A seat with a view

The greatest show has come to town, and Mumbai’s cricket-loving residents cannot even get a look-in. Earlier this week, the sale of tickets for today’s India-Australia fixture at Wankhede Stadium spiralled into a farce. It transpired that less than 12 per cent of the seating capacity was accessible to the general public — the rest had been cordoned off for the Mumbai Cricket Association’s affiliated clubs, donors and sponsors. So when the cameras scan the crowds, remember just 4,300 seats of a total of 36,000 were offered to the ordinary ticket-buying spectator. In giving such overwhelming preference to administrative and corporate patrons, the organisers have failed the spirit of the game. It is not just the fan who suffers when organisers cede all the vantage space at the ground to the well-connected, cricket itself becomes a casualty.

Social histories of cricket in India — and elsewhere, from Australia to the Caribbean — highlight the deep engagement between the spectators in the stands and the drift of the game in the middle. Spectators lend character to a ground. They provide texture. They prevent cricket from becoming an easily replicated contest between two playing elevens on any old patch of green. Back in the seventies cricket writers began profiling the Chennai spectator’s appreciation of good cricket. In 1999, they did their bit for bus diplomacy and gave the victorious Pakistani team a standing ovation. In the same series, Delhiites stuck to their much chronicled passion for tamasha, and Kolkata’s Eden Gardens had to be emptied of its passionate hordes so that India could lose without missiles raining down on the park.

Today, the spectator stands marginalised, in the television age he is an optional accessory. And as Ramachandra Guha reckons in A Corner of a Foreign Field, the changing crowd profile is transforming the way cricket is consumed and analysed. Elbowed out of spectacular one-day matches, the ticket-buying viewer snaps old bonds; she fails to turn up for the less raucous, more laidback Test fixtures. The result is evident. Stadia resemble sites for gladiatorial contests during one-dayers; during Tests they hollow out into empty shells, as happened in Ahmedabad last month. Is this cricket?