Cricket overwhelms India, and yet despite all the passion for the game and the sheer number of people there, well, the country has not been been a cricket-winning machine by any means.
I suppose the recent track record is better than when I was a kid. But, still, when one compares Sri Lanka and India, the latter is a country that has a population that is 60 times the population of the former. Arithmetically, even India's 50th best team ought to be better than Sri Lanka's first team!
So, it really does mean that demography is not destiny. How about that negation, Monsieur Comte?
Country Population
(in millions)Sri Lanka 20 Pakistan 176 Australia 23 New Zealand 4 Zimbabwe 13 Canada 34 Kenya 38 India 1,200 South Africa 50 England 51 West Indies 4 Bangladesh 150 Ireland 4 Netherlands 17
I explored some of these issues in the context of another world cup--when the soccer tournament was held in South Africa last summer. As I wrote then, "a sport is, thus, more than merely about the game itself. It presents yet another opportunity to begin to understand the peoples of the world, and their cultures and politics."
Maybe India ought to take the UK route in sports. The UK doesn't field, say, a soccer teaming representing the UK, but has teams from its component political entities--teams from England, Wales, ... Maybe India, too, ought to field teams from its states!
There is a good chance, however, that this Indian victory might just about establish India's permanence in the sport. As this NY Times story notes
Cricket may be, as the sociologist Ashis Nandy wrote in 1983, “an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English,” but India took a long time to take control of it. It played its first international matches in 1932, but its all-time record in five-day test matches remains well below .500, and its all-time one-day record is not far above that.Interestingly enough, Tendulkar's arrival on the international cricket scene almost exactly coincides with India's decision to get rid of its import-substituting industrialization, and to open itself to the global economy. Tendulkar arrived in international cricket in 1989, and really established himself from 1990 on. India, which was on the verge of going belly-up, opened up its economy in 1991, with Manmohan Singh as its finance minister--he is now the prime minister of the country, and has been at the helm since 2004.
In spite of its massive population, for many years it suffered from a lack of effective pace bowling and a failure to develop talent outside the big cities. Tendulkar — the teenage prodigy who not only exceeds expectation but plays on into middle age and handles ridiculous celebrity with ego-free equanimity — has been the face of India’s transformation
Thus, what is really interesting about this World Cup victory is that it comes at a time when India is asserting itself in global economics and politics.
BTW, America, too, could have been a part of this cricketing world.
Cricket was among the more popular sports in America in the mid-19th century, but baseball's rapid postbellum expansion came at the expense of cricket. Some have argued that the shorter duration of a baseball game, its simpler rules (at least initially), and the fact that it didn't require dedicated fields helped kill cricket, but these claims are hard to evaluate. What's more clear is that marketing played a major role. When a sense of American national identity began to emerge in the decades following the Civil War, along with new communication and transportation technologies, baseball promoters recognized an opportunity. They stitched together some of the existing traveling clubs into the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players in 1871, and young athletes and fans flocked to the unified league. Cricket clubs, by contrast, stayed regional and let the historical moment slip. Many of the top players switched to baseball, and the fans went with them.Meanwhile, this sports/business news update:
ESPN is finally on board with the real biggest sport in the world — or the fastest growing at least — cricket.
ESPN announced last month they have bought the US broadcast rights to future ICC events, including the 2015 World Cup.
