Is it a coincidence that the recently concluded World Cup produced many more close encounters than the countless never-ending bilateral one-day tournaments do? Well the answer is fairly obvious. It was a World Cup. Even if a group stage match is not of much consequence, a loss hurts. And the media and the fans climb the captain’s back about how ‘the team is shaping up’ and how ‘this is probably the best chance of winning the World Cup’. Ravi Shastri is somewhere in the vicinity, pointing out how ‘the players should pull up their socks’ and how ‘a loss was just what the doctor ordered’. So if the ageing cricket experts didn’t make it clear enough by now, the recent results are now shoving the evidence down our throats. One-day cricket needs context to flourish.
Holding ridiculously long bilateral one-day tournaments after the World Cup will restore the situation back to its boring best, and we will once again start questioning the future of the one-day format. Domestic Twenty20 tournaments have been successful in garnering significant amounts of revenue for cricket boards, and so there is no need to hold 58 one-day matches between India and Sri Lanka every year under the excuse of generating revenue for ‘developing the game at the grass roots’, and then have the BCCI explain after a series defeat why India doesn’t have any fast bowlers that can keep a batsman rooted to the crease.
Imagine playing for your country. Imagine standing alongside your team-mates, not listening to but feeling your national anthem envelop your senses, with your fingers tinkling with anticipation as you wait to play an important match in the World Cup in front of a roaring crowd. Or imagine walking out to play yet another match against a team whose wicketkeeper you have come around to knowing better than your neighbour, with the series winner already determined, and two more matches to go before you can see your son whose face you can’t quite recall. Ask the English, they would know. You wouldn’t be surprised to see Andrew Strauss starting to hallucinate during a match one of these days and start stroking Daryl Harper’s head, softly singing ‘Sleep away, my angel’.
How many great one-day matches can be traced back to bilateral one day tournaments? Not many. How many times have you seen Munaf Patel throw himself to stop a boundary in one of those innumerable one-day matches against Sri Lanka? Well, that is an unlikely case even in a World Cup match. However, the point is, more matches will be close if more is at stake. If India play Pakistan after a gap of a year, with no injured players and the best eleven representing each country, the interest and revenue the match would generate would not be far behind the same achieved in a five-match series against the same team after having played them just three months ago.
Someone explain it to the managers and administrators analysing bar graphs and pie charts on their smart phones. I didn’t share a room with Dennis Lillee when he was playing the Ashes, but I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar he used to wake up with a spring in his step, his hands itching to get hold of the ball and bowl his heart out. And though I don’t share a room with Ashish Nehra either, I don’t think I would see him jumping around the room in the morning in anticipation to play yet another match against Sri Lanka.
We can’t only have the World Cup for one-day cricket, but we can certainly eliminate many redundant bilateral tournaments. The question of revenue generation is a ridiculous one. If you hold a 15 match one-day series between India and Australia in India, each and every one of those matches will generate a great deal of revenue, but that does not mean that we start doing that. If we would leave it to the businessmen cum administrators to decide the cricketing schedule, the cricketers’ sanity could be in trouble. Let the poor blokes get some rest.
Holding ridiculously long bilateral one-day tournaments after the World Cup will restore the situation back to its boring best, and we will once again start questioning the future of the one-day format. Domestic Twenty20 tournaments have been successful in garnering significant amounts of revenue for cricket boards, and so there is no need to hold 58 one-day matches between India and Sri Lanka every year under the excuse of generating revenue for ‘developing the game at the grass roots’, and then have the BCCI explain after a series defeat why India doesn’t have any fast bowlers that can keep a batsman rooted to the crease.
Imagine playing for your country. Imagine standing alongside your team-mates, not listening to but feeling your national anthem envelop your senses, with your fingers tinkling with anticipation as you wait to play an important match in the World Cup in front of a roaring crowd. Or imagine walking out to play yet another match against a team whose wicketkeeper you have come around to knowing better than your neighbour, with the series winner already determined, and two more matches to go before you can see your son whose face you can’t quite recall. Ask the English, they would know. You wouldn’t be surprised to see Andrew Strauss starting to hallucinate during a match one of these days and start stroking Daryl Harper’s head, softly singing ‘Sleep away, my angel’.
How many great one-day matches can be traced back to bilateral one day tournaments? Not many. How many times have you seen Munaf Patel throw himself to stop a boundary in one of those innumerable one-day matches against Sri Lanka? Well, that is an unlikely case even in a World Cup match. However, the point is, more matches will be close if more is at stake. If India play Pakistan after a gap of a year, with no injured players and the best eleven representing each country, the interest and revenue the match would generate would not be far behind the same achieved in a five-match series against the same team after having played them just three months ago.
Someone explain it to the managers and administrators analysing bar graphs and pie charts on their smart phones. I didn’t share a room with Dennis Lillee when he was playing the Ashes, but I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar he used to wake up with a spring in his step, his hands itching to get hold of the ball and bowl his heart out. And though I don’t share a room with Ashish Nehra either, I don’t think I would see him jumping around the room in the morning in anticipation to play yet another match against Sri Lanka.
We can’t only have the World Cup for one-day cricket, but we can certainly eliminate many redundant bilateral tournaments. The question of revenue generation is a ridiculous one. If you hold a 15 match one-day series between India and Australia in India, each and every one of those matches will generate a great deal of revenue, but that does not mean that we start doing that. If we would leave it to the businessmen cum administrators to decide the cricketing schedule, the cricketers’ sanity could be in trouble. Let the poor blokes get some rest.
