesn’t bring them to the stadium, then BCCI should be very worried about the future of the game.