Provoke and increase following!

England skipper-turned-commentator Michael Vaughan. Pic/Getty Images

Cricket in India is very fortunate to have a massive following. The interest in the game as well as in those playing it means that there is no shortage of views and comments about the game, the team, the individual players, officials, selectors, commentators and anybody even with a tenuous connection with the game. The IPL has helped generate another fiendishly loyal following which sometimes can mean that Indian supporters only want and like players from the franchise they support to do well and are quite blasé, if not actually happy, that a player from a rival franchise team has not done well even when he is playing for the country.

Not that this is a totally new phenomenon but has happened to a slightly lesser extent in the past when fans of individual players, who in the minds of the supporters, were rivals even though they were teammates playing against another country. To give a few examples, Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi v Ajit Wadekar or GR Viswanath v Gavaskar or Gavaskar v Kapil Dev or Dravid v Tendulkar and now Kohli v Rohit Sharma. The fans of these players wanted not just their player to do well, but his so called rival or competitor to fail even though they were both playing for India. That's the kind of passionate following the game generates in India.

In such a scenario, the media be it print or electronic is only too happy to cater to the need to put up some content, any content, as long as it gets them eyeballs or viewership. While this is perfectly understandable from the economics point of view, it also means even a hardly known cricketer from another country gets his space in the Indian media space simply by commenting on Indian cricket. As the current series is going on between India and England, there are many from other countries who have been having their say and finding that they are getting headlines in India. Most of them are hardly known in their own countries especially now since they are retired from the game but in the Indian media space, they are pretty regular as whatever they put up on the public media finds itself in the media in India.

A deliberate strategy

For some, it is a deliberate strategy to provoke response from India as it increases the number of followers they have on their individual media channels. It's pretty foolproof, as the moment they write something critical about any Indian player, they know they are going to be bombarded with hundreds of thousands of retorts and responses from Indian fans of the player. The abuse or retorts doesn't bother them at all as all they are interested in is increasing their followers on their media pages. Michael Vaughan, the former England captain, has developed this into a fine art and is quite candid about it. He actually is a very humorous guy and great fun to be with and he knows that once every few days a teaser about an Indian player or Indian cricket is going to get him plenty of hate and sometimes vile responses, but his media page will have more followers than what he had before his latest post.

Even from our neighbours we are now getting advice about team selection and strategy and those with a not-so-savoury past are also getting their views into the Indian media space. That is the draw and power of cricket in India.

Security breach

On another note, the breach of security for yet another time by the same person at the current Test match at The Oval is most disturbing. The fact that this serial offender actually barged into Jonny Bairstow should wake the mandarins at the ECB to the dangers of a player being seriously hurt by such breaches of security. Today, it is easy to identify potential troublemakers and especially someone who in the last few days has breached the security at an earlier venue. So not allowing them entry into the ground itself would be the best option. Fortunately, nothing untoward happened and the offender will probably be fined heavily, most of which will be covered by the wagers he would have won for doing what he did. Before these intrusions, nobody even knew his name or who he was. But now, after wearing a counterfeit India cricket team shirt and entering three cricket grounds, he is famous or rather infamous, but still known to Indian cricket lovers now.
There you are, the power of Indian cricket again.

Professional Management Group