The people’s cricket

Blame it on a marketing survey. In 2001, the England and Wales Cricket Board commissioned the biggest piece of market research in the game’s history. They were told cricket was ‘socially inaccessible’, and that there existed a vast swath of ‘cricket tolerators’ — those who didn’t hate the game yet didn’t attend matches. So the ECB decided to take cricket to them. Twenty20, which could be crammed in after work on a midsummer’s evening, was created in the summer of 2003.

The new game followed a traditional path: born in England, but perfected abroad. After India overcame its initial opposition, the country inexorably became the home of T20. A decade ago the Indian Premier League, the nation’s T20 domestic league, was launched, with matches at 8 p.m. every day, like an Indian soap opera. This was less a traditional sports league than an alliance between cricket and Bollywood, which provided many of the owners. Cricket, everyone knew, would never be the same again.

Ten years on, I visited India for this year’s IPL season. What I saw was a game that, far from being infantilised, is being taken more seriously. Broadcasters once focused so much on the cheerleaders and the Bollywood actors in the crowd that it was sometimes easy to forget you were actually watching cricket; now, more analytical commentary has been introduced to dissect complex strategies. Many coaches and players consider T20 more strategic than Test cricket, because there isn’t any time to recover from a mistake; they also report, sadly, that the IPL’s incessant parties have given way to professionalism. Bangalore have even ditched their cheerleaders: T20 no longer needs sex to sell it. The cricket itself does the job nicely.