The Economist: Cricket, lovely cricket
LALIT MODI might have written the script himself. Tense to the end, the match was not settled until the stroke of midnight and the last ball. Lakshmipathy Balaji, of the Chennai Super Kings, bowled it: Sohail Tanvir, of the Rajasthan Royals, hit it through midwicket for one run. And with that Rajasthan won the final of the inaugural Indian Premier League (IPL).
No follower of cricket needs to be told who Mr Modi is. As vice-president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the national governing body, he conceived and now runs the IPL. The sudden arrival and apparent success of the new league has shaken cricket from top to bottom. It is the most vivid illustration in sport of the shift in the global economy from rich countries to the emerging world.
The IPL is bright and brash, mixing India’s great sporting passion and Bollywood’s glamour, topped with lashings of money. The fun starts with the format: “Twenty20”, a short version of cricket in which each team bowls 20 overs (sets of six balls). Matches last three hours or so, about as long as a baseball game—just right for an evening’s entertainment. By contrast, international Test matches, the purist’s favourite form, can take five days....
“I was very sceptical about whether it would succeed,” says Ramachandra Guha, a historian and author of “A Corner of a Foreign Field”, a social history of the game in India. “I don’t much care about it as a form of cricket, but as a business model it’s turned out better than expected.” Certainly the league, screened every evening in a prime slot at 8pm, pulled in viewers, with women as well as men watching. In a survey carried out in franchise cities for the Economic Times, more than one-tenth of respondents said that they had cut back on going to see films or eating out (the main alternatives in Indian cities to a night in front of the television) in order to watch the IPL. Cinema-going in Mohali was reckoned to be down by almost half....
Innovation, then, seems to be winning the fight with tradition. In the battle of new powers and old, the new—represented by India—is also coming out on top. India has hundreds of millions of cricket lovers, far more than any other country. As their purchasing power grows, so does their value as television [and online & mobile] viewers. And that provides the wherewithal to pay cricketers more than they have ever been paid before.
It's no wonder why we believe our involvement with the IPL, BCCI and Indian cricket is such an incredible opportunity.
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