Year-ender 2023: Cricket cruised in fifth gear as India suffered yearend heartbreak

For Cricket on the world stage, 2023 will be remembered as the year of expansion, exploration, fair share and youthful transition. For India, of course, it is the big yearend heartbreak. The following is the first piece of a five-part series in which Meenakshi Rao analyses what the gentleman’s game meant to global sport this year.

Hyderabad: Yes, I know. You can’t remember anything other than heartbreak, the encompassing agony at Motera despite a start to finish 10/10 round of ecstasy Rohit Sharma and his team of warriors took you through in the 2023 World Cup.

Yes, I know. Such was the distress that only two journalists turned up for the Press conference for the T20 series that followed India’s abject World Cup defeat in the Final against Australia.

The heart-break of ICC ODI World Cup 2023 final loss:

Yes, I know. Only a few of us able to forgive Surya Kumar Yadav for sending away his T20 360 degrees skills to an ODI neverland when runs were most needed from him in the 14 overs he got to build up on a miserly score to make it a defending total beyond the 240 that the Sharmas and the Kohlis could manage.

Yes, I know. But do you know that before the World Cup was held in October-November of the Indian season this year, Cricket went where no player had ever gone before? The foremost achievement of 2023 has been the white ball crossing the ropes to land on unchartered territories.

Cricket goes to new territories:

Imagine, doggedly football nations like Italy and Germany, an Olympics predator like China and America with its Super Bowl linearism padding up for test drives, alongside Canada. Imagine, a T20 World Cup being co-hosted by an entirely non-cricketing land sparkling on the sporting map with tennis venues like Flushing Meadows and Olympian history at Atlanta.

Imagine, a nation like Namibia rising up to co-host the 2027 50-over World Cup along with South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Yes, the outreach exploded this year even though Team India imploded at Motera. And now that even a forever broken skipper in Rohit Sharma has ended his silence and self-imposed exile from immediate cricket with an insta appeal for fans to move on, one can reflect and realise that beyond the World Cup, cricket in 2023 was a year of triumph and transformation, often with India at centre-stage.

But let’s first talk about the new territories the International Cricket Council has been working hard at establishing cricket in.

Rise of Cricket in China:

China has been the toughest for explainable reasons. First, it has limited diaspora from cricket playing nations. Second, it continues to be a shrouded land suspicious to Western entries. Third, the bureaucratic red tape squarely wins in a colour contest with its successive Governments.

Having said that, did you that the Chinese Cricket Association has existed on the rolls since 2004? That as many as 21 universities have cricket as the official sport in the curriculum. And that it’s Women cricket team, 26th on the global T20 rankings, has a far greater presence than its men’s team which is 86 out of 90?

Yet, China with its huge revenue potential for cricket if it takes the run-up, is the final frontier for ICC plans, a dormant giant that’s being consistently stoked for activation if the game’s true global reach has to get into the superpower league, like football has been for ages. Progress here, according to ICC’s Asian developer is slow not static.

The rainbow story, however, emanates from the US where the sub-continental diaspora drives the game and the nation that will be co-hosting the upcoming T20 World Cup as a kick-starter. The venues would be New York, Dallas and Florida where a major part of the diaspora lives, mostly in techie pockets.

The global Cricket market size was valued at $ 298.91 million in 2022 and is expected to expand at a growth rate of 3.62 per cent, reaching $ 369.9 million by 2028. The estimated cricket viewership in the US is projected to reach 50 million by 2027, showcasing significant potential.

Growth of Major League Cricket:

The Major League Cricket (MLC), the first-class professional cricket league of America played its inaugural tournament in July 2023, is the most ambitious effort yet to establish professional T20 cricket in the US.

Six city-based teams featuring international stars like Sunil Narine, Aaron Finch, Faf Due Plesis and Kieron Pollard to name a few have attracted significant media attention and sponsorship deals. Initial viewership figures and fan engagement have been promising, indicating a potential market for the sport.

With the World Cup matches, the entry of cricket into the DNA of a world superpower signals a robust future for the primarily Commonwealth nations’ game.

Moreso, with the MLC receiving an added $120 million investment from multiple corporates, the Kolkata Knight Riders ploughing taking control of a team in Los Angeles (called Los Angeles KKR) and Chennai Super Kings powering the Texas Super Kings, not to mention big builders GMR Group investing in Seattle Orcas, cricket-specific stadia and training centres coming up rapidly to help develop a new generation of US-born players, cricket indeed is on its surest path this year.

Canada, too, has been in the midst of introducing cricketing nomenclature to its young ones who know ice hockey with the same singularity as American schoolkids know NFL.

For now, and despite a brief appearance of this nation in the 2011 World Cup, Canadians are, at best, known as weekend cricketers and their need to grow into something more popular and sustainable has been a work in progress for a long time.

Boost year for Cricket Canada:

However, 2023 has come as a booster year for Cricket Canada. They invested in the team by hiring seasoned coach Pubudu Dassanayake and sending them overseas for lead-up matches. The 14-member Canadian national team will be paid salaries that average about $55,000 to $65,000. The one-year contracts signed on Canada Day will allow a majority of the squad to train full-time.

Add to that the ICC’s successful bid of $3 million to get Cricket a place in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, and Canada may just be on the path of sustained growth.

An Olympics inclusion means many things for ICC’s growth plans, one of them being that the Canadian Olympic Committee and its Own the Podium programme will invest in grassroots cricket to breed next generation cricketers.

Besides this, the Canadian Premier League, planned for launch in 2024, aims at capitalising the growing cricket fanbase in Canadian the diaspora with a six-team league with franchises Toronto and Vancouver with some international players staled to join in.

To sum up, the 2023 path for Cricket was syrupy, both in established areas where the World Cup became its crowning glory and in newer areas where the recognition of the game and its growth cruised in the fifth gear.

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