The Americanization of Cricket

February 20th will be remembered as the day the Americanisation of world cricket commenced. Is America taking to cricket? Actually, the converse. Cricket is taking to America. It is the day that player auctions were held for the inaugural version of the Indian Premier League (IPL), a two-month long cricket tournament that will be organized by BCCI, India's cricket board.

$1.5 Million. For the average Joe, that amount is hard to grasp. For the average Indian, even more so (even with its new-found riches, India is still largely impoverished). That's 2 Juhu sea-facing mansions, 30 Porsche Carreras, 200 Rolex Oyster watches. That's $1.5 Million for two months work. Nothing wrong with that.

Unless, of course, you are talking about two months of hitting a red leather sphere with a wooden paddle, or catching said sphere with oversized leather gloves. The benefeciary of this largesse, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the new ringleader of the circus that is Indian cricket, is probably most deserving of this bounty. The man has just led his country's cricket team to a tournament victory over her most capable rival. Indeed, he probably earned it last year, when he led his young team to glory in a tournament for Twenty20, the latest episode in cricket's march towards crass commercialisation.

Sure, sports such as tennis, club soccer and golf are commercialized, but are still thriving. Indeed, they are going places where they have never been before. Asia is the new frontier for these sports, and are poised to take off to an order of magnitude. But comparison of present-day cricket to a different set of sports is more apt. American sports. America's sports leagues - baseball, American football and basketball are probably the richest in the world, barring England's Premier League. But these sports are characterized by what Disraeli termed 'Splendid Isolation', who, of course, was describing Britain's foreign policy in the late 19th century, but this phrase may well be used to describe the landscape of American sports.

Played and watched mostly by locals, these sports have little appeal outside the shores of North America. Declining interest levels have made desperate tactics such as cheerleaders, halftime show gimmicks, and slick P.R the norm in American sports. Overinflated egos (Stephon Marbury of the NY Knicks and almost every NBA player worth his bling), callousness (Michael Vick of the dog-fighting infamy), drug scandals (Clemens, Giambi in baseball, Marion Jones in athletics), cheating (Bill Belichik of pro football) are the result.

Cricket, while certainly more global and pristine, is still limited to the Commonwealth, and is likely to remain so, given the intricacies of the sport, which make cricket, cricket. While other sports have the potential to grow in Asia, specifically India, cricket is already there, and there is no other country (with the exception of China) where it can grow on such a massive scale.

All this may be moot, and cricket's 'glorious uncertainties' may well win out over the 'certainties' of commercialization. But I have a feeling that cricket will go the way of American sports. Why do I think that? Well, to start with, I could give you 1.5 million reasons....