Cricket fever will be high in New York City tonight.
Sujeet Rajan
As restaurants in the metros of India gear up to host the India-Pakistan World Cup cricket match with special themed breakfasts, to coincide with the start of the match at 9 AM IST Sunday, The Australian pub and bar in midtown Manhattan, is preparing too, albeit in a different way – they will charge $10 cover at the door, install extra security to take control of the raucous crowd if need be, who will throng around the 22 televisions inside. The match is set to begin telecast at 10:30 PM EST Saturday.
The manager at The Australian, Annie Morton, told The American Bazaar in an interview that they are not taking any pre-orders or bookings, and those who wish to get into the bar tonight, and be part of the capacity 300 crowd lucky enough to find space inside, would be advised to come early. Long lines are expected.
“It will be huge tonight,” said Morton, who was in India during the last World Cup, in 2011, which India won.
“We are perhaps the only bar in town which will show the match in its duration through 6 AM or longer,” said Morton.
One need not be reminded of the violence at the 1999 World Cup, at the Old Trafford, in Manchester, England, when Pakistani and Indians fans hurled insults at each other, got into altercations. There were flags burnt, people injured, arrested, the match disrupted.
Across town, on the East Side, on Lexington Avenue, the mini India hub that has many Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi owned restaurants, also expect a big rush tonight. Like every cricket World Cup in the last decade or so, there will be no alcoholic drinks available inside, but $1-2 piping hot cups of chai, along with samosas, and kebabs would have to suffice.
The TV sets are going to be small, installed on the wall, but the rush of enthusiasm and expectation from those who fill the space inside, and root for their respective team, would not be much different from the folks who down heady cocktails as they wade through the intricacies of the match and the vagaries of the night at The Australian.
For the cricket fanatic, It does not make a difference if a billion plus people are likely to watch the India-Pakistan game tonight, more than the 114.4 million viewers that watched the nail-biting Super Bowl between New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks, and perhaps more than the FIFA football World Cup final last year between Germany and Argentina, when around a billion people tuned in. What matters is that their team wins.
India would, of course, hope to perpetuate the legacy of their World Cup campaign against Pakistani, having won all their previous five encounters. Pakistan would gladly lose to any team in the world, but India. Hope to get instant medication for their insufferable insomnia, thinking of those five defeats.
This year also marks a big change for cricket in the US, as for the first time the sports network ESPN got the exclusive rights to broadcast the matches in the US, and they immediately put it into a ‘pay-per-view’ mode. If professional boxing matches were considered expensive at $50 plus, the $100 app to watch the cricket could be considered exorbitant, but folks at ESPN would also like to point out that you get all the matches live through the over month-long tournament.
It was apparent during the broadcast of the inaugural Sri Lanka-New Zealand and Australia-England matches on Friday that ESPN had done poor marketing of the tournament, given the paucity of ads during breaks, compared to what cricket-specific channels like Willow and channels from India, had done in the past.
But whether it’s the $1, $10, or the $100 route you take tonight to watch the India-Pakistan encounter, one thing is certain: it’s worth every penny of it.
2 Comments
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