India shows the way for English cricket

One of the most-watched sporting fixtures in the world this weekend will see the Mumbai Indians face Sunrisers Hyderabad in the Indian Premier League cricket tournament. A large portion of the nation’s 1.4bn people is sure to tune in, just as they do throughout the six-week championship. Recent matches have secured up to 200m viewers each, just shy of the populations of Britain, France and Germany put together. The Twenty20 matches, a format of the game which takes around three to four hours to complete, are watched avidly on television and smartphones.

This is one possible future on offer to England’s cricketing traditionalists: a vibrant national scene, competitive and popular, appealing to fans of all classes and genders. All it will take is letting go of shibboleths, breaking taboos and for cricket to embrace, like so many other sports have before it, the opportunities of commercialisation.

In India, questions for the sport revolve around its potential growth. Last year’s tournament attracted record viewer numbers and higher advertising spending. Can that continue? The tournament has turned star players from Indian captain Virat Kohli and English all-rounder Ben Stokes into millionaires — how much more will they earn? Will the likes of Facebook and Amazon challenge for screening rights, currently owned by Disney?

This is in sharp contrast to the state of play in Britain, which exported the game to India and other former colonies. Stadiums pack out whenever the England men’s national team plays in “test” matches, which can last for five days. But otherwise, the game is in decline.

Back in 2017, the England and Wales Cricket Board, the sport’s national governing body, conducted extensive research into attitudes towards cricket. The tally of people playing is falling. Only 5 per cent of children aged between seven and 15 years old listed it in their top two favourite sports. Outside its bastion of affluent, middle-aged men the research suggested the appeal is fading.

To arrest the decline, the ECB first inaugurated the “Blast”, England’s own T20 tournament. But now it has been more revolutionary, looking eastward at the success of the IPL and creating “The Hundred”, a tournament that is set to debut later this summer. Instead of representing historic “counties”, teams will be standard-bearers for seven big cities. Each innings will last just 100 balls, fewer than any other format of the game. This is intended to create 2-3 hour matches that fit into television schedules, or allow families to attend matches after school or work.

Such ideas are anathema to the cricket traditionalists. This week, it emerged The Hundred’s organisers are considering further measures, such as changing references to “batsmen” to “batters” — a gender-neutral moniker to reflect equal billing of men’s and women’s teams. More controversially, “wickets” could be replaced by “outs”. This is an unnecessary Americanisation, but reflects a well-intended attempt to simplify the game’s often baffling jargon. None of the changes eradicates the game’s essence: a battle of bat against ball, willow against leather, across 22 yards of grass.

Those who argue that true satisfaction comes from being immersed in complexities and eccentricities will still have the longer test matches. But money, the best players and the biggest audiences are all flowing to India, where the shorter form of the game rules. That is unlikely to change. Attracting a new audience to a simpler, faster version in cricket’s home nation, however, may help others rediscover the joy of England’s national game.