2020 has been an unusual year. International cricket has suffered too. Frankly, this is a minor matter in the overall scheme of things, but where would we be without our little indulgences?
Despite a crammed December calendar featuring eight teams, the year will see less than 25 Tests and around 50 one-day internationals (ODIs). This is roughly half the annual average action of about 45 Tests and 135 ODIs since 2000.
Comparable levels of action were last witnessed in the eighties, a time when Brian Lara and Shane Warne hadn’t even debuted and Virat Kohli and Steve Smith were still in diapers. If the near-100 T20s of 2020 are considered full day exertions, it would be nineties level of business. The larger point remains unchanged. 2020 has been a slow year in international cricket.
India, among the busiest sides alongside Australia and England in recent decades, have had it no different. 1995 was the last time they played fewer international games (excluding T20s).
Now, one would imagine Indians – said to be the game’s most passionate followers, breathing cricket and so on – to be experiencing serious withdrawal symptoms on account of the dry-up. That hardly seems the case. Grumbles have been mild and occasional, often lumped with general and progressively perfunctory-sounding longings for the pre-Covid normal.
How has a supposedly cricket-mad country managed without its accustomed doses of the game? For one, amidst the anxieties the pandemic has spawned, other matters – far more pressing ones such as life and livelihood – have come to occupy people’s mindspace.
Crises are known to put things in perspective, trigger introspections and prioritisations. So, even sworn cricket fans have had the opportunity to locate the game in life’s larger schema.
And they have quite likely discovered that cricket’s grip on their selves is not as strong as nostalgia, television, and water cooler conversations have led them to believe; that sporting interests can be properly nourished only in times of relative certaint and that what has for long been assumed an essential pre-occupation has merely been an engrossing frill. The game may return and sweep them – us – once again like an old vice, but we now know that some of its potency is imagined.
A second factor that has helped Indian fans cope is the Indian Premier League (IPL). In short episodes played out back-to-back over a seven week period, the domestic T20 tournament’s 13th edition, like previous ones, served everything audiences look for in the game: drama, suspense, intense competition, heroic performances, spectacular failures.
This exciting offering, its glitzy packaging, and the breathless pace with which it is delivered, has provided fans not just the cricket fix they needed but also the sated, hung-over feel necessary to endure the drought in prospect. Reports that administrators are plotting a bigger IPL window to take advantage of what they think could be a longer than anticipated slowdown in international cricketing activity are not surprising.
What about the ‘international’ in international cricket? Did Indian cricket fans not miss the energy and edginess of a country versus country face-off? Not as much as one would think.
The quality of IPL cricket is some notches below international, but the tournament musters enough foreign names to have an international flavor. It is more than adequate for the modern Indian cricket fan.
Because most modern Indian cricket fans are more fans of Indian cricket than Indian fans of cricket. Their primary interest is not the sport itself but their national team and the men in it. Nothing wrong with that, except that it closes them to the delights unfolding in neutral contests, from the bats and arms of stars from lands foreign.
This is different from, say, the tennis or football fan in India whose love for the sport is determined by the rhythms of the sport and the performers who illuminate the playing arena, whose joy from sport is not contingent on the national side’s or a compatriot’s achievements (though there could still be pride in it).
Indian cricket fans of a certain vintage – even some modern ones for that matter - will know the feeling, the thrill derived from reading the exploits of David Gower and Abdul Qadir, from videos of Kumar Sangakkara in full pomp or Allan Donald in full tilt. It is pure love for sport, needing no coat to enhance its appeal. As for the rest, the IPL works nicely, and could well become part of the new normal. Quite likely it already is.
(Manish Dubey is a policy analyst and writer)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.