So, I was trawling through Ted.com when I came across this Harsha Bhogle video on the rise of cricket in India. Harsha is his usual charming self as he outlines the latest episode in the rise of cricket in India – T20.
Overall, it was a fairly ordinary talk – coming from one of the sharpest thinkers about cricket today.
- He makes very few points that offer any new insight either into India or her relationship with the game. And there are far too many clichés – more like an article you’re likely to see in a Sunday morning newspaper than something from Harsha.
- While IPL has clearly cemented India as the place to be for cricketers to make money, India’s rise as a cricketing superpower (economic) started well before the IPL. ‘Bollywoodization’ and ‘corporatization’ hadn’t happened in this scale, but cricket had become a huge money spinner by the end of the last decade. Hearing Harsha talk, you could quite forget this.
- He spends too little time discussing the ‘cricketing’ aspect of the game. Admittedly, TED isn’t the forum for a serious talk on how cricket technique and style of play have changed over the years. But to talk about the rise of cricket in India without making a single point about the quality of cricket on display was disappointing.
- It was unfortunate that he didn’t have an opportunity to elaborate the point on how cricket has impacted other sports and talk about the last 20 years in Indian hockey/ athletics.
But if you have 15 minutes, you should still watch this – he does have some nice video clips (the auction video clip (which I hadn’t seen before)) and interesting snippets on the things that happen behind the scenes – watch for the Dwayne Bravo story. And he does a good job of driving home how India has made T20 her own with the IPL.
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