Are the cameras more important than the spectators? © Hampshire Cricket

There's more: the Hindustan Times reports that the Zee deal with the BCCI is dead and the first casualty is the lunatic 'home' series of ODIs that India was going to play with South Africa in Ireland. Ireland! Apparently the BCCI's idea of home means a series where the BCCI's chosen telecast partner gets to keep the ad revenues. This is Lalit Modi's definition of a home away from home.

It's all part of the BCCI's plan to replace spectators with television cameras. I can see it now: portable pitches (held together with glue), third-country venues, empty stadiums, and cross-eyed players wondering if it's Tuesday and Tangiers or Wednesday and consequently Riyadh?

But unfortunately for this excellent scheme Doordarshan kept taking its mandatory pound of flesh or share of feed and Zee couldn't bear it any more, specially after losing boatloads of money telecasting the epic India-West Indies-Australia tri-series staged in that well known nursery of cricket, Kuala Lumpur. Anyone remember who won or what happened? Thought not. But here's the good part: HT claims that Zee lost fifty crores! Isn't that wonderful? It couldn't have happened to a nicer company: people who hope to make their money by getting Dravid and Co. to play Mickey Mouse matches in Malaysia, deserve all the grief they get.

Perhaps all the cruddy ODIs that had attached themselves to the venerable hull of Indian cricket like barnacles will drop off now. Rahul Dravid and his team mates have been begging for a let up in their schedules for years now: maybe they'll get a break now. It's the only way that this cash-cow milking Board was ever going to provide relief: via a massive commercial cock-up.

In its greed and its contempt for the game and its players, the BCCI merely follows the lead of the ICC, the game's apex organization, which invented the Super Test to fill its coffers and, en passant, to devalue the most precious currency of the game, Test cricket. Luckily everyone hated it and it is unlikely to be repeated, (though its statistics need to be expunged from Test records for the damage to be undone).

The Hindustan Times also reports a rumour that ESPN-Star's new channel might step in to telecast the Afro-Asia Cup if Zee pulls out. I hope they do: the more money our sports channels lose by telecasting ersatz farce, the faster they'll learn the lesson of this morning's news—that the game will be purged of dross by a cricketing inversion of Gresham's law: "When there is a legal tender currency, good money drives bad money out of circulation."

	Cricket in India attracts few spectators to the ground, largely because of the bloated ticket prices © Getty Images

Around the time India was routing Bangladesh in an ugly stadium in Dhaka watched by nearly no one, England was rolling up the West Indies even more comprehensively, only they were doing it before a full house in Leeds. When it wasn't raining in Headingley the sky was a vivid blue, denser than the bleached blue of summer skies in the subcontinent.

From newspaper reports the English scene looked better than it felt: temperatures hovered just above zero, fielders kept their hands in their pockets and the West Indians could have been forgiven for thinking that everything, even the weather, was against them. Just as no one should play Test cricket in the dehydrating heat and humidity of Bangladesh in May, the early, frozen part of an English 'summer', as Indian teams have found in the past, is unfit for human consumption.

But Leeds was better than Dhaka because there were people watching. Inspite of the cold there were men dressed as brides in white lace complete with veils and trains, pinkly English spectators dressed as Mexicans in ponchos and sombreros, happy knots of people perversely chugging beer in the bitter cold. They had paid the absurd ticket prices (between fifteen and forty five pounds a day) and they were willing to brave the cold to enjoy themselves because a day out at the cricket was meant to be fun.

There's a difference between Leeds and Dhaka or between cricket in England and Australia and cricket in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. (I was tempted to say West and East when I remembered that the Sri Lankans seem to have a great time watching cricket at home as do the West Indians—with the exception of the last World Cup when the ICC with its genius for doing the wrong thing managed to take the joy out of cricket in the Caribbean)

Ticket prices in England seem to bear some relationship to the spectator's ability to pay. Fifteen pounds is roughly 1200 rupees a day which seems a substantial sum of money to me, especially if you add the cost of travelling to the stadium and back and the prices that the concessions at the ground charge for food and drink. But from the evidence of the stands at Headingley, it's a price that the market will bear.

Compare this with the sub-continent.( I'll leave out Pakistan and Bangladesh: I don't know enough about those two countries, though from the evidence of television, Test match attendances are dire. I remember reading that during the last two Indian tours of Pakistan the stands were empty because tickets were too expensive, security too tight and ticket-booths too hard to get to.) Let's look at ticket prices and their effects on attendance not at the worst of our venues, like that drain, Feroz Shah Kotla, but at the best, say Mohali.

	At Headingley, a day out at the cricket seemed like fun © Getty Images

This is an extract from the report in the Tribune of 13 March last year, about the Mohali Test against the English tourists:

"Mohali, March 12
After the decision of the Punjab Cricket Association to reduce the prices of the General Block and VIP Block tickets, today witnessed a heavy rush at the stands of the stadium on the fourth day of ongoing India-England Test match on at PCA Stadium, here. The decision on reduction combined with the weekend rush had the stands pretty full today."

From Rs 200 per day for the general seats and Rs 1500 for the VIP seats, the prices had been reduced to Rs 50 and Rs 300. In its report the Tribune had a Class X student, a mechanic and a clerk saying that the Punjab Cricket Association's decision to cut prices had drawn them to the stadium.

'"I am a middle-class man and I cannot afford to spend Rs 200 per head for my family of five. So I went on making excuses to my children when they insisted on watching Rahul Dravid playing here. But when I came to know that the general block prices have come down, I decided to take my family to the stadium to watch the action live," said Ram Khilawan, a Junior Division Clerk with Department of Punjab.'

The PCA made tickets affordable and Mohali had a full house, the teams in the middle had the benefit of the ambience spectators alone can create and seats that would have gone to waste made some money for the association. Everyone benefited: so why aren't affordable tickets the rule in cricket venues in India? Why do associations price tickets so ineptly? A Test match seat is a perishable thing: why wouldn't you get a low price for it instead of nothing at all? Airlines do it; theatres in sensible countries have cheap standby seats you can buy at the last minute, why don't Indian cricket venues? The answer, I think, is that having grown fat on television revenues generated by ODIs, provincial cricket administrators are more concerned with handing out passes to people that matter than getting cricket fans to the stadium. Revenues from ticket sales seem like small change to these 'honorary' administrators, careless of house-keeping or accounting, who are more concerned with winning votes in tiny electoral colleges than attending to either the bottom line or the comfort of spectators.

It's killing Test cricket off. The pass-bearing 'patron' will turn up for an ODI, but he isn't a fan, he's a parasite and parasites don't watch Tests, fans do. To get the fan to the stadium you need sensibly priced tickets, public transport to the stadium, parking space, covered stands so you don't die of heat stroke, food you can safely eat and loos that aren't pits slopping with…well, let's not go there. This isn't a utopian programme: it's been done successfully. Mohali's amenities are wonderful: they just need to get their prices right and Chepauk in Chennai consistently attracts large crowds for Test matches because it does the basic things well.

I'm not asking for beer to be sold at the Eden Gardens and I don't expect to see jolly Indian men dressed as dulhans any time soon at an Indian Test match. I'll settle for happy young faces sucking Sprite up with a straw wearing paper caps and cheering. That way when I reach for the remote on my sofa (having paid my stadium dues in youth!) I'll have the satisfaction of watching Test cricket played in populated stadiums for live bodies, not just the television camera. And, rather more importantly, the thrill of Test cricket close-up will keep India's passion for the long game alive.

The national audience for cricket was created by Doordarshan. I was part of that pan-Indian audience when it first gathered as one to watch the World Cup in 1983. Which partly explains why I was so annoyed in an earlier post that Doordarshan had passed on the Bangladesh Test matches.

	The Indian players rush to the pavillion after defeating the West Indies in the final © AllSport UK Ltd

But when we collapsed for under two hundred, the fairy tale seemed over. You have to understand that none of us really thought we could win. This was the West Indies, twice champions of the world already. Just to list their bowlers was to finger a rosary of scary modern greats: Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall and Joel Garner. And we were one-day minnows; that we were in the final was a miracle. In the first two World Cup competitions we had won once, against a minor team.

In the break between innings, I did what what Indian fans have always done: I consoled myself with individual performances amid the collective wreckage. Individual performance, actually, in the singular: Srikkanth top-scored with 38. Reading the scorecard now, it's odd to notice that it took him 57 balls to make, because I remember it as a berserker innings.

Anyway, after the team folded, we drove to a friend's house because it seemed too depressing to sit indoors waiting for the West Indies to begin killing us. Venkat, who lived a few miles away, had a new colour television. I saw Desmond Haynes and Gordon Greenidge take guard in colour. The West Indies didn't just have the four greatest fast bowlers in cricket, they also had an invicible top order. Haynes and Greenidge had been the best opening partnership in the game for years. Number 3 was Viv Richards, whose on-field aura was more menacing than that of most fast bowlers. Number 4 was the skipper, Clive Lloyd who had been giving Indians a hard time from the time I was twelve. And they batted all the way to eight.

But colour worked for us. Balwinder Singh Sandhu, the gentlest swing bowler in the history of cricket, got Greenidge to shoulder arms to a slow-motion in-dipper and that was the end of Greenidge. There was a nasty passage when Richards was cruel to Madan Lal, hitting him for lots of unnecessarily emphatic boundaries but that ended in colour too, with Kapil in whites bounding across green turf to catch a red ball dropping over his shoulder in his brown hands. We tore ourselves away from that magic box because we had to get home for dinner. By the time we got back, Lloyd and Larry Gomes and Faoud Bacchus were gone too, consumed, presumably, by the corrosive colour of Venkat's television. Mohinder Amarnath didn't let the handicap of my mother's old black-and-white set get to him: bowling even slower than Sandhu, he winkled out Jeff Dujon and Marshall who were threatening a lower order resurgence, and then, suddenly, the thing was done.

There were people screaming and little explosions in my corner of Delhi. All the accounts I've read of that famous victory have fire-crackers going off. And they're all true, because for once the phrase 'India rejoiced' wasn't a metaphorical flourish—it was literally true. The World Cup of 1983 was the first cricket event that had a national television audience in India. Indians had watched live cricket on television for years before 1983, but never as a networked national audience. Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay, Madras didn't watch the same programmes. Only with the Asian Games of 1982 did the National Programme come into being, which linked all of Doordarshan's broadcasting nodes for the same telecast. The result was that India's incredible win in 1983 was watched by a single pan-Indian audience, tens of millions of eyeballs transfixed by a single event.

This coincidence of national telecasting and World Cup victory transformed cricket in three ways.

It cemented cricket's primacy in India because this newly consolidated television nation wanted winners and Indian cricket team had delivered glory on cue. Two years later, our one-day heroes delivered again when, captained by Gavaskar, we won the World Championship, a one-off one-day tournament in Australia, this time in blue costumes (in 1983 the teams wore white). These two victories won cricket a new mass audience which was as interested in savouring the unfamiliar taste of international glory as it was in watching cricket.

This perfectly timed, nationally televised victory, created a massive captive audience for any company that had the sense to advertise its wares in the course of a cricket match. India hadn't yet emerged from the austerity of autarky and high tariff barriers (the Maruti 800 was launched the year we won), so this was an untapped ocean of consumers. Unsurprisingly Dhirubhai Ambani saw the opportunity first and staged the Reliance Cup in 1987. Pepsi moved in to India at the end of the decade and began recruiting actors and cricketers for its campaigns because they were the keys to India’s consuming classes. First Kapil Dev, then Mohammad Azharuddin, then Sachin Tendulkar and his generation became rich and the BCCI became powerful. By the time India began to open up its economy at the start of the Nineties, cricket owned the national audience and was perfectly positioned to milk a sub-continental market.

And once it became clear that India owned the world’s largest and most lucrative audience for cricket, the balance of power within world cricket changed decisively. For good and ill, India became the pivot of the ICC, of world cricket. The consequences of this shift in power are still working themselves out.

And all of this began that long ago summer evening in 1983, when spectators like me, individually clapping for India, found ourselves part of a national communion.

This post first appeared as an article in the April 2007 issue of Cricinfo Magazine

	Did you expect India to register a comprehensive series-win before the Bangladesh tour started? © AFP

I just hope we don't build on this for England. Because if Dravid decides to stay with five batsmen in England, he can't, after this performance, pick Laxman for the first Test and Jaffer, Karthik, Dravid, Tendulkar plus Ganguly and Dhoni would be an iffy line-up against the moving ball and short-pitched bowling. Lots of people have written in to point out that Ganguly did well against an all-pace attack in South Africa and so he did. He has earned his place in the team…at No.6. I don't want him walking in against Harmison and Flintoff at the fall of the fourth wicket, specially if Dhoni's in next. Dhoni's a splendid player in sub-continental conditions but he has yet to show us that his home-made brutality travels well. Besides, I'm not sure that India's dominance in this Test match has much to do with a five-man attack. Zaheer and Kumble between them have done the business as so often before. I can't see that the exclusion of Ishant Sharma would have made much difference to our fortunes in the Mirpur Test. Footnote: given that Karthik can't catch anything without gloves on, Laxman in the slips in seaming conditions would be more than useful.

I notice that cricket reporters on web sites and newspapers (and not a few of the comments in response to the last post) are 'perplexed', 'baffled' and 'worried' by Tendulkar's strike-rate. The conclusion is a) that Tendulkar is batting for individual milestones, not for the team and b) that he's past his sell-by date. Sanjay Manjrekar had a piece in the May issue of Cricinfo Magazine where he observed "…Indian players have a tendency to overstay their welcome. Kapil Dev, with due respect, clearly robbed India of two good years of cricket from the young Javagal Srinath…There is a fear that a great cricketer can never be replaced. But didn't Tendulkar replace Sunil Gavaskar adequately in a matter of two years?" You could be forgiven for thinking that Manjrekar's hinting rather broadly that it's time to send Tendulkar on his way, but even if that's not what Manjrekar meant, from the evidence of public comment over the last couple of days, there are lots of fans and journalists who think Tendulkar's a liability.

I think they're daft. On the matter of Tendulkar thwarting the team interest by scoring too slowly, it's worth remembering that India scored over six hundred runs at four runs an over in less than two days and there was enough time after the declaration for Zaheer to wreck the Bangladeshi top order. There's a difference between a proper nostalgia for a younger Tendulkar who took attacks apart and the unlovely, irrational instinct to savage a great player because he has been diminished by time. Yes, Tendulkar isn't the batsman he was and his decline is the more poignant for having been accompanied by a change of style: a great attacking batsman has become a nudging accumulator. But I suggest that till we find a young batsman who can nudgingly accumulate at the same rate as Tendulkar does now, we leave him be. I don't think Suresh Raina or Yuvraj Singh are credible rivals for his batting spot. In the South African series Tendulkar was well below his best but it's worth remembering that he played rather better than his captain did.

I'm not surprised by Tendulkar's attritional methods and his determination to get his hundreds. Having been slandered by gossip (the rumours about his subversion of Dravid's authority), dissed by Chappell, reprimanded by the board for speaking out of turn and excluded from the Bangladeshi ODIs as punishment for unspecified 'sins', he could be forgiven for thinking that he had been put on notice, that given the opportunity the time wasn't far off when the selectors and the team management might 'rest' him for Test matches. Having struck two centuries in successive Tests he's achieved two things: One, a stay on the popular Manjrekar Prescription (viz. old guys should be recycled) and two, he's boosted his own morale as a batsman. For those of us who wish the team well this is good news at the start of a busy Test season.

	"Why the batsman the team turns to in difficult conditions, is denied the opportunity to consolidate his place in the Indian side and fill his boots in easier ones?" © Getty Images

Now that every Indian batsman lucky enough to be picked looks likely to score a century against Bangladesh, this is a good time to look at the considerations behind Indias five batsmen policy in the long term. The point of only five batsmen is more bowling options. Despite the matchless Adam Gilchrist, Australia traditionally play six batsmen, a keeper and four bowlers. One of the batsmen (Michael Bevan, Andrew Symonds, Mark Waugh) has generally doubled up as an auxiliary bowler. Dravid has been pushing the idea of five bowlers for a while, though it isn't clear that India has five bowlers penetrative enough to back up the policy. Anil Kumble, an in-form Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan, an un-injured Munaf Patel and Sreesanth might (just) justify their places but Harbhajan is in decline and Munaf Patel keeps breaking down. Irfan Pathan swinging the ball and shoring up the lower order would be perfect, but Greg Chappell, with his gift for turning gold into lead, did for him.

In Bangladesh the five-bowler experiment is relatively risk-free. On slow pitches Bangladesh's seamers aren't a threat and Indian Test batsmen aren't likely to be troubled by poor-to-middling left arm spin. I can't see us playing five batsmen against England in England this summer or even at home against the Pakistanis later this year so the best thing you can say about the policy is that it's Bangladesh-specific. But you have to experiment somewhere if five bowlers is what you favour so perhaps Bangladesh is Dravid's laboratory.

The trouble is that Dravid's experiment, even if it succeeds (i.e. we beat Bangladesh), is so poorly set up that it has no lessons for the future. And the problem isn't the five bowlers, it's the five batsmen he's decided to go with.

Mohinder Amarnath wrote a piece recently where he argued that it was a mistake to pick two wicket-keepers (Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Dinesh Karthik) in the playing eleven. I don't think that's where the problem lies. I'm old enough to remember the time India played both Farokh Engineer and Budhi Kunderan. Kunderan played as a batsman and he was picked for the same reason that Karthik is: he showed promise as an opener, a position India has always had trouble filling. Karthik has scored runs every time he's been given an opportunity and I don't think it's a good idea to unsettle the team's best batsman, Dravid, by making him open.

No, the reason this experiment is meaningless is that Dravid and Ravi Shastri have picked Sourav Ganguly over VVS Laxman. If India were to play six batsmen, Ganguly walks into the team. He has made a brave return to the Indian team in both forms of the game and he deserves his place at number six. As a Test batsman Ganguly is still twice the player Yuvraj will ever be. But in a line up of five, after Karthik, Wasim Jaffer, Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar, surely the fifth has to be Laxman. His recent form in Test matches, his overall record, his average, his ability against fast bowling are all superior to Ganguly's. Were we to play Australia or England or South Africa on quick pitches I can't see anyone rooting for Ganguly over Laxman and if it's Bangladesh and slow bowlers we're talking about, nobody sane is going to argue that Laxman is less than masterful against spin. Or that Ganguly is immeasurably the better fielder. I could argue the reverse: Laxman is a fine slip catcher.

So why did Ganguly get the nod over Laxman? It doesn't seem to be on account of the 'process' that Dravid was once so keen on. If 'process' is shorthand for a rational long haul strategy systematically implemented regardless of short term setbacks, the dropping of Laxman seems the very opposite of process: it seems an example of how expediency trumps merit and reason in Indian cricket, it seems, in short, a political decision.

It seems a political decision forced upon the team management by its complicity in the selectors' decision to 'rest' Ganguly (along with Tendulkar) from the one-day games against Bangladesh. My guess about the reasoning behind Laxman's exclusion goes like this: World Cup gossip, a television sting operation and the rumours about Dravid's difficulties with senior players made it clear to everyone that they were being punished for having been recalcitrant, awkward and subversive of the captain's authority. In this context dropping Ganguly from the Bangladesh Tests would have seemed like vendetta so the tour management dropped Laxman instead.

Ganguly, with composure and courage, compiled a century in the Chittagong Test which meant that Laxman was benched for the Bangladesh Test series. So if Dravid is serious about a five batsman team in the long run, the current series has entrenched a batsman who is dodgy against the short ball at the expense of perhaps the best player of fast bowling in the Indian team. If he isn't, if the five-batsman strategy is designed for the sub-continent's slow pitches, then he needs to explain to us (and perhaps to his erstwhile team mate, Laxman) why the batsman the team turns to in difficult conditions, is denied the opportunity to consolidate his place in the Indian side and fill his boots in easier ones?

Dravid has form in the business of dropping Laxman from the side. He has chosen Yuvraj over Laxman in a home series during Chappell's regime as coach which, in Test match terms, is close to sacrilege. But to drop Laxman (and remember that Laxman was vice-captain in the last Test series we played in South Africa) because it was inexpedient to drop Ganguly is worse because it seems to indicate a willingness to politically finesse a cricketing choice. To exile Laxman to the margins of the team, to make an extra of a batsman who by right should be seen as one of the anchors of India's Test match batting over the next few years, is inexplicable especially when the captain who has made that call had the privilege of playing glorious second-fiddle to Laxman through his great, match-winning innings in Kolkata in 2001.

	'How can there be a Test series being played that features the Indian team with no television coverage and no radio commentary?' © Getty Images

At the time I felt sorry for my hosts but not especially worried because I assumed that this was a provincial problem. Once I got home to Delhi, a proper metropolis, the capital of this great republic, normal service would be restored. Except it wasn't, because the dispute between Neo Sports and Doordarshan on the one hand and Neo Sports and cable and satellite operators on the other, made sure that the only Indians watching were the Tamil-speaking audiences of Raj TV.

How has it come to this? How can there be a Test series being played that features the Indian team with no television coverage and no radio commentary? You might say that a contest with Bangladesh is unlikely to make pulses race, but you'd be wrong. Bangladesh helped boot India out of the World Cup, they nearly got the better of a Test match against a full-strength Australian touring side recently, so they're worthy opponents. I think there's a substantial audience for Indo-Bangla Test cricket; not as large as the audience for one-day cricket, of course, but large enough.

What's happening here is that Doordarshan isn't willing to settle for the modest profits that a low-profile Test series with Bangladesh might have brought in. It telecast the one-day matches because the ad revenues are higher for those, but refused to agree terms with Nimbus (which has bought the television rights from the Bangladesh Board) for the Test series. Amazingly Doordarshan was telecasting the one-day series being played between Sri Lanka and Pakistan at the same time as it was conspicuously not doing live coverage of the Indian Test match. This wouldn't be amazing if Doordarshan was a private television station. ESPN/Star as private channels are responsible to their shareholders. If they find that there's more money to be made telecasting ODIs played between Sri Lanka and Pakistan than Test matches featuring India, that's their business.

But Doordarshan, as it never tires of telling us when it suits its purpose, is the 'national broadcaster'. It's paid for by the tax-payer's money. It's happy to use its special relationship with the state to strong-arm other television channels into sharing the cricket that it wants to telecast. When the BCCI sells the rights to international matches played in India, it makes it clear to the purchaser that the live feed and the revenues accruing from the telecast will have to be shared with Doordarshan. So private broadcasters pay vast sums of money for television rights and when Doordarshan thinks there's enough money to be made, it piggy-backs on them to get its snout into the trough.

Now I happen to think that the fan's urge to watch cricket matches live and for free doesn't amount to a fundamental right. I'm devoted to cricket and I think anything that helps reach the game to Indian fans is a good thing, but that doesn't mean that free-to-air telecasts of live cricket on state television should be mandatory. Cricket for its audiences is a form of entertainment: covering it doesn't qualify as public-service broadcasting. There's no large public good being served here: telecast cricket is a commodity and there's no reason for the state to intervene to make sure that it's available for free. If Doordarshan wants to subsidize its consumption by the general public, it should be willing to buy the rights or pay top dollar for sharing the feed.

But Doordarshan, supported by the Indian state, argues that telecasting international cricket featuring India is a form of public service broadcasting. The only justification for its claim that it has a mandatory right to 'share' live pictures is its invocation of the Indian poor who love the game but can't afford to watch it on cable. Given the fact that more and more people receive Doordarshan not directly through their aerials but via cable this isn't, even on its own terms, a watertight argument. But let us, for the sake of argument, allow that Doordarshan has a legitimate case, that DD National is a unique vehicle for carrying the exploits of the Indian cricket team to the plebeian fan. In which case, how is this purpose served by covering Sri Lanka's matches with Pakistan when India is playing Bangladesh?

If the 'public good', defined as the Indian fan's right to watch his heroes play, trumps private profit when it comes to the World Cup or a Test series between India and Australia played in India, how come this logic doesn't apply to the India-Bangladesh series? By Doordarshan's own logic its willingness to telecast ODIs featuring two foreign nations while ignoring India's champions as they labour in the heat of Chittagong, besides being inconsistent, amounts to a kind of treachery. If DD's invocation of the straitened Indian fan helps it muscle its way into vast revenues, surely it should use those revenues to subsidize the telecast of series that might be less profitable. If it doesn't (as it hasn't with the Bangladesh series) it should forfeit its right to share telecast rights to matches featuring India that have been bought at huge cost by others.

Doordarshan's greed and callousness apart, the blackout of the Bangladesh Tests is a symptom not so much of Test cricket's decline in the sub-continent as the BCCI's deliberate orphaning of Test cricket. The Board's greed for ODI revenues has led to the overloading of the Indian team's calendar with standalone ODI contests. This has gone hand-in-hand with the Board's unwillingness to build a cricket season around a major Test series (as the Australian Board has done with its end-of-year Test matches), its failure to make tickets for Test matches available in advance and the failure of provincial boards to build decent facilities in their stadiums. Stadiums like Chepauk and Mohali that have attended to these things have large Test match attendances. Television revenues from ODIs have so debauched the BCCI and the its affiliated boards that they have no interest in the hard work necessary to keep Test cricket viable and popular in the modern media marketplace. Despite the amount the amount of Test cricket played the world over, between the BCCI and Doordarshan it won't be long before live Test cricket on Indian television becomes an occasional treat, not a constant pleasure.

This post is adapted from an article that appeared in The Telegraph, Kolkata, which can be read here.