In the past, state-owned Doordarshan used to co-opt broadcasts of cricket tournaments expensively acquired by private channels by claiming that such events were of “national importance”. That argument, commercially questionable as it was, will cease to hold if the recent TV ratings for the ICC Champions Trophy are anything to go by. This is not a new trend. Five years ago, an India-Pakistan one-day international (ODI) match used to get ratings of 12-plus. In comparison, the last dozen ODIs involving India received an average match rating of under 3.0, while the recent India-Pakistan ODI in the ICC Champions Trophy generated an average match rating of no more than 2.8. Compared to this, a Twenty20 format cricket match generates average match ratings of over 5.0. Still, the fact is that ratings for matches in the second edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) Twenty20 tournament—the format that was supposed to have revived interest in the sport—were significantly lower than the first, and suggest that cricket is losing its audience faster than might have been expected.
Few should mourn this decline, especially if the space vacated by this sport is replaced by support (from fans, commercial sponsors and the government) to other sports. Cricket is way too time-consuming to suit the demands of a 21st century economy. The growing productivity demands of a globalising India, the biggest audience for the sport, have already ensured the decline of the five-day game. The 50-over one-day matches were seen for a while as a solution, but they too have lost their appeal as spectators find less and less time to spare for the glut of tournaments. Twenty20, a six-hour version, has emerged as a novelty and only slowed the decline. Most other sports—barring baseball, which the T20 format resembles, and golf—consume a third of that time. A game of soccer, the world’s largest sport in terms of viewership (a staggering cumulative total of 26 billion for the last World Cup), is about two hours long. Only epic tennis matches run into six hours, most conclude in two or three. Hockey, the sport in which India neglectfully ceded its supremacy, takes about 80 minutes. Even a Formula 1 race takes no more than an hour-and-a-half. Track and field, badminton, swimming and even chess are all activities that have more to say for themselves.
Nothing probably represents the wasteful nature of cricket than the soaring food prices even as India’s agriculture minister takes time out to fulfil his duties as chief of India’s cricket board. But the most compelling reason to celebrate the decline of cricket is economic. It is, by its nature, an elitist game. The cost of the basic equipment alone precludes poorer people from participating, unlike soccer where Brazilian handymen and British dockworkers can legitimately dream of becoming billionaires by their thirties if they have a talent for kicking a leather ball. Cricket’s elitism does little to foster the kind of healthy eco-system that soccer and basketball can create. Successful soccer clubs operating on free-market principles are the equivalents of mid-size companies with direct and indirect job-creating potential—from footballers and managers to coaching staff, club staff and outsourcing opportunities for merchandise that trickle down to Tirupur in India and Shenzhen in China. Sports commentators celebrate the emergence of small town boys like Mahendra Singh Dhoni on the cricket scene, but their number is tiny and hardly transformative. In soccer, the potential runs into thousands. For a country that is worried about its aam admi, it is worth wondering whether the semi-official importance accorded to cricket makes sense anymore.
