Mar 24, 2003 02:33 PM
1808 Views
(Updated Mar 24, 2003 03:32 PM)
I am not big sports fan and hence I am an rank outsider on this topic whenever conversations land up in this zone (last month was practically tormentous for me, when every second line had something to do with cricket or affiliated agencies aka MANDIRA BEDI)
A few things that caught my attention
- Cricket is an foreign game which we have adopted as ours, and it is paid for by Indians and watched by Indians. the other foreign teams play a side role like in a Hindi movie, have a few firangs here and there
I have some statistics for you here, Page 7 of the ET on 24th March 2003 carries these startling facts
Total Global audience for cricket :
''India's population of close to 1.1 billion is more than twice the population of all other world cup competitors put together, which is just over 500 million. Take out Pakistan and Bangladesh and the remaining countries have a population of no more than 240 million, less than a quarter of India's.''
''INDIA COULD ACCOUNT FOR 85% OF AD REVENUES''
''South AFrican Airlines flies 10 extra additional flights from India for the Cup''
Also we heard the ICC chairman state in his presentation that two channels carried the cup live Sony in India and Channel 9 in Australia, which leads us exclusively to the fact that for the rest of the world cricket is a non starter.
Cricket is the national game of Australia and obviously rewarded with a live telecast, whereas in India it is the actual ground reality.
Even where it was originated in England, it has lost its importance to Football. As the game is associated with the classes and football is a game for the masses.
the chief sponsors for the world cup were :
Pepsi (which has a massive operation in India, the only market apart from Chile or some other south American country where its sales exceed that of Coca-Cola)
LG (The fastest growing MNC brand in India for the past three - four years and BTW Koreans don’t play cricket, atleast not yet)
Hero Honda (No questions)
- India team that won in 1983 were underdogs in the tournament and did not have a single sponsorship deal.
That gave them that extra bit to go out and create magic.
Unlike now, where even before the games could begin we had litigation’s galore on the issue of the green stuff.
How can you call this an amateur sport? with so much riding on the backs of our guys in blue
To conclude, I am in no way belittling the game and the players. I think it is a great achievement to go out and achieve something. But at the same time we should not do it at the cost of other sports and the government needs to be level headed enough to understand this and also we as erudite consumers should reject such blatant commercialization of the sport.
I agree with what a fellow reviewer of mine had stated in her review, that atleast one good thing about the game is that we came together as a nation and cheered our boys forgetting our differences.
