The Demise of ODI

A current wave is flowing among the cricket experts and non cricket experts about discussing the death of the ODI. Now that is a pretty stupid thing to discuss first of all. Come on now how many times would the ICC change its stance or bring circus like innovation to the gentleman’s game to attract spectators. Now firstly I totally disagree with the killing of ODI, no matter what T20 will do. First of all the talks about the demise of ODI is entirely based on stadium revenues. Yes it does play an important part in generating revenue and giving the sponsors good value for their money, but again here we are looking at a very small part of the picture or we are being forced to look upon that small part of the picture. Sponsors and organizers always want a large share of the smallest part of a business unit, no matter what and if they find that another unit is giving that large share of the smallest part it is better to discontinue the current business.

Now take the case of ODI it is true that stadium revenue are low for the ODI games but we do have high TRPs for them. That means viewing is not quite affected due to the longer version of the game. On the other hand for T20 the stadium revenue has huge chunk which maximizes their profit to a large extent. Here is fact to support, the champion’s trophy is slotted to have a higher TRP than the champion’s league although the Champions league is said to have been the event of the year. Moreover CLT20 has done a poor business in terms of viewing revenue even though it was slotted for a higher than 10 TRP.

Another problem with killing ODI is that people do not watch it because they are bored of the long schedule of the match and today in this fast paced world no one has the time for watching all these stuff. But an interesting statistics will show the danger of treading such path. The TRP of last year’s IPL was much higher to this year’s one. Even though some of the biggest stars were roped in to counter balance the losing interest. With the sponsors adding the strategic breaks the pain was turned into agony. This shows as people have lost interest in the ODI format people are getting bored with the T20 format, then we will have cries for Hong Kong Six over games, but then will the cricketing world yield to this also. This could to demise of the pajama cricket itself. All we would be watching is people selected on power and agility and killing the art form of the game. This is more of the American form of playing a particular game.

VENKY THE NOBEL FALL GUY

As the news of the nobel laureate Venky comes in about his irritation towards people contacting him for networking purposes. It is not quite surprising that people now want a piece of the action hence professors , teachers and students which are “so called “ are trying to contact the great just to show off or snob off. Considering the simplicity of the man who used to cycle to work and a mere layman existence is flooded with attention of superstar its indeed asking too much to cope up with. Even after such flooding of adulation he quite modestly was back to work and complaining about people’s email flooding his mail box daily, he said he spends minimum of an hour cleaning his junk mails( hasn’t he heard about unlimited storage).

But that shows what is it like if you are famous and on top of it you are Indian, you will have so many fans just because of the sheer size of the country. They will praise you like hell which if you do something which is good according to their perspective but on the contrary they will hammer you if they find you evil in their perspective. Yeah everybody has experienced it whether its Sachin Tendulkar of Rahul Dravid or even for that case the prince himself Sourav, you had during the world cup his house being painted black but during exclusion from the national side you had riots and violence everywhere. That is what we have as Indians that we think with our hearts, have a very short term memory and tend to act on it quite impulsively.

Another thing is that why do we get excited when somebody of our origin excels using resources of some other country because its like the caretaker is more important than the one who has given birth. We have many Indians using foreign shores to excel in fields and why is that whether it is Sunita Williams or Kalpana Chawla or any other artist. We should be ashamed of ourselves that our country does not have the back up or resources to retain local talent , that such talented individuals have to leave shores to excel in their respective fields. Then these guys do well all we do clap for them after they have achieved their goals through sheer hard work we do not support them when they require us the most and after they have done their thing we are there to shower false adulation just because it is cool to do that.