When world champion cricketers come to town, we cannot but bunk classes (with Prof’s prior permission of course) and show up bright and early. We had ‘Managing Negotiations’ on schedule, but our master negotiator Nishant, exploiting the early moisture and some over cast conditions, swung into action with his astute negotiation skills, so that we could ‘square-cut’ the classes, ‘well-left’ the assignments and get on our ‘straight-drive’ to Baroda.
And boy, were we happy, for we got to see was some really futuristic cricketing action. If we had any doubts about Twenty20 being the wave of the future, our team quelled all those by presenting some really strong evidence of how badly they can suck in other forms of cricket. Underscoring their newfound liking for T20 and proving that their world cup victory was no fluke, India, batting first, posted a pretty decent score. One, that could have challenged even the formidable Aussie batting line up, if they hadn’t realized, this was not a T20 match. But alas, that was not to be and that is when all our ‘men went into blues’. The scene was so bad that some of them even tried to haul bottles and stuff, but still couldn’t get Ponting or Gilchirst out.
Earlier in the day, the action was so 'riveting' that I decided to move to one of the back seats so that I could catch up on my sleep, as I am wont to do, during that time of the day, when I am in my classes. But unfortunately, my friendly neighbor kept waking me up at regular intervals, to make sure that I didn’t miss any of the Indian wickets falling and thereby escape the pain that I deserved, for the mistake I had committed. I slowly started hating him, but he was acting as if he was being very helpful and all and I was too sleepy to threaten him in any meaningful manner.
Towards the end, he really upped the ante by pulling a fast one, which scared the bejesus out of me. During one of the forced wakeful moments he told me that they had shown me on TV. In all my years of watching TV, wherein I might have seen several different ways of fans registering their displeasure at their team’s performance, never had I watched anything close to something like this. The simple thought that I could end up making history by becoming the first one, was enough for me to keep my chin up for the rest of the brain-dead match.
In my attempt to keep myself awake, I tried to pretend as our ‘harsha bhogling’ expert commentator from IIMA and tried to make some sense out of whatever little that was going on. Then it suddenly dawned on me as to what the Indian team was trying to do. Their logic slowly became apparent. Think about it. Given a choice between playing 50 overs under the sun and 20 overs in the evening, even amateur cricketers like me, with no cricketing brains what so ever, would look for other things to do during the day. Now with the kind of cricketing geniuses that we have studded our line up with, it is only obvious that even they are also hinting that they know what their right choices are. And what better way to promote T20 than by playing every match as if it’s a T20?
To me, the situation is very similar to asking a consultant, who is used to working half-days and ‘netting’ away the rest of the time, to take up the job of a program manager, with round the clock conference calls and stakeholders looking to get a chokehold on his neck. Thanks, but no thanks. Even the Indian team knows better.
And the real killer is how our boys are still assured of whatever they have gotten used to getting - the money share of the corporates, mind share of the fans and lion’s share of the pride, fame and glory of being heroes in a star-starved India. Sweet…No? To this I say, Chak de India to all the players and Cheque de India to all the sponsors.
Now that I could really see what was going on, I was tempted to put my consultant cap on and dig deeper, may be apply some frameworks and stuff to look far ahead into the future. And then I saw cricket being taken over by Pareto and his famed 80-20 rule. He observed thus on the future economics of Indian cricket: “80% of the money will be in Twenty20 and the rest will be taken home by Dhoni endorsing 80 different products”.
Future was here guys and we were lucky to be a part of it. That is my match analysis and I am sticking to it…
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