MUMBAI: Beware cricket organizers the world over before the fast-scaling popularity of the shortest version of the game turns sour and ends up in nausea. That surely is the warning that the Champions Twenty20 League, reaching its finale in India, has thrown up.
The event, coming close on the heels of the Twenty20 World Cup in England and the Champions Trophy in South Africa, without even as much as a breathing space in between, is ending up as a classic example of overkill. Hasn’t someone said that too much of a good thing is bad?
It need not be emphasized that if a cricket promotion, in whatever form, does not succeed in India; it has very little hope to thrive elsewhere.
Considering the enormous cricket-crazy population in a vast country, with large stadia all over, the game just has to have international flavor for it to be devoured. But nothing of that sort happened during the Champions League.
A well-orchestrated hype and all the attendant gizmo and a sprinkling of world-class players just failed to recapture even a fraction of the popularity that the two editions of IPL had generated.
The sparsely filled stands, despite the convenient hours of the matches, timed with the festive season, came as a shock to the organizers. But the worse was seen in television viewing of the event. If TRP (Television Rating Points) is anything to go by, one cannot recall any multi-team international cricket event having touched such a low.
Lalit Modi, whose brainchild it was, thought that the event would be as big a success as his IPL. He desperately tried to bring in the crowds by issuing thousands of complimentary passes to the match staging associations for free distribution, but surprisingly, there were no takers.
One of the reasons that the event did not click is the lack of identity with foreign teams that represented the champion twenty20 teams of various countries. Wayamba, Cape Cobra, Victoria Bushrangers did not mean anything to the local fans. Their plight turned worse when the three Indian teams, Delhi Daredevils, Royal Challengers Bangalore and the holders of IPL2 Deccan Chargers, performed so terribly below par.
Two very relevant points emerge from the hefty flop-show. One is that cricketing rivalry is natural and in-born; you cannot create it artificially in the manner of TNA Impact (professional wrestling promotions).
The second and a more important point is that it is time to realize not to let the goose that lays the golden egg bleed to death by laying all of them in a heap. One only hopes that the lessons from the Champions League will have been learnt. People have already started talking about what fate awaits the IPL3 to be held in India April next.
