Cricket for dummies

Watching cricket used to be like a cup of tea in the morning: you knew what you were getting. Of late, it feels like someone threw in a few extra spoons of sugar. When ESPN-Star, a television channel avowedly committed to sports - unlike SETMax, a predominantly movies-and-entertainment channel that occasionally turns to cricket - unleashed a pitch doctor and nurse during the Asia Cup, your heart sank. It confirmed the worst fears: dumbing down of cricket coverage was no longer an isolated phenomenon, it had become a full blown malaise. It was banal, intrusive and downright silly. It gave innovation a bad name.

Innovations are not new to cricket broadcasting. The nineties brought a slew of them: the snickometer, Hawk-Eye, the stump camera, stump-microphones, super slow-mos. All of these took us closer to the game, and enhanced cricket viewing. The super slow-mo camera showed us how Shane Warne did what he did, and how fast bowlers made the ball swing with their wrists. The latest 'innovations' leave you numb.

A year ago, after having spent close to $250 million to obtain the telecast rights for all ICC events till 2007, Sony Entertainment Television broadcast cricket in a manner that was first bemoaned, and then imitated. They roped in Mandira Bedi, an actress, as presenter, presumably to pose all the questions that every housewife ostensibly wanted to ask. It made a star out of her; her designer sarees became a topic of discussion and she even made it to the cover of a national magazine. "Cricket in India is not just a sport," a Sony official said at the time. "It is entertainment."

It's a bewildering statement for serious followers of the game for whom cricket was entertainment enough. But the channel claimed the innovations had resulted in a 200- to 300-per-cent increase in female viewership, and that women made up 46 per cent of their audience for the World Cup. Obviously it translated into a lot of money because a larger female viewership meant a wider advertising base. In time this would ostensibly extend to the tapping of another huge market: the Hindi-speaking audience.

ESPN-Star caught on quickly, and gave Ravi Shastri and Wasim Akram a laddish mid-match show, Shaz and Waz, where the two chatted with women picked by the audience. Shaz and Waz flirted with their guests openly, sometimes even crossing the line of decency. It was alien to conservative cricket coverage, but according to the channel the show got them 40 per cent more viewers during the breaks. Of course, the show was sponsored.

Things went hysterically over the top during the Asia Cup, a tournament viewers will remember as much for the inanties packaged as novelties as the way India choked in the final. In addition to the pitch doctor, Michael Slater, and 'Professor' Dean Jones, viewers were treated to, among other things, Gillette's Push-Clean Facts, Samsung's Match-up Zone, the Pepsi Huddle, and the Chattar-Pattar predictions.

In many ways, cricket is a game designed for commercial exploitation on television. No other game provides a natural break every four minutes that's long enough for a couple of commercials and short enough to prevent the viewer from switching channels. But increasingly, programmers are pushing the edges in their desperation to create more space within the given time. In part, this can be attributed the ballooning costs of telecast rights.

The rights for the Asia Cup, for instance, were handed out a mere three weeks before the tournament, at Rs 16 crore for a 13-game tournament. ESPN-Star needed not only to recover their money but also to use the tournament as an experiment to determine how much they could afford to bid for the rights to cricket played in India, which are currently up for grabs. "The Asia Cup was far over the top," admitted a senior professional at the channel. "We were in a corner, we had a point to prove. It was very important for ESPN-Star to see what numbers they could write on a tournament of that length before they put in a BCCI bid." Jagmohan Dalmiya had gone public with his expectations of how much the four-year-long rights would cost. About four times more than last time, he had said. He was right: Zee TV put up Rs 1200 crore and ESPN-Star Rs 1100 crore.

The BCCI, in turn, guarantees a minimum of 27 days of international cricket every year, which means that to break even the channel must earn about Rs 10 crore per match day.

Is the price too high? Everyone but the BCCI seems to think so. "Rights have reached a stage where they're now bizarre ... bizarre by any standards. The amount of pressure put on our sales team ..." the man at ESPN-Star trails off. He goes on to admit that with rights selling for astronomical amounts, over-commercialisation was inevitable.

He's not alone. Sanjay Manjrekar, who has been associated with three television channels as commentator, is convinced that the price of television rights directly influences the quality of broadcasts. "Every sports channel is desperate to have live cricket and is willing to pay unreasonable amounts of money, even if it doesn't make business sense. They pay that amount in sheer desperation and then there is a clamour to recover the money spent." Unless advertising rates are inflated, or the price of telecast rights decreased, sports channels are going to struggle to recover their money, and the end result will be embarrassing.

It is a choice, says Steve Norris of Ten Sports - a man instrumental in the broadcast of the recent India-Pakistan series - that every channel has: how much do they want to sell out? "Every network draws a line in the sand about how commercial they are going to make a product, and how far they're going to stick to keep the fundamentals of the games intact."

Norris speaks of his time in England, when Sky Sports bought rights to the Premier League and tried to pull in viewers by throwing dancing girls and fireworks into the mix, before admitting failure and returning to the basics. He agrees that Sony and ESPN-Star's frills have been successful, but wonders if it will last.

To its credit Ten Sports, the newest of the sports broadcasters, has stood out for its belief that cricket alone is a good enough commercial proposition. "I think they have a different approach," says Manjrekar, describing Ten Sports' policy. "By remaining a traditional sports channel, they are looking different."

ESPN's tie-up with Star Sports inadvertently changed the dynamics of cricket coverage. Matches can now be broadcast in two languages, with a different set of commentators on each channel, and two vastly different audiences tuning in to the same game. The ESPN-Star source believes that in due time the clowning around will be scaled down on the English broadcast, but will continue on the Hindi one. It's good news for old-school cricket watchers, but only just.

The channels prefer that their innovations are not referred to as 'dumbing down'. They earnestly believe that a large percentage of the viewership knows about fours and sixes, but nothing more. They believe that Shaz, Waz, and Mandira Bedi are the chosen ones - the ones who will take cricket to the people. That people will respond, and that in a few years Hindi viewers will outnumber English speakers by four to one. As an idea, it isn't too shabby. Surrounded by Bollywood, Indians are supposedly more susceptible to the pull of melodrama than to that of seriousness. Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham was a commercial success, Chandni Bar wasn't.

Perhaps this is the new way, but then money's allegiance is to none but itself. India has been cricket's cash cow for a while, and the emergence of strong teams and a renewed rivalry with Pakistan will make for compelling viewing - which naturally means more money. When India and Pakistan met in March this year, Ten Sports charged Rs 300,000 for 10 seconds of advertising time - a gargantuan amount by the standards of Indian television.

But while it is without question that the higher cost of television rights will put greater pressure on television channels to draw more viewers and find new ways to increase revenue, the question that must be asked is if there isn't another way. Channel 4, which broadcasts English cricket, has ways to sell "without hype or trickery", to quote Mark Nicholas, one of its presenters. They carry special features during the lunch break: Shane Warne showing how to bowl legspin, Brian Lara batting, Richie Benaud picking his all-time XI. Their gimmicks, in Nicholas's words, are designed to "enhance the image and words, not to usurp them."

Striking a balance between commercial needs and the integrity of cricket coverage is a delicate art, but is it impossible? "Very few people are able get the right balance, where they can keep the purists happy and get people who are not into cricket to watch the game," says Manjrekar. For sure, it will take imagination and creative thinking. To start with, broadcasters will do well to look within the game than outside it.

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