Rise of T20 cricket

Recently went through a talk by Harsha Bhogle on Ted, “The rise of cricket, the rise of India”. It spoke about the advent of T20 cricket in India. As have been his talks previously, this too was very insightful as well as intuitive. It gave example of a test match which was played on 3rd of March 1939 and ended on 14th of March, and it only ended because English cricketers had to move from Durban to Capetown to catch a ship. An English cricketer later said that another ½ an hour and we would have won. If anyone spoke of such a thing to todays generation, the immediate response could be are they insane to go on playing and who will watch such a game, but this was how cricket was played till of late.

The game moved on after few years and India started playing 50 over’s cricket. Accident happened and we won the world cup, so more 50 over’s cricket. Then the first T20 world Cup took place in South Africa and again an accident happened and India won the cup, so obviously the next things is more T20 cricket. Companies/ individual started getting interested too, they had money, but just needed something to convert billions to trillions, and gave rise to fast paced league cricket in India. So, this gave birth to the IPL. This had the feel of a movie which Indian population loves. 3 hour entertainment, Lots of music, dance, animosity, unfaithfulness, passion, stunning and lots and lots of drama, these proved a lot useful for the organizers to attract the population to this new baby.

Recently read in the paper that the IPL would be taxed something 300 crore. This billion dollar baby has risen as one of the fastest growing company and it has not only pulled up itself but also has fostered the growth of the country too. In forst season of IPL, an MI cricketer wanted to fly to West Indies to attend to his national cricketing duties. So, as most cricketers do they fly a couple of days in advance to reach the country and get acclimatized to the team. The MI management said no way this is going to happen, in two days you would play two matches and then a private jet flew him in the evening as soon as the match was over to West Indies. Next day this player was playing test for his country. The amount of money involved in this game and the things at stake can be understood from these simple things, yet not so common for a common man to assimilate.

Is this going to change the Indian culture or is it going to run into political benefits, as anything that has money in it attracts attention? I guess it would be difficult to talk about it or make any judgment so soon, but it has definitely changed the way of thinking and making money.