Image branding – Are players play-acting to create an image?

Unmukt Chand – cricketer or brand ambassador?

In the last few years, a very disturbing trend is emerging in sport, especially cricket. Anil Kumble’s Tenvic isn’t really the first of what you would call image branding or player career management companies. There are many. In the yesteryear, you would hardly come across such terms in cricket. Now, Indian cricketers are super stars and even those on the fringes of the team are millionaires. Sometimes, those who have been out of reckoning since Geoffrey Boycott’s ‘grandmum’ retired from active cricket find themselves to be millionaires too. Ask Saurabh Tiwary, who, along with Glenn Maxwell, is the most expensive bench-warmer the game has seen.

Part of the reason why great men like Sachin Tendulkar are respected is because of their choices. The undisputed king of endorsements for a very long time hardly ever appeared in ads that were controversial or that were misleading the youth. The modern cricketer isn’t just a cricketer anymore. He is a commodity, branded and packaged to millions of consumers. He is a brand in himself. That is the scary part. I wonder if there are occasions where players are doing what they do because they know they are being watched, because they have a brand to live up to, or maybe a brand to create if they don’t have one already, with millions at stake. Nasser Hussain, in a wonderful interview, pointed out that there are all kinds of players in a team – those that are shy and those that love attention. Darren Gough, for example, loved to know where the cameras were, he said. It is a lovely insight into the tough world of players who get used to attention and find themselves branded long before they are the complete product. Ask Unmukt Chand, the would-be superstar of Indian cricket, who entered the big leagues with a commercial that featured Dhoni, Kohli and Raina. The blue-eyed boy of Indian U-19 cricket, Unmukt found his stump cartwheeling first ball of the IPL and is yet to make a mark at international senior level cricket.

KKR skipper G Gambhir and RCB skipper Virat Kohli arguing during the IPL match between RCB v/s KKR at Chinnaswamy Stadium,in Bangalore on Thursday 11th April 2013

The new Cinthol ad shows Virat Kohli exhorting us that ‘alive is awesome’. Perhaps, he took it a bit too seriously. The spat on the ground during the RCB-KKR match was ugly to say the least. I cringe every time I watch Pollard and Bravo, who play for the same international team, take digs at each other. Do you care, I want to ask them, so much for the teams that you play for less than two months in a year, that you disrespect the guy who wears whites with you and sings the national anthem standing next to you? The Kohli-Gambhir spat, which needed intervention by Rajat Bhatia, is way above the banter that the two West Indians get involved in. I wonder how much of this over-aggressiveness stemmed from the actual heat of the moment. It was not a nail-biting match by any stretch of imagination. It wasn’t the IPL final. It was just another dull game on a dull day, the spat being the highlight of the match. Incredibly, Virat Kohli and Gautam Gambhir, two of the angrier men in the Indian international team, also play for the same state – Delhi. Kohli, already branded as the ‘guy with attitude’, often shows too much of it on the field; way too much for someone who has been in the limelight for a while. He is almost the anti-thesis for Dhoni’s ‘cool-dude’ look. Similarly, for years I have asked myself if Dhoni is really as cool and detached as he is made out to be. It is wonderful to have a captain who doesn’t keep spanking the players through wild glares and nasty words. Yet, Dhoni’s expressionless calm has let many a match drift, many a player slacken. His penchant for last over and last ball finishes is well-known and well-documented. In fact, his attitudinal change witnessed during the Australian series, where he was more forthcoming and involved, was much appreciated by commentators and fans alike.

As a cricket lover who has grown up watching gentlemen like Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid put their best demeanour on the ground, it is hard for me to digest players reliving their ad-images on-field, carrying it like a prized mantel. And Rahul and Sachin have fought tougher battles and faced greater heat than Kohli or Gambhir have in their relatively shorter international cricket careers. That they let the tempers of a meaningless T20 league game affect their behaviour towards someone they share a dressing room with for 9 months a year is what makes me wonder if it is just cricket, just the heat of the moment.

There was a time when a spontaneous moment of affection between a judge and a participant in a reality show made the audience emotional. However, reality shows these days have excelled in the art of kicking controversies and play-acting lame moments of attempted emotion. The judge walking away fuming, the child hugging the judge and crying, the singer being insulted by one judge and defended by another, the close-up of an extremely emotional judge or relative of a participant wiping tears – the schmaltz is in poor taste. Yet, it is making its way into the gentleman’s game, one antic at a time, one gimmick at a time, one spat at a time. Sport could be ugly, we know that. Football players dive regularly to get free kicks and penalties. They stand up to each other, say nasty things. Who can forget the famous Zidane head-butt that ended France’s chances of winning against Italy to own the World Cup? But the stakes were high there, the heat intolerable, and the antics, although cringe-worthy, were understandable too. A large part of the audience is intelligent enough, I believe, to understand where the line should be drawn. They have a sense of the occasion. To see players getting marketed as brands, tagged with images and looks of a particular kind, leading them away from the beauty of the actual game is something authorities have to look into. The last thing I want to see on TV is a player showing attitude, not to intimidate opponents in a serious game or pass a message, but just to look cool in the next ad he endorses.