Vision Twenty20

Everybody, it would seem, is finding ways to take a piece of the Indian Premier League pie. As reported in this newspaper on Friday, the Central Board of Excise and Customs is studying the ways in which it could extract service tax from the six-week celebration of excess. Cricket, it seems, may be good for our tax collections. So, as cricket’s romantics continue to mourn the end of the game’s gentlemanly era — without of course bothering to prove that cricket did indeed ever have such a gentle phase — let us count the other benefits this Twenty20 is bringing.

Amidst images of packed stadia in the early matches, it is easy to overlook the importance of atmosphere in Twenty20 matches. The hastened pace of cricket in this format appears to demand the amplification of noise, cheer, music — in other words, the background score of thousands of spectators having a good time. Unlike Tests, even on television, Twenty20 doesn’t work as a silent film. For cricket this is wonderful. Especially in Tests and even one-day matches involving India, the hosts had become so assured of revenues from broadcast rights that spectators at the ground were seen to be little better than a nuisance. In Indian stadia, go for a Test or ODI, and you are reconciled to pathetic seating and facilities. Now, IPL franchisees are especially dependent on the crowds to construct so-called city loyalties. So, look away from the field of action and cheerleading distractions at the boundary rope, and you see stadia being refurbished.

This is not to fetishise the spectator in isolation. The spectator is needed to keep the cricket honest. As Indian administrators found when they sought to take the game to third-party venues like Toronto, it was not just that the contest became less keen. That phase overlapped in a sense with Indian cricket’s darkest phase, with rumours of match-fixing and rampant apathy threatening to drive away even the television audience. You have to be even a marginal follower of any sport to know the importance of live spectators. If Twenty20 establishes that, it will have done more than make the cash registers hum.