Cricket telecast: What about the fans?

I read the news about the recent award for TV rights by the Board of Control for Cricket in India with mild disappointment and some concern. Not, you understand, because of any altruistic worries over whether the losing bidders were given a fair deal or not -- that is now for the courts to decide.

No, the feelings were partly selfish. I was rather looking forward to the certain, unadorned excellence of the knowledgeable ESPN-Star commentary team over the uncertain offering of Zee's impending sports channels. Overall, I couldn't help thinking that the needs of genuine sports fans are accorded the last priority when the contract for TV rights are awarded.

Let me clarify that there is nothing inherently wrong in awarding TV rights to the highest bidder. The BCCI is fully entitled to maximise its earnings from cricket viewership, just as all sports bodies do the world over.

The objection is a more complicated one. The upshot of such hyper-payouts for the benefit of broadcasting cricket matches is that TV channels are being forced to stretch and expand their viewer bases to attract advertising revenues.

By one estimate, hard-core cricket fans account for just 15 per cent of total viewership and are predominantly male.

Only an India-Pakistan one-dayer would attract a viewership of, say, 20 million homes out of a total TV-owning population of 80 million homes. So attracting the extra buck on a sustained basis requires luring newer audiences, like women or maybe the casual fan. The upshot of this is that the sport tends to get promoted in ways that may not always be desirable.

Signs of this have been noticeable in the jingoism that is becoming a far bigger element of cricket than ever before -- a point Ramachandra Guha talked of in his book A Corner of a Foreign Field.

He noted, for instance, the deafening silence with which Indian spectators in Bangalore greeted the delightful batting of Pakistan openers Saeed Anwar and Amir Sohail during the 1996 World Cup quarter-final between India and Pakistan.

To be fair, jingoism mostly takes the form of harmless, good-natured spectator antics for the benefit of the TV cameras. But the abandoned World Cup semi-final match between India and Sri Lanka in the same year at the Eden Gardens, Kolkata, was one example of the pointless extremes to which fervent and artificially induced nationalist feeling can take frustrated fans.

It would be unfair to heap the entire blame on advertisers and marketers for such developments. But the frenetically combative nature of advertising and marketing ahead of that World Cup and subsequent ones surely bears some responsibility -- and it is a trend that continues today.

Cricket, like any sport, is as much part of the entertainment business as, say, a popular film, and it follows that it will be promoted as such. SET-Max's Extraa Innings, the channel's high-profile pre-, mid-, and post-match programme during the 2003 World Cup, is one indication of the direction cricket promotion is taking.

Gimmicks such as a sartorially challenged hostess and tarot card readings by a New Age fortune teller expanded the audience base for cricket by 30 per cent and allowed Set Max, which paid Rs 1,250 crore (Rs 12.5 billion) for the rights, to sell 2,000 seconds of commercial time, in addition to the 5,000 seconds available during the match.

Certainly, the decidedly poor nature of the commentary and technical analysis was overlooked in the buzz generated by these admittedly controversial innovations.

The fallout of this, however, has been less than savoury. ESPN-Star's "Shaz and Waz" show, which was introduced soon after, is one potent example. Young ladies who appear to have a uniformly minimalist sartorial outlook are "selected" by the viewing audience and asked a series of remarkably vacuous questions by Ravi Shastry and Wasim Akram.

Both are acknowledged experts of the game; do they really need to cast themselves publicly in the playboy mould? I am not sure if this is the kind of message that should be conveyed to children who form a fairly large section of the cricket-viewing audience.

There are scores of ways of adding sex appeal and glamour to sport without resorting to the risqué or the tasteless. I would point to John Dykes's presentation of soccer shows on ESPN-Star as an outstanding example of how this can be achieved by leveraging deep knowledge with a sense of humour and fun.

As it starts conceptualising its sports channel, this would be a better example for Zee to emulate than "Extraa Innings" or "Shaz and Waz", which appear to have become benchmarks.