After Twenty20 World Cup, now IPL games, including semis.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: Spring is in the air; it’s baseball season in the US. But it’s another ball game which is hogging the limelight. Not basketball – the NBA season is in full flow, no surprises there. Football season is over. World Cup soccer is still some weeks away. It’s cricket.
Cricket has languished in the US as a quirky foreign sport for decades, despite its close resemblance, birth from baseball. The same was true of ice hockey and field hockey – the latter took time to grow into a popular sport, is still marginalized by broadcasters. Most people wouldn’t know the difference between croquet and cricket; mallet and bat.
It’s looked upon curiously when played by immigrants on patches of green, derided as boring, too long. Baseball players take to the field in uniform, right from Little League games. Not cricket though. Probably more people play it on a Sunday morning wearing jeans than track pants; uniforms are for the vain.
There’s always been a buzz about the commercial aspect of cricket, though. Nobody questioned the big advertising dollars, multinational sponsors that would rush in if international cricket took off. The 30 million avowed fans in the country is a big base in itself.
What’s been missing is the right approach to showcase it. It’s been confined to first generation immigrants, seen as a recreational sport; nobody really expects it to go national. Second generation Americans don’t play it competitively, vie for scholarships in college – there are none. It’s not a career sport, with lucrative contracts – the bedrock for American sports to flourish on national television.
Over the years, there have been no dearth of people who tried to exploit its commercial appeal. None succeeded. Most were slimy Indian and Indian American fly by night operators out to make a quick buck, with no zeal to invest in it, make it grow. Texas sports promoter Allen Stanford, once seen as the godfather of cricket, is now incarcerated for running a Ponzi scheme.
These operators saw it as a concert sport, where they could become annual promoters. Like promoters of Bollywood concerts come summer. To which desis flock to like one would go for a Broadway musical when one visits New York.
But even the concert, tourist cricket concept never became a reality. International cricket, with the advent and gush of T20 tournaments, has become so hectic, lucrative, that it’s hard to get even Ranji Trophy level players to come play in the US. They get more money playing league cricket in England, or T20 in Bangladesh.
Contrary to expectations, T20 cricket seemed to actually spell doom for any kind of quality cricket to flourish in the US. Except perhaps for in Florida, where some former international West Indies players occasionally visit to spur local tournaments.
Recent entrants on the international stage, like Afghanistan, Nepal and Hong Kong, despite their lack of resources, have outdone the US national team easily, as seen in the recent ICC World Twenty20 championship. The sport had reached its virtual last leg competitively.
There’s plenty of cricket in the US on television, though, broadcast from around the world.
In the last few years, those with access to satellite have no problems catching it round the clock, with live telecast of almost each and every international game, and domestic cricket in India, covered by networks like Willow TV, Neo Cricket. But while accessibility to cricket grew, the sport grew globally, in the US it remained stagnant, couldn’t penetrate the mainstream households.
All that’s going to change now; courtesy of ESPN.
After its tremendous success in telecasting the World Twenty20 championship in
Bangladesh, on ESPN3, it’s now reached a content exchange deal with Willow TV to telecast exclusively live 9 matches of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket, to be played in the UAE and India, from April 16th through June 1.
Interestingly, the ESPN exclusive digital telecast would include both the semi-finals, and seven ‘Game of the Week’ matches, apart from highlights rights package to all the other matches.
In exchange, Willow TV gets the exclusive rights to the India vs. New Zealand series. Willow TV is at present the only provider of cricket content on the DISH TV platform. Neo TV has left the business.
In the long run, it’s a critical strategic mistake by Willow TV, but great for cricket in America. The rights to the semi-finals of the IPL, after its telecast of the entire Twenty20 World Cup, gives ESPN – controlled by Disney – a chance to explore how much further they can go to try wrest the telecast cricket market in the US; move from all digital and select TV coverage to national television coverage through ESPN2, like it did for the final of the World Twenty20 match played between India and Sri Lanka. Willow TV could well follow into oblivion on the heels of Neo TV, in the US.
ESPN3 is ESPN’s live multi-screen sports network, accessible online at WatchESPN.com, on smartphones and tablets. It’s also streamed on televisions, on Xbox LIVE to Gold members, Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV.
The network is currently available to more than 92 million homes in the US, who receive their high-speed Internet connection or video subscription from an affiliated service provider of ESPN. The network is also available free to approximately 21 million U.S. college students and U.S.-based military personnel.
The final between Sri Lanka and India was the first live cricket telecast on ESPN2 and – together with WatchESPN and ESPN3 – logged an average minute audience of 302,248 across TV and digital, according to Nielsen and Adobe Analytics.
ESPN2 alone averaged 196,195 viewers in a given minute, while WatchESPN and ESPN3 provided a 54 percent lift to the cross platform audience, adding an average minute audience of 106,053 – its largest ever for a live cricket match. In total, the telecast registered 2.4 million viewers, while WatchESPN and ESPN3 logged 316,000 – up 70 percent compared to the 2012 ICC World T20 final.
ESPNcricinfo also provided extensive coverage from a team of seasoned experts and analysts throughout the event, from March 16-April 6. It averaged 8.2 million visits per day during the tournament, up 18 percent compared to 2012. In the US specifically, the site and apps averaged 1.2 million visits a day, up 15 percent.
The semifinal match between West Indies and India registered 590,000 unique viewers in the US, the most since the 2012 ICC World T20 match between India and Pakistan in the Super 8 stage.
These phenomenal numbers no doubt led ESPN to get a deal done with Willow TV for the IPL matches.
If digital viewership exceeds expectations for the 9 IPL matches, ESPN may experiment bidding for major T20 tournament telecast rights in the future, show it on national television in the US. Sponsors and advertisers would rush in. The sport could well pique mainstream America. That could be the game changer cricket aficionados in the US have been looking for all these years.
A huge incentive for America to take to cricket is also the money in the sport.
Last year, the richest sportsperson in the world was Tiger Woods with total earnings of $78.1 million, with $65 million of that coming in endorsements. The Indian cricket captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni was 16th on the list, with total earnings of $31.5 million – endorsements worth $28 million.
What’s surprising is that Dhoni made more money last year than any other baseball player in the world. The closest a baseball player came to Dhoni was Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees with $30.3 million total earnings, standing 18th overall on the list. Sachin Tendulkar made $22 million dollars in total, last year.
Cricket is the last frontier for popular, lucrative sports played by Americans. The combination of live TV in their living rooms, and the money involved in it, should make many a Minor Leagues pitcher who deals a 90 mile an hour fastball, a knuckleballer with a Sunil Narine style, or a hitter with excellent hand-eye coordination to swat it out of the ballpark, sit up and take note. Playing a season in the Big Bash in Australia might be a better option than spending a couple of years slugging it out on baseball diamonds in Japan.
With ESPN’s expanded cricket coverage in the US, it won’t be long before colleges start teams, offer scholarships. That would set the ball rolling for professional leagues to be set up, the holy grail for cricket to explode in the country.
(Sujeet Rajan is the Editor-in-chief of The American Bazaar)
To contact the author, email to editor@americanbazaaronline.com
2 Comments
Birth from baseball? WTF are you talking about dude? The article for me lost half its credibility the moment i read that. Cricket was first played in 16th century, years before america was even a country! Baseball is nothing but a boring, idiotic disfigurement of the world’s best sport – Cricket.
I think cricket is introduced first. . It is not baseball. .. Baseball evolved from cricket. .. Please verify.