The Attention Order: The Grounds Indian Cricket's Cameras Left Behind

The Attention Order: The Grounds Indian Cricket's Cameras Left Behind

Chennai, a January morning. It was about twelve degrees on the outer road of the M. A. Chidambaram Stadium at five o'clock, and a groundsman was parking his bicycle near Gate Three. In his hand was an old yellow rope, the one he uses every morning to measure the pitch. He has done this job for twenty-three years, and without being asked he said to me, "Sir, there will be two people in the commentary box today. It's a Ranji match." I asked him how the pitch was. He put the rope on his shoulder and said, "The pitch is good. There is nobody to watch it."

That sentence stayed with me all day. The pitch is good, there is nobody to watch it. The entire economy of Indian cricket fits into those nine words, and we have spent thirty years trying to read it off the scoreboard instead.

The press box is a floor above. Ten years ago it had eighteen seats, two telephones, a fax machine and a tea stove that stayed hot from seven in the morning. Now it has eleven seats. The rest of the space has glass around it and a hospitality box inside with air conditioning, where corporate guests arrive on match days and go out for a cigarette after the fourth ball. That day, three of the eleven seats were occupied. A colleague from a local paper, a photographer who had already decided to leave by afternoon, and me.

The scoreboard did its job all day. Runs were scored, wickets fell, no century was made, the match drifted towards a draw. If you pick up the newspaper the next morning you will find one paragraph, and even that will come off an agency feed. The man who was measuring the pitch with a rope at five in the morning is not in that paragraph. The three boys working on their line and length in the nets at two in the afternoon are not in it either.

I was there when the silence broke — but it was not the silence of a record. It was the silence of an entire system that had decided nobody would watch this match, and nobody was ever asked to account for that decision.

The calendar is where cricket's real budget is written

Debate about Indian cricket usually gets stuck in one place: Test versus T20. Is Test cricket dying, has the IPL eaten the red-ball culture, have young players lost the patience to bat five days. These are comfortable questions because they can be answered emotionally and nobody has to produce a balance sheet.

The real question is the calendar. A calendar is not a neutral document. It is a budget — a budget of time, of cameras, and above all a budget of attention. Once it is settled how many hours of cricket will be broadcast in a year, everything else is fitted inside that envelope. A tournament that does not find room in the envelope does not die. It simply disappears from someone's line of sight.

I began covering the Ranji Trophy when it still had full-time staff reporters. In the nineties a newspaper had two reporters whose whole year went through Ranji, Duleep, the Irani Cup and then Ranji again. They did not cover that beat. They lived in it. They knew which Saurashtra batsman was slow in the first innings and why he changed in the second. That knowledge was never on a scoresheet. It was stored in the reporter's body.

Where is that knowledge now? Nowhere. The post was abolished, and institutional memory went with it — the memory that told you which twenty-three-year-old might become something in three years. That is cricket's loss, not journalism's.

One number belongs here, late but it belongs. In the 2026 IPL media rights auction, the Indian subcontinent television rights went for roughly ₹23,575 crore and the digital rights for roughly ₹23,758 crore — a pool of about ₹48,000 crore for five years. Domestic first-class cricket's broadcast value over the same period has been a fraction of a fraction of that. I cite the figure so you can see that money did not move from one tournament to another. Money moved from one tier of the game to another, and cameras went with it, and commentators went with it, and the viewer's attention went with it.

None of this makes the IPL a villain. The IPL gave the Indian player a confidence that was not on his face on overseas tours in the nineties. It gave bowlers from small towns a stage Ranji never could. But we have to admit, honestly, that it built an economy, and that economy has its own priorities, none of which have anything to do with the ground reality of domestic cricket.

The man in the nets who never makes the press release

I am often asked how I read a team. My answer always sounds odd: I don't watch the scoreboard, I watch the nets. Tactics are just people in motion, and people are clearest when there is no camera on them.

In February 2026 I was at the mega auction in Bengaluru where every channel was counting the same thing — who went for how many crores. Outside the green room there was a corridor where boys sat listening to their agents. There I met a young man whose name I wrote in my diary that night and whom I still call once every three months. He went unsold. That night he did not ask me which team bought whom. He asked, "Sir, will I get back the money I spent on my tapes?"

His preparation had taken five years. It ended in six hours. His phone stayed off for the next twenty-four hours. I believe the most important part of any auction is not what is shown on television; it is what surfaces in the forty-eight hours afterwards, on the way home. I keep a separate notebook from that period with only the names that were not bought. It is my own small ledger, and I think Indian cricket should keep one too.

I set up a WhatsApp group for three of those boys — only to share trial notices. One of them got a Ranji Trophy game later that season. This is not a big story. It is a story that happens every day and is never printed.

Bench community: the most important Gabba story

January 2026, Brisbane. Eight India players had broken down. The bowling attack that walked out had four Tests of combined experience. The outside world called it a miracle. I was uncomfortable with the word, so I went to the places where the word miracle was not being used.

I spent hours with the net bowlers on that tour — the boys flown in only to bowl in practice, who sit outside the dressing room on match days, whom nobody knows. One of them told me his whole job was to bowl to Rishabh Pant the way Australian bowlers would, so that Pant could get used to it. He was spending his identity on someone else's preparation, and he was happy about it.

On the day India won that Test by three wickets and Australia's thirty-two-year unbeaten run at the Gabba ended, I wrote one phrase in my copy that night: bench community. Outsiders call it bench strength. That is the wrong word. Strength is a resource; a community is a relationship. What happened on that field was not the magic of a resource. It was the result of a habit in which one player does his work for another without calculating whether he will get credit.

I have had a habit since then: before every series I ask the coach for three unsung names. Three names that will never appear at a press conference. And I make sure at least one of them appears in my preview. It is not an editorial policy. It is a small responsibility I have taken on myself, because I know that if I don't write their names, nobody else will.

The years when nobody was listening

Women's cricket has been the longest unassigned beat of my career. In the nineties, if you covered women's cricket, the editor asked, "What is the return on this?" You did not have the answer, because the answer was not with the editor either.

2026, Lord's. The Women's World Cup final. India lost by nine runs. I was in the press box and I was tweeting all day. But that was not the real reporting of that series. The real reporting was a daily diary I filed from the team hotel — whose mother was travelling, whose father runs a sweet shop, who eats what at night and why. After Harmanpreet Kaur made 171 against Australia in Derby, I wrote a piece about her father's shop. It became my most-read copy of the year.

I learned something that year that changed how I work: a reader does not only want cricket, he wants somebody's home. Since then I begin every match report with a fan-pulse paragraph, after speaking to three fans in three different time zones. It produces no data, but it stops me from deciding whose story this is and whose it isn't.

The period after 2026 is different. Women's cricket now has a separate bureau, a separate league, and a separate line in the rights documents. When the Women's Premier League began in 2026, its media rights went to a major broadcaster for roughly ₹951 crore for five years. The number is exciting. I do not read it as a victory. I read it as an examination.

Because the question is not how many people watched in one season. It is how many are watching regularly five years later. How many girls started practising cricket in their own towns. How many reporters turn up to a women's match with the same preparation they bring to an IPL playoff. Enthusiasm is a moment; structure is a habit. We have secured the moment. The habit is still unaudited.

What happened inside the bubble never reached the scoreboard

The beat never stops, even in a bubble. In 2026, when the IPL was played in the UAE, I spent all sixty days inside one team's bubble. The stadiums were empty. Cricket happened all day and the hotel corridors had a strange silence at night.

My most important work in that bubble was not filing copy. At night I wrote a small series called the Bubble Diaries, where players could send in their thoughts without a name attached. One night a nineteen-year-old uncapped player wrote that his mother's surgery was that week and he knew that if he left the bubble his contract was finished. I read that page and had no idea what to do with it. If I published it, he was out. If I did not, I was not doing my job. I found a route: I put the page in the hands of the team physio with the name removed. That month the team held a mental health session for the entire staff. That did not happen because I pulled off a trick. It happened because someone read something someone had told someone.

Since then every tournament preview I write carries a section on human cost, asking teams directly what mental health support exists. I train junior colleagues to ask about wellbeing before they ask about tactics. The scoreboard keeps no record of this.

How it looks from outside

Now the part I most want to avoid and cannot leave out.

When an outside commentator looks at Indian cricket, two things are visible: a very large market and a very large talent pool. He joins the two and gets a product. What falls out of that reading is the pipeline between them, and where the pipeline leaks.

The first misreading is that Indian cricket's fight is a fight about formats. It is not. Format is a topic that is fun to argue about. The real fight is over which match is considered worth watching, and that decision is not made by a cricket lover. It is made inside broadcast contracts, sponsorship slabs and the calendar attached to both. When someone says Ranji is not what it used to be, it stings, but the cause is not the quality of the cricket. The cause is that you cannot watch it. What you cannot watch, you cannot have an opinion about.

The second misreading is about data. We live in a culture where every performance is converted into a number and the number is then treated as the cricket. The cleanest example I have of what we miss when we only watch the scoreboard is the Gabba, 2026. Read that scorecard and you get five names and a large miracle. Read that week's nets and you get ten more names who prepared those five. The scorecard records what happened on the field. The story records what happened off it. I have leaned towards the story for three decades, and I know exactly why — I have seen both, and the scorecard always writes less.

The third misreading concerns the reporter's relationship with the system. The 2026 match-fixing scandal made me an investigative reporter. In the same career came a second phase in which the franchise economy turned access into currency. I do not hide that contradiction. I sit in the same press box whose corridor has team officials handing out tea, and I know that if I ask a hard question next week, the next phone call goes to someone else.

My only answer is a professionally incomplete one: I keep a written list of the questions the subject would least like asked. If a draft contains none of them, I assume the draft is unfinished. It is not a moral shield. It is a habit that keeps me outside the room where compliments are distributed.

The fourth misreading is the most contagious — the belief that everything has been fixed. Women's cricket got a league, a broadcast, an audience, and the problem was declared solved. Domestic cricket got streaming on apps, and coverage was declared restored. I read it differently: there is a distance between a beat getting an audience and a beat getting an institution. Audiences can vanish in a season. Institutions — a permanent bureau, a permanent correspondent, a permanent budget line — do not. And behind every big Indian cricket story right now, that institution is not there. What is there is an enthusiastic freelancer without medical insurance.

The record of the room

One thing I have noticed in this trade is rarely discussed. The people closest to the system have the most information and the least freedom. The people furthest away have freedom and no information. Most wrong reporting on Indian cricket comes out of that gap, not out of conspiracy.

An example. I have seen many selection controversies, and the interpretation arriving from outside almost always runs in one direction — regional bias, an agent's pressure, a star's displeasure. I do not say these things don't exist. I say most of these interpretations were not formed in the room where the decision was made. They were formed in the corridor where people meet afterwards. And the corridor is louder, because the corridor has a camera.

The rhythm of a team is written in its quietest moments. I once watched a side lose four matches in a row and there was no drama in the dressing room. Before the fifth, the captain made no speech. He only changed the order in the nets — the man who usually batted last went first. That was all. The team won. The next day the papers carried a story about the captain's "team talk" that never happened.

That is the most important lesson cricket has taught me: the changes that matter make no noise. And our entire profession runs towards the noise.

The questions we stop asking

Every season there comes a point when I open my own old files and count how many pieces in the last three months could not have existed without an auction, a series or a press conference. If the number is high, I know I am running off the calendar, not the story. I do this count every quarter and every time it embarrasses me.

Because the calendar's questions are easy — what happened yesterday, what happens tomorrow. That street is always lit. But the stories the calendar never asks for are the ones that will be read in ten years. The story of a career that began on a small-town ground, the story of a groundsman who picked up a rope to measure a pitch, the story of a decision taken in a closed room whose minutes were never written.

The signal ahead

Next time you watch a cricket match — any match, any format — try a small experiment. Before you look at the scoreboard, look at who is on the field whose name you don't know. The umpires, the men returning the ball, the ones practising alone in the nets. In them you will see the next five years of the Indian team, and nobody will have to tell you who built it.

I am waiting for one thing, and it is not an announcement of a record. It is some editor's meeting approving one expense that produces no advertising — a correspondent hired only for domestic cricket, a budget that exists only for news. That day I will say the attention order has changed. Until then I will stand at five in the morning with the man with the yellow rope, because he is the one who tells me what the pitch is like — and, if I listen properly, who will not be coming today.