Ranji Trophy

For the first time since I have been reading newspaper in Delhi(More than 30 years), Ranji Trophy is getting a very good coverage. Cricket followers who use ESPNcricinfo are also able to follow session by session highlights on the ranji Trophy Live Blog.Twenty seven teams are playing and except for the disfranchised 100 millions from Bihar, most cricket followers are able to follow their team or teams.The followers will grow into committed Test followers, so the  more people following Ranji Trophy augurs well. for the future.
The followers of First class cricket this season seem to have grown. A decent coverage in the papers and the ESPNCricinfo Live blog has brought Ranji Trophy to the consciousness of serious cricket followers in this country and that itself is a multi million population.

The effect has been that Jiwanjot Singh and Ishwar Pandey are respected names and possibly sending more positive vibrations than several international stars.Indian Cricket has the strength to tide over the current misfortunes and build towards a course correction.

Greying of the Indian Test Followers

Steve Waugh tried to breach the final frontier and failed.Australia was able to win the series in 2004 in India but the series was won only because rain ruined India's chance of winning in Chennai. And after the series normal business was restored in Indian conditions.The team looks so ragged at present and bowling options so limited that it is really good that the BCCI does not invite Bangladesh to tour India because the Bangladesh spinners are way better than ours and we do not have the pace of Roach and Best.

The Indian team needs to rebuild but the problem is of the entire cricketing world.With Hockey, Badminton and football competing for Indian eyeballs, it is difficult to imagine that the IPL alone will be able to keep cricket a major TV draw in India for long if the Indian Test team becomes weak.The elderly and the retired are premium TV audience and with growing prosperity, they are also likely to attract advertisers.However the next few decades will see the generation who grew following  Tests retiring.In sheer terms these numbers will match potential viewers anywhere in the world.They will need a strong Indian test team rather than any IPL franchise.Cricket needs a strong Indian team to remain afloat in the world amidst Basketball, baseball, American football besides football itself.

Where Angels Fear to Tread

This Indian team led by Mahendra Singh Dhoni has gone where no Indian team has gone before.Never before since India played its first Test has India lost eight consecutive tests abroad.They drew a Test against Bradman's australia and even in 1936.It had come to seven in a row against England and Australia in 1967-68 but a victory against Newzealand,incidentally India's first overseas win,stopped further damage.Even when India were poor tourists with mainly amateurs  players being who were often rewarded with  lowly paid clerical jobs in Banks, Indian cricketers held out for some memorable draws.

We have moved from amateur cricketers to another state of economic situation when the BCCI contract is not a major part of the cricketr's earnings.The BCCI has other means but match fees or the Bank job is not dependant on performance in one form alone. Suresh Raina is a celebrity with ordinary  test record and Rohit Sharma is a household name without having played a Test.Limited Overs cricket and club based t20 has the possibility to keep cricketers well paid even without playing a test. Saurav Tiwari earns more by playing cricket than perhaps Cheteshwar Pujara does simply because he has played a few ODIs for India and talented first class performers with reasonable IPL records have their IPL match fees capped at 30 Lakhs.The endorsements for Indian cricketers can come inspite of team performances as their IPL performances will also keep them in public consciousness.

Time has come therefore to move ahead on the Supreme Court decision in Zee Telefilms vs BCCI case.The team playing for BCCI is not a national team in the strict sense and BCCI therefore does not come in the ambit of instrumentality of the state under Article 12 of the Constitution. BCCI and its cricketers can no doubt ply their wares for the consuming public but just like the scenes where actor smokes in fil;ms have to show that smoking is harmful, every broadcast of matches involving India should have a ticker running with the message that the team playing for BCCI is not representing India and is a private team representing a Registered Society.This will therefore distance the atists that the BCCI cricketers really are from the national representatives who may be participating in other sports from Khokho to Wrestling.

"plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"

The French critic and novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonso Karr's well known epigram "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"loosely translated as"the more it changes, the more they stay the same " has acquired a significance to those of us who were old enough to follow the Eden gardens Test of 1977 involving the same two teams playing the Test  Match this week at the same venue.We were cheering, then for Brijesh Patel when he scored 56 to make England bat again and we were cheering for Ashwin when he ensured that England will bat again.More than 60,000 people came to watch England knock off the 16 runs required to win.Few thousands will no doubt turn up tomorrow morning.Yet, two world Cup and a t20 world cup win, a number 1 ranking in tests, a place at the ICC high table and India's becoming a talked about economy which have happened in the interim have still not impacted on the essential malaise of cricketers not taking cricket seriously enough.The cricketers were essentially amateurs then and remain essentially amateurs now.The difference is that they are substantially wealthier now and make money from endorsements and are in effect models or actors who also play cricket.The consistent performance which is required is not really important to these endorsers and cricket's nature where we can laud Ashwin even in our hour of defeat as we lauded Patel then in 1977. Even a below par performance in the Asia cup got eclipsed by Tendulkar's hundredth hundred.What is even more galling is that in 1976-77, the team had bowlers who could bowl England within 350 regularly.At present, both bowling and batting talents look in short supply and the West Indies Bangladesh fifth ODI will end with a better viewership than some days of this Test match.In spite of a decent run since that series in 1977 till the fateful series in England last year, the Indian team has come to resemble "the tag rag squad of bootleggers masquerading as a team called India" which certainly the Indian team of 1979 who were described as such which lost the series 1-0 and almost chased 230 to win was not.