Cricketing Idiosynchrocies ....

News out now shows the ugly underbelly of the business side of Cricket.

• Doordarshan which was out-bid by a long way will get a 'clean feed' after it protested against receiving 'dirty feed'.
• Nimbus will give the 'clean feed' with a time-lag of SEVEN minutes. Yes! you read it right., SEVEN minutes. What a joke! That's equivalent of 2 full overs lag.
• BCCI is the worst of the culprits as it created the crisis in the first place by encashing on cricket's popularity and punishing the viewing public. What a 'classless' organization. In the last year, we have had cricket shown on DD Sports, Sahara ONE, Set Max and NEO Sports. Why is that BCCI has displayed very little acumen in balancing short term and long term interests of the game. In professional sports across the globe (Football, Basketball, Baseball, American Football), contracts are stable and drawn to established players and not to the rookie-who-outbid-everyone. Case in point is Australia, where the feed has always from Nine Sports and they have signed with ESPN-Star through 2011.
• Prasar Barathi - Doordarshan's master are calling Cricket matches as events of "National Interest". How shameful that the country with rich culture has to claim national interest on a sports event. While not willing to shell the going price for cricket matches, they have always taken the negative approach of arm twisting the production companies and forcing them into sharing the feed.
• Indian Government is looking to bring an ordinance / bill that makes it mandatory for all cricket matches involving India to be telecast on Doordarshan. There is nothing more ridiculous that the government trying to get involved in deciding which sports events should be showed on national television or not. This is the same government that has procastinated from passing the Whistleblowers Protection Bill and Women's Reservation Bill but has time to come up with ordinances and bills for cricket events. Rest assured, our future generations will laugh at our misplaced priorities.

The overall losers are the viewing public who are gonna be delayed to the extent of seven minutes on television. What's comical is that the Radio feed is going to be live and so is the data on the internet. If you plan to mute the television and hear commentary from the radio, you might re-think the strategy for these 4 matches!