Golden age of cricket viewing is coming to an end.

Mukul Kesvan writes about the strange death of indian cricket in his blog. I agree with his views completely and here is my take on it.

I am 27 years old as of this date and I believe I have been privileged to belong to the golden generation of Indian Cricket Audience. Anyone born in late 70s or early 80s can claim to belong to this generation. We are most impressionable in the later part of our first decade and early teens. No longer do our experiences pass us in a disconnected flow of events. We start forming a coherent picture from events around and in the process are affected at a deeper emotional level. Yet we are not mature enough to look at them objectively. 

We (and yes I agree with you that folding into a collective “We” is coolest for any sports fan), that is my generation, reached that age around late 80s and early 90s. And it was then that three important things started and continued throughout 90s. Firstly television became a household item and cable channels started gaining a foothold in Indian market. Secondly one day cricket started gaining a respectability and mass adulation that probably test cricket alone would have never achieved. Thirdly, and most importantly, a little man exploded on the Indian cricket scene named Sachin Tendulkar. I remember having a discussion with a friend during one of the early tours of Sachin. My friend told me that Sachin cannot speak English properly and I just refused to believe him. Ridiculous though it sounds now, it shows that right from the beginning of his career, he had captured my imagination like no other cricketer. Even then he could do no wrong.

Of course these 3 factors are not disconnected. In fact it is in there synergy that a more complete explanation is to be found for the phenomenal popularity of cricket in 90s. Magic of Sachin pulled more and more people to there television sets and fed the popularity of one day cricket. Yet that magic was in large part due to the fact, that Sachin was by nature a quintessential one day batsman and his aggression was coupled by a sublime beauty that probably a voice on radio could not have expressed. Television box became a canvas where he could paint his masterpieces day after day. Add to this the fact that he became the face of all sorts of myriad products, thus appearing on TV almost every single day. Sachin and cricket became an integral part of our life. We felt as if we were growing up alongside the master. People of younger generation missed the earlier part of his career while those of older were too wise and busy to be infected like us. 

But now sadly all these factors are losing there importance and from the dizzy heights of this golden period, we will probably fall straight into a chasm. With other sports especially EPL increasingly gaining prominence on sports channel, overload of ODIs many of which are complete mismatches and the impending retirement of Sachin, the age of cricket viewing is coming to an end. 

I myself am a big arsenal fan and am delighted by the sorcery of the wily frenchman every week. Yet none of his elegant passes and cool finishes can take me to the same stratospheric heights that Sachin’s backfoot punch or that signature straight drive can. Sadly in a few years, all that will remain of these are treasured memories and old recordings that only a few middle aged balding farts like me would care to watch.