India Wins World Sports-Viewing Championship

Monday, 07 July 2008 13:17

Written by essbee, onion uttapam news

It was a super Sunday yesterday. Roger Federer took on Rafael Nadal for the third successive final between the two at Wimbledon, attempting to become the first man since 19th century to win six Wimbledon titles in a row and equal Bjorn Borg's record of 41 wins at the venue. The big boys of Formula One stepped on the gas at Silverstone. And Mahendra Dhoni and his team clashed against Sri Lanka in the finals of the Asia Cup at Karachi.

Of course, no Indian figured in the clashes and races at Wimbledon and Silverstone and in the match they were involved, they failed to beat the Lankans. Nevertheless the super Sunday turned out to be a great day for us as India lifted the world championship trophy in Sports-Viewing registering highest viewership of sporting contests across the world. A record seven million Indians sat glued in front of their television sets between 3.30 PM and 10 PM on Sunday evening using their remotes furiously to switch between ESPN, Star Sports and Star Cricket, the three channels telecasting the sports events at Wimbledon, Silverstone and Karachi respectively, narrowly beating United States which recorded 6.7 million combined views of all sporting contests telecast on US channels.

India is of course now new to winning sports viewing contests. We are the greatest global audience in the world. During the recent Euro soccer tournament, it was reported that TV audience dipped in England to abysmal levels because the English team failed to qualify for the tournament. India, not being a European country was not eligible to play in Euro soccer championship, but that didn't deter millions of urban Indians from religiously following the fortunes of European teams on television and internet.

Viewing sports on television is India's forte. We specialize in it. The ability to watch sports on television comes naturally to us. Earlier our viewing habits were limited, confined only to the game of cricket. But now with 24/7 sport channels bringing us live telecasts of exciting sporting events around the world, we have learned to appreciate and enjoy viewing other sports too, including sports like football where we are ranked around 154th in the world. In last few years, sports viewing has really caught on with Indians and television channels are hopeful that soon India would be leaders in viewing other sports like athletics, golf, basketball, baseball, cycling or swimming.

What makes India so good at sports-viewing?

Several factors come into play making sports-viewing a favorite activity of urban India's male population.

Firstly, lack of adequate number of playgrounds. As soon as Indian children grow up they find the narrow compounds of the housing societies they reside in too constraining and limiting. Watching sports on television is much easier and more well-suited to space-constrained Indian conditions, requiring only a television set that occupies barely two square feet space in our living rooms.

Secondly, during their growing years, Indian youngsters are busy playing more exciting, non-athletic, brainy sports like competing for admissions in prestigious colleges and merits lists in class ten/ twelve examinations which leaves them with no time to hone their athletic skills. Insufficient number of good colleges screws up the demand-supply ratio resulting in cut-off percentages for college admissions getting higher every passing year. Consequently Indian adolescents prefer concentrating their energies on perfecting their mugging and rote-learning skills - skills that are absolutely needed (though perfectly useless in an age where unlimited bytes of information can be retrieved by punching in few keys) in cracking competitive examinations.

But by far the biggest element that goes into choosing to view sports rather than participate in sports as players, is the 'blame factor'. Playing any sport carries the potential risk of losing, which in turn necessitates finding scapegoats for the loss. Since its much easier to blame someone else (and also less hurtful to our egos) for the pathetic performance of the team you are watching play than blaming yourself for your poor performance on the field, we find viewing sports much more comforting and satisfying than playing sports. And of course like viewing, blaming others for everything that is wrong also comes naturally to us. We have ready-made scapegoats like corrupt-politicians-controlling-sports-bodies, greedy or apathetic sports administrators, poor infrastructure or incompetent coaches on whom we can conveniently shift the burden of failures of our sports teams.

How to excel at viewing sports matches where India or Indians don't feature?

Our resident expert sports-viewer, maverick58 offers valuable advice for the benefit of sports-apathetic minority. "Learn to identify completely with either of the two competing players or teams. For example, if you are a female and don't give a rat's ass about futball-shutball, you can still learn to revel in watching a soccer game between Italy and Germany by identifying with the Italian team. Discover a common factor between you and Italy, which can be something totally unrelated like say, Sonia Gandhi. So if you admire Sonia Gandhi for being a woman on top of our political power structure, you can become an admirer of Italian soccer team too. But if you hate Sonia Gandhi for being an Italian-born ruling the destiny of a billion Indians, you can easily identify with Germans by picking up a copy of Mein Kampf and learning to love their xenophobic, genocidal ex-ruler and world war II hero, Adolf Hitler."

Advantages & Benefits of viewing sports

The biggest advantage of following sports events on boob tube is the easy ability to switch identifications and avoid grief and heartbreak when you or your favorite team or player loses. So if you are pinning for Rafael Nadal, but he loses to Roger Federer in a crucial final, you can temporarily switch your loyalties and feel happy that Federer won a record number of successive titles or tallied Bjorn Borg's number of wins at his favorite venue. In case you have chosen Federer as the guy to whom you will lend your cheering energies and he loses to Nadal, you can swap your allegiance by appreciating the fact that despite being a clay-court specialist, Nadal pulled off a shock victory over a five-time grass-court champion.

"When you are actually playing a tennis match and happen to lose it, you are wallowing too excessively in the misery of losing the game to feel happy that your opponent has broken some record or appreciate his remarkable achievement in beating you." opines maverick58.

All in all, watching sports is a win-win proposition and its not really a surprise that we are good at it.

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bigstoner: ...

While the IPL may have brought spectators and players untold joy, it has been causing a terrible headache for cricket's anti-corruption police. Sir Paul Condon, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner who heads up the International Cricket Council's Anti-Corruption and Security Unit, has warned that "'the IPL brings with it the biggest threat in terms of corruption in the game since the days of cricket in Sharjah'. The Sharjah tournaments, which reached their peak in the mid-Nineties, were the subject of many rumours of match-fixing," reports the Daily Telegraph. "As far as the ACSU are concerned, the explosion of Twenty20 has set back their campaign to clean up cricket. At international level, there is no ranking system, and the games are still not treated with the same seriousness as Tests or 50-over matches, making them a natural target for racketeers."

July 07, 2008

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