Confused Cricket: Sport Tries to Ratchet up Excitement by Adopting Football Traditions
“Oh Lord, Thank you for all the ‘cricket ‘ on the telly, but can we please get the English Premier League back. Amen.”
OK, hopefully God is reading this and I’ll soon get to see a football match. I am at the point where I don’t care who is playing, which league they are in, or whether they have matching uniforms. The cat is out of the bag … ‘I am Rhea and I am a football addict.” I love all sports but I need at least one game of footie a week to stay sane.
I have been watching the ongoing Cricket the past few days and I especially like the parts that have been borrowed from football in an effort to make the game more exciting. Yep, cricket is trying hard to become more and more like football.
So much so, that at the opening ceremony of the ongoing Airtel Champions League Twenty20, they had Shaggy singing “Feel the Rush,” the official anthem for the Mascots (Trix and Flix) of the Euro 2008 football tournament. If that was not enough they have also borrowed the tradition of children leading the players out to the playing pitch, the only difference being that these kids don’t actually lead the players out from the tunnel but each cricketer grabs hold of a kid from the sidelines of the pitch. Hopefully, by the next tournament, the cricketing officials will get this minor detail sorted out.
Also, now cricketers get to shake hands with each other before the start of the game and line-up for a tournament anthem. This particular tournament’s anthem is an original and quite honestly it is rank bad. They should have probably stuck to swiping stuff off of football … the UEFA Champions League jingle is kinda nice. I am just saying it could be a nice way to pay homage to the UEFA Champions League, considering this whole Airtel Champions League tournament is inspired by it.
Such is Cricket’s scare of being sidelined by other more exciting sports that they have a brand new format to the game - the 20-20 format, which I lovingly call ‘The Circus.” What this format basically is supposed to do is to make the game shorter and more exciting, less predictable and less laid-back. Dare I say, a bit like football?
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