But is it really cricket?

Soutik Biswas
BBC News, Bangalore and Calcutta

On a muggy afternoon last weekend, a spectator leapt off an upper tier stand during a cricket game in Eden Gardens stadium in the eastern Indian city of Calcutta.

He survived the fall with broken bones.

The middle-aged man did not fly off his seat because he was carried away by the game.

He simply wanted to have a closer peek at Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan who had turned up in the stands below to cheer a team that he owns in the new Indian Premier League cricket competition.

The multi-million dollar competition has been hyped as one which will revolutionise the game with a fizzy cocktail of cricket, entertainment and celebrity shows.

Starved

So how do you serve up entertainment to embellish a game which is religion for millions of Indians?

It’s a fairly uncomplicated recipe.

Take a large helping of Bollywood stars, sautee it with some more Bollywood music, and then add whatever you can lay your hands on - cheerleading girls, stilt walkers, cyclists furiously riding around the ground, acrobats hanging from the stadium roof.

It appears to be working in an entertainment-starved country where an evening out in the big cities essentially means flocking to shiny, air-conditioned malls to shop, eating unappetising precooked food, and catching a Bollywood movie at the overpriced cineplex.

During what promises to be a blazing Indian summer, the 44-day competition needs to pull out all its stops and entertain parched fans, many of whom still have no loyalty to the newly created city teams.

No wonder then that, for the inaugural ceremony, the organisers hired cheerleaders from America, stilt walkers from Holland, stunt acrobats from Germany and laser operators from China and Malaysia to serve up a visually stunning show.

It was helped by 250,000 watts of sound and 50,000 watts of lighting through lasers and sky tracers.

Many of the players on the field were imported too. The only strong Indian presence appeared to be again, Shah Rukh Khan, who as one commentator said is “seen everywhere and anywhere these days”. He had come to cheer his team and egg on the crowds.

Bollywood brew

Even Calcutta, a city known for its unflagging loyalty to local star and former Indian captain, Saurav Ganguly, appeared to have forgotten him at the weekend game - there were posters of Khan in the stands, and the star’s local fan club walked in carrying huge cut outs of their icon.

At the games Khan can be seen heading an entourage of B-list stars, bling music composers, fashion designers, bouncers and security guards. All eyes are usually glued to them.

In star-struck, hierarchy conscious India, Bollywood stars are like Pied Pipers who lead their legions of fans to love and hate what they love and hate.

Purists fear that in this quest for offering entertainment to woo crowds, the dividing line between entertainment - read Bollywood- and cricket is becoming precariously thin.

The result is very few are actually watching the game at all.

In a Mumbai weekend game, Bollywood’s Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapur, and Anil Kapur ran along the ground sporting the team’s jerseys emblazoned with the name of their upcoming film in a brazen marketing push.

In Delhi, another actor, Akshay Kumar, known for his daredevil and comic acts on screen, found himself suspended from a cable midway through the act, and had to be unclipped and let down.

A Hyderabad team commercial showed the captain VVS Laxman teaching a rather sheepish looking local film star to play cricket.

People like Vijay Mallya, the flamboyant owner of the Bangalore team and a brewery and airline baron, believe that all the entertainment will not distract from the game.

“Entertainment enhances the game. Look at the Olympics ceremonies, look at American baseball. They all have glamour and entertainment. Here we are adding glamour to what is already a pretty glamorous game in India,” he says.

‘Game is sacrosanct’

Others like Venkat Vardhan, who heads a leading Indian event management company that is rolling out the entertainment for the Bangalore matches, feels onfield entertainment during cricket matches should be carefully conceived.

“The game is sacrosanct. But the combined energy of classy entertainment and good cricket is a good thing. What is wrong is to make the players entertainers. Let entertainers entertain, and cricketers play the game”.
But such ‘classy entertainment’ like getting skimpily-clad foreign cheerleading girls is sometimes threatening to go out of hand at the competition.

In Bangalore beer-addled spectators exhorted the girls to come down and dance with them, screaming in unison to a Bollywood song, “Come to us, come to us, now!”

And in Mumbai, swooning men implored the shimmying girls, “Madam, madam, shake hand, shake hand!”.

Analysts say cricket and the cult of celebrity are feeding off each other at the competition.

“The cricket uses celebrities to feel good about itself; the celebrities use the cricket to stay in the headlines. It’s a symbiosis of a particularly cynical kind,” says cricket writer Lawrence Booth.

Meanwhile, as Bollywood stars dance and cheerleading girls do the jig, electronic scorecards are yet not working in many stadia, and at the weekend match in Calcutta, there was no drinking water available for over 70,000 spectators.

Also, a floodlight blew its fuse stopping the game for half an hour and the dustbowl cricket pitch invited the wrath of players and analysts alike.

Clearly, there is nothing revolutionary about all this, and how it will change the game - for the better- is unclear.

Additional reporting from Prachi Pinglay in Mumbai

What the IPL needs is a couple of last-ball finishes with an Indian icon sealing victory. Until then, look out for more exclusives on the owners

Six matches in four days is not the kind of sample any self-respecting scientist would rely upon to draw Nobel-prize-winning conclusions, but the Spin is not a self-respecting scientist and its Nobel can wait. So far, the Indian Premier League has supplied two truly outstanding innings (Brendon McCullum and Mike Hussey), one world-class opening ceremony, one last-over finish (and even then the Bangalore Royal Challengers only needed two off six balls to beat the Mumbai Indians), one floodlight failure and at least one minor lathi charge (the Spin was almost caught up in the stampede outside the Wankhede on Sunday night but bravely fought its way out of trouble/stepped neatly to the side).

The fiasco at Eden Gardens, where the embarrassment over the temporary darkness was made worse by a minefield of a pitch, has been the one obvious clanger. But you do not have to delve too far beneath the surface to discern more subtle discord. Top of the agenda in some quarters is the extent to which the IPL is in thrall to celebrities and politicians, who regularly dominate the front pages every morning simply because they were good enough to make an appearance at the game the night before.

There was a telling comment from Greg Chappell in the commentary box at yesterday’s match between Rajasthan Royals and Kings XI Punjab after the camera had zoomed in for the umpteenth time these past few days on the Kings XI co-owner and movie star Preity Zinta. Chappell asked in all seriousness how the “owners are going to hold up” as the tournament progresses, as if travelling around India in first-class looking beautiful were a gruelling competition in itself.

Actually, the Spin exaggerates. An article in one of the Mumbai tabloids yesterday revealed how Shah Rukh Khan - the only person who has proved capable on a regular basis of stealing Preity’s limelight - travelled to Kolkata the other day not in first class but with the hoi polloi. Apparently, there was a bit of a rush on seats in first, mainly because of the extraordinary entourage that accompanies Shah Rukh wherever he goes, but it seems he was good enough to take one for the team and knuckle down in cattle class. Said one breathless observer: “Shah Rukh even ate the food served in the economy class without any objections.”

On one level, the Indian public laps up this stuff. Crowds go mad for SRK and one bloke even fell out of a stand at Eden Gardens on Sunday because he was straining so far to catch a glimpse of the great man. But not everyone is convinced. “What is seen in IPL is nothing less than hardcore commercialisation of Indian cricket at the behest of Bollywood stars, mighty industrialists, liquor barons etc, which reminds one of a masala super star Bollywood movie,” read a letter in the Deccan Herald.

Equally appalled by this tendency to report SRK’s every sniff and fart, one senior Indian journalist emailed the Spin yesterday to ask: “Did you notice how EVERY newspaper today had on their front page photos of the Gandhi-Nehru family with SRK at the Eden? If this is a sign of things to come, heaven help us.”

The Spin fears it is a sign of the way things already are. Even taking into account India’s love of the grand gesture and its veneration of superstars, there must be a concern that the IPL will turn into a plaything of the rich and famous first, and a playground for the cricketers second. Another Deccan Herald green-inker rages: “Our Bollywood stars are trying to make cricket into fun. Or, are they making fun of cricket? Is it right thinking and good for the future of Indian cricket?”

If that’s a little po-faced, then there is a good point struggling to get out. Surely the Indian people will tire of another seven weeks of front-page pictures showing SRK grinning and Preity cheering. What this tournament needs is a couple of last-ball finishes with one of the Indian icon cricketers sealing victory with a six. Until then, look out for more exclusives on what SRK had for breakfast.

Extract taken from the Spin, guardian.co.uk’s weekly take on the world of cricket