It was just the other day, when I had that "I seriously need to start studying" feeling all day and then after wasting about more than two-thirds of it, I finally pulled out some random text book out of the closet. Dusted it, pulled some random page which said "Solutions to differential equations at regular singular points" which is the only thing I feel like I read in about an hour. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I heard some chants from the common room. I closed the text book, and went down to find out. I heard Dhoni was on fire. He'd smashed 63 off 19 balls. I was like, "What?", I didn't even know CSK were playing. Those in the common room looked at me like I'd come from Mars. What was worse, was that I didn't seem to care.
It was a Cricket match, for God's sake, and there were people around me watching, cheering for various turn of events in it, and there I was pretending to read Maths 3. When I think of it, the Cricket lover inside me begins to ask this question whether I still have that appetite to watch Cricket anymore. I'd never imagined such a time would come. IPL Cricket, Champions League Cricket have stopped exciting me for quite some time now. It doesn't pluck that nerve which usually other Cricket matches do for me. And, the worse part is that on top of all this I claim to be a Cricket geek in the society. I have criticized IPL Cricket a lot of times in my life. I won't do it anymore.
It's just that, I feel like I have found what I love the most in Cricket. I believe, that appetite is still there somewhere. It's not the Karbonn Kamaal Catches or the Citi Bank moments of success that excite me. These days I tend love those typical Test match scenarios, like the 'crucial first hour', or when the ball starts to reverse out of nowhere, or those aggressive field placings for the new batsman, or those gritty innings after a few quick wickets, etc. Things like these hardly play a role in T20 Cricket, because it involves a pretty different style of game play which is equally tough.
In my little journey of life, I've met a lot of people having similar Cricketing mind-sets like that of mine. We've had various memorable and intense discussions about various aspects of the game. Such discussions usually end on a unanimous feeling that IPL-like Cricket should be put to an end. But, I'm afraid that is impossible to happen. The truth is, these people like me actually form the minority of all those who watch Cricket. We seem to be in the majority because we tend to be more vocal, but we're not. The world has embraced this IPL-like Cricket. When you think of it, such Cricket actually unites families; it's much better that the daily soaps or the reality shows that exist in some parts of the world (especially in India); and on top of that it's just 3 hours of exciting nail-biters with Bollywood Masala somewhere in the backdrop. It's actually a win-win for those who watch Cricket for entertainment. And rather sadly, the truth is that it is people like these who form the majority of Cricket viewers. I mean that, majority of the Cricket viewers today don't like to get geeky or put attention to detail to various aspects of the sport, like the significance of field-placings and the various restrictions on them, or what a new ball does, or even how certain pitches behave for that matter. The modern Cricket viewer, I believe, is far more interested in those '20 balls and 40 to get' or those '15 runs in an over' or probably those '5 dot balls in an over' scenarios.
For example, gone are the days, when as a viewer you would expect the captain to elect to bowl first on a gloomy day on a green pitch after winning the toss. I don't think the modern Cricket viewer cares too much about what might or might not be a wise thing to do on winning the toss.
This transition of the Cricket viewer is something, people like me will have to accept. The changing mind-set of the viewer results in the changed mind set of the next generation Cricketer. Rahul Dravid said the other day, "We are maybe one generation away from reaching the point where our entire youth structure could cater only to T20 without any emphasis on the longer form of the game. By not giving young players a chance to explore their versatility, endurance or even improvisational skills we will be selling ourselves and our sport well short."
Imagining a whole generation of Cricket players trained with that T20 mind-set throughout their lives is something that scares people like me. It's probably because, we would never get to see someone like a Dravid or a Kallis in the upcoming generations. Or rather because, say after about 10-20 years or so from now, our kids won't be interested in our little Tendulkar stories. They'll have their own Laras, Warnes and McGraths and their own different opinions about the game which will make it tough to connect with them on a lazy Sunday afternoon. People like me know that when you meet someone who shares a similar Cricketing opinion as yours, he/she becomes your friend for life. This might just not happen with the future generation because of this transition of the mind set of the Cricket viewer.
Having said that, I certainly feel that because of this mind-set, the next crop of Cricketers will be far more versatile than the current ones as far as making adjustments to the different forms of the game is concerned, but probably at the expense of mastery in the longer forms of the game. We've got to accept them, as we form the minority. The one thing we all Cricket lovers will definitely have in common is the fact that, it was that epic contest between bat and ball which we all actually fell in love with in the beginning. Cricketing opinions, attention to detail, is all secondary. And I hope, these next generation Cricketers with their different mind-sets would create some other 'to be explored dimensions' in various aspects of the game. Geeks like me would love that.
