Sachin vs BA saga - Cricket isn't as popular as you'd like to think

The tweets that started the ruckus

On Friday, a British Airways passenger misplaced his baggage and vented out his frustration on social media. The airline company duly responded as per policy and asked the aggrieved customer for his details so that they can look into the matter. Nothing out of the ordinary, right? But there is one thing that I haven’t mentioned here, and it is that the passenger was named Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. The BA tweet asking Sachin for his full name, baggage reference and address got viral in a matter of minutes as cricket fans in India got incensed just because the tweet asked the Indian maestro for his full name. Many fans saw it as an insult to the person they refer to as God of Cricket, and replied to the tweet in the most alarming of fashions with tweets ranging from curses that BA’s share prices will crash to theories that the airline company misplaced the legend’s baggage on purpose. And as all this took place, they conveniently missed out on the fact that it was in all probability an automated response to Sachin’s tweet by a bot, which sends out standardised replies to complaining customers. 

And this is not the first time such a ridiculous thing has happened. Last year, millions of Indian fans spammed and bombarded Maria Sharapova’s social media accounts with the choicest and vilest of abuses and long poems about Sachin’s cricketing records. And why? All this because she said no when asked if she knew who Sachin was after he watched her play at Centre Court. Ask yourself, do you seriously expect a Russian athlete, where cricket is not played in the slightest bit, to know who Sachin is? Do you know the names of Russian ice hockey and chess legends yourself?  

And putting that aside, it is also totally unacceptable to think that a British Airways employee (assuming that the tweet was not sent by a bot) should know who Sachin is. Why? Simply because cricket is not popular in other countries as much as it is in ours. That is the hard, bitter truth. We are a one-sport country where cricket is like a religion and all other sports are given the cold shoulder by most people. Other than the subcontinent, cricket is played and followed at a decent level in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and England. But what differentiates them from us? A simple answer is that cricket is down in the pecking order in these countries in terms of popularity and hero-worship. While football and rugby remain the most watched sports in these countries, cricket is also followed but not at the same level as in the subcontinent. People enjoy their cricket, but do not go ballistic when someone does not know their star players. But in India, we simply refuse to watch and support other sports in our country and remain so vehemently attached to cricket, that we don’t see that it is what is not allowing us to grow as a sporting nation. We have so many heroes who suffer far worse treatment than misplaced baggage, and yet, not a word is said about them and not an ounce of support is shown to them. We too can be a multi-sport country and get more than a handful of medals at the Olympic games if we get behind our athletes, but the truth remains, that we don’t.

And coming back to cricket’s popularity, outside the subcontinent, there is hardly any passion towards the sport in the same way that there is here. A statistic that is thrown around every time such an issue comes up is that cricket is the second-most popular sport in the world. This stat is highly misleading as it only considers absolute population numbers while the popularity of a sport is clearly defined by the number of countries where it is played and how far apart these countries are situated, and not just number of people. By considering only the populations of nations, it is only obvious that the results will be skewed in favour of highly populated countries, such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. To put things into perspective, these three countries together have almost the same number of people as both the Americas and Europe combined! And not surprisingly, cricket is not a primary sport in a single country in all the three continents. 

Finally, the point of writing this piece is not criticizing the Gentleman's game or the great man that Sachin is. The point is simply that we should come to terms with the fact that it is perfectly fine if people outside India do not know our cricketers and the fact that cricket is not as popular across the globe as we would like it to be. And there’s not much we can do about it, sadly. But on the other hand, there is something that we can do and should do. We can, along with cricket, try to support other sports as well. It’s not that hard, and the truth is that our athletes need all the support they can get. If we can get behind these sportsmen and women, and show them the same affection as we show our cricketers, we can actually slowly and steadily transform into a multi-sport nation.

Australia celebrates Sir Don Bradman, Rod Laver and Ian Thorpe together, New Zealand celebrates Sir Richard Hadlee and Richie McCaw together, and England celebrates WG Grace and Sir Bobby Charlton together. But why can’t be celebrate the likes of Vishy Anand and Leander Paes the way we celebrate the God of cricket. Give it a thought!