The Cricket World Cup has returned to the Commonwealth's television screens. It has been accompanied by the usual breathless commercial hype. Today's match between India and Pakistan will have the second-largest audience for a cricket match ever, it has been claimed. The number of brands lining up to advertise (70), the price of an advertisement spot (Rs 25 lakh), the number of tourists in Adelaide where the match will be played (60,000), the price of tickets (Rs 3,500 to Rs 36,000) - all these numbers have been trotted out, in an attempt to remind the vast cricket audience of the excitement that is normally supposed to accompany a World Cup.
And yet it is difficult to escape the sense that, this time, there is no sustained build-up of excitement that usually accompanies a World Cup. That is an organic phenomenon, one which is difficult to control. It is difficult to quantify buzz. But, say, a census of advertisements from brands that are not official sponsors but that still somehow manage to work cricket or the Indian team or the Cup itself into their narrative, would probably yield many fewer positive results in 2015 than in 2011 or 2007. This is matched by the paucity, in comparison to previous Cups, of visible markers of an ongoing tournament in India's metropolitan cities. Restaurants are not advertising World Cup specials in the same numbers; there are relatively fewer hoardings and billboards expressing excitement. And, of course, in regular conversations or on social media the World Cup does not quite feature to the same extent that it should - though there is no doubt that Twitter and Facebook will explode for the duration of the India-Pakistan match, at least. (AN EPIC BATTLE TO BRING INDIA, PAKISTAN TO A HALT)
It is impossible to isolate a single reason for this. Of course, there is the general fact that the uniqueness that the World Cup once held, as the sole tournament of its nature, is now lost. In the days of the Prudential and Reliance Cups, such tournaments were rare spectacles. But one-day tournaments have become increasingly common. And then there are the troubles with the format itself. A good number of viewers in India, a young country, will have seen many times as much Twenty20 cricket as they will have one-day cricket. For them, perhaps, cricket is actually a 40-over game, and one-day cricket is viewed as the "longer form", as slow in the way that generations brought up on one-day cricket thought of Tests. Twenty20's popularity cannot help but cast the greatest of one-day tournaments into the shade, somewhat. The frenzied hype that surrounds the Indian Premier League every year is perhaps the best reminder of what the build-up to World Cups used to be like. Unquestionably, the IPL has taken away a bit of the World Cup's halo.
And then there is the inevitable reflection that a certain proportion of the World Cup's visibility will depend upon the expectations and demands from the local team. And those are very different in 2015 than they were in 2011, in 2007 or in 2003. That is what finally winning the Cup after a gap of almost three decades will do. In 2003 or 2007 the idea that the Indian team was close to the pinnacle of world cricket, perhaps the best in the world, felt like a novel idea. It no longer does; the prospect of winning no longer has the power to excite the way it did earlier. And, frankly, few expect the Indian team to win anyway. Winning abroad is a different matter from winning on the flat tracks of the subcontinent - and the variable bounce of Australia has brought down the Indian team more often than not. The India-Pakistan encounter will be accompanied with all the usual jingoistic bluster. But other than that, the World Cup does not look at the moment like it is winning hearts and minds, at least in India.
