Portfolio diversification

With Bangladesh defeating Bermuda on Sunday, the worst fears of Indian cricket fans have come to pass. What seemed like another month's worth of excuses for doing nothing other than watching cricket, talking about it and dozing off when doing neither has just evaporated. Several hundred million people are, all of a sudden, confronted with the challenge of finding constructive things to do with their time for the next four weeks. But, like most challenges, this also provides an opportunity, one which should be grasped with both hands. After years of abject slavery to the more down-than-up trajectory of cricket, a game that seems to be caught in swirls of controversy over match-fixing, dubious deal-making and now murder, the time has clearly come to push the game to the edges of the collective attention and find a healthy mix of other things with which to occupy the mind. The country may have crashed out of the World Cup, but stands to gain from a restoration of a sense of proportion about success and failure.

India's growing stature in the world has nothing at all to do with its cricket ratings""any more than its hockey ratings, to mention another sport that has gone into long-term decline because of sustained mismanagement. Solid and dependable macro-economic performance and a high potential for sustaining the current growth rate are a combination. Why should these considerations, rather than the cricket team's performance against Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, not be a source of national pride and self-satisfaction? Granted that these indicators are somewhat intangible and do not have the gut-wrenching impact of the winning runs being scored with a six or the last wicket falling in an "oh! so close" run chase, but they have a far greater impact on people's quality of life and the prospects for its improvement.

If most people find it difficult to substitute GDP growth numbers or the Sensex for sporting performance as a barometer of national self-esteem, surely there are legitimate alternatives to cricket. The country should not be so starved of other sports heroes that it has to indulge in national breast-beating every time another international sports meet ends with no athletic golds, and mass hysteria when a young woman tennis player is briefly ranked 32nd in the world. Chess is not a spectator sport, so there may be no spin-off benefits from Viswanathan Anand's continuing exploits, but golf has TV potential""with Jeev Milkha Singh becoming the first Indian to feature in the Augusta Masters next month. The problem with obsessive cricket is that nobody bothers to watch anything else, so there is no space for anything else to grow. Well, if enough people are disgusted enough with the entertainment and emotional returns from watching one-day cricket, the opportunity is clearly at hand for a sports entrepreneur to grab some of that attention. The Premier Hockey League is a brave attempt to get people to watch something other than cricket and, having been first off the blocks, could turn out to be a beneficiary of the early exit from the World Cup. Realistically speaking, though, it is going to need a combined effort from the commercial, athletic and broadcasting components, not to mention a fair amount of lead time, to translate the opportunity into a viable business model. However, there is no question that the Indian cricket team's decline presents an opportunity.