Cricketainment

 I am not able to recall the exact series, but guess it was surely after Steve Waugh's retirement, for i remember him sharing his views on cricket coverage. Whether it was part of a commentary or an interview, that i am not sure, but the point he made was, how advertisements have began to eat up on the coverage. 

It was an ODI series where India was playing Australia i guess, where either the first ball of the over or the last ball of the over would be overlapped by ads!! If it happens to be a wicket taking delivery they would force a replay else it would be more of a match with 250+ deliveries rather than the standard 300!! And even during the rest of the over, the screen space would be shrunk to a smaller square with a "L" shaped window being used for ads!! It felt more like watching cricket in between ads, literally and when Waugh made those comments, there were criticism as well, saying the Westerners are jealous of the growing clout of BCCI.

Cut to circa IPL (well, IPL definitely has became an era of its own), we have commentators crying "DLF Maximum" or "Rupay credit card +followed by the hindi tag line in butchered accent+ maximum" or whomever the sponsor is for every six. We even have "moments" during the innings where people are reminded to order food in swiggy or take care of their mutual funds or go and check about the online gambling game at the app store icon nearest in your phone!!! Excluding the over end ads, we've two 2.5 minutes strategic time out "ad breaks" for each innings. IPL players, support staff and every other crew member, wear ads stitched into dresses and are walking talking advertisements themselves. No wonder it is the richest league in world cricket. But going back to what Waugh said, feels like they are over killing it. Pretty soon, the ad companies and sponsors will decide the rules of the game and we may soon see "12"'s or "10"s being hit, with each innings total ballooning to test match figures. I would recommend bowling machine companies to throw their hat in the ring, by coming up with competitive machines replacing poor bowlers, who would eventually be marginalized as mere props in next couple of seasons. May be the machine companies can have their own competition in coming up with whose machine can bowl the fastest or something like that!! Till that time, you can either play book cricket or the play station version of it and if it is boring, try to watch the motion capture version of it on TV!