I’M RESISTING the temptation to write about the IPL. Everywhere you look on the net, there is an opinion piece about what is wrong with it. Every day’s TV ratings tell you what is right about it.
I’m now more interested in what comes next as the ICC T20 looms into sight. There’s a classic sporting dilemna at play. West Indies cricket has its latest opportunity to reinvent itself. The worlds best players are on show in an event that they clearly care about winning.
The much criticised Stanford 20-20 tournaments showed that the West Indian crowds love a party, love their cricket and can create a cricketing atmosphere like no one else. All the best ingredients are there.
Yet we wait, watch and hope for the tournament. The last ICC trip to the Caribbean left a perhaps undeserved memory of giant empty stadia and soulless occasions. The impressive new CEO of West Indies cricket Ernest Hilaire has been working with the ICC to bring the party back.
Everyone who cares about cricket should wish him luck regardless of channel affiliations and sponsor obligations! Yet there are two requirements pulling in different directions. ESPN/Star quite rightly want matches to start at prime time in India, which is unfortunately morning in the West Indies.
For the domestic audience in the West Indies, the Stanford series showed that as with sport the world over, sport played under lights in the evening works for spectators at the venue, works for sponsors, works for television. Sport under lights simply looks and feels special, it hides empty seats, it seems to intensify the occasion.
The difference comes when the audience is predominantly in a different time zone. Just as the American pay masters of the Olympics dictated in Beijing a schedule that worked for their audiences, so the ICC has to cope with a commercial cricket market that will now always try to tilt events into Indian prime time.
I’d love to say that what West Indies cricket needs is to build on their stanford 20-20, have more lights at stadia and let fans enjoy their parties at night as the IPL does. The occasion will draw youngsters into the game and help turn around the fortunes of what was everyone’s second favourite or favourite team.
Cricket’s economy argues against that option. An awful choice and impossible to get right.
