In the 1990s, RK Laxman's Common Man grieved lost matches and not entirely metaphorically. Laxman's bespectacled, dhoti-clad everyman appeared on the front page of the Times of India for half a century as the nation's emotional barometer and he devoted an entire cartoon collection to the sport. The Common Man Watches Cricket, published by Penguin in 1998, captured what everyone who lived through that era already knew. A defeat in a one-day international was not just a sporting result. It was a blow to the national psyche. You felt it in your bones. You carried it through the day.
Today, a world cup win produces celebration and the social media numbers confirm it. Brands activate their contingency assets and the players post their carefully worded gratitude. But the celebration feels managed. A knockout loss, when it comes, feels dissociative. Something has changed in the relationship between cricket and the people who watch it and the change is worth naming precisely because vague nostalgia about how sport used to feel better does not survive scrutiny.
What has happened to cricket is monetary debasement applied to an emotional currency. When a central bank expands the supply of money without a corresponding expansion of genuine economic value, each unit buys less. Cricket's administrators expanded the supply of fixtures, formats and world cups without a corresponding expansion of what made cricket valuable: the stakes, the scarcity, the sense that this particular tie matters in the present and in the future. Each match came to carry less weight. The feelings followed the arc of currency debasement. The mechanism is not vague.
The commentary box
In the 1990s, the voices behind the microphone were not always former players. They were journalists, writers, broadcasters, former players of a different generation whose primary allegiance was to the audience (or the producer) rather than to the dressing room. Tony Greig's excitability. Richie Benaud's restraint. Navjot Sidhu's exuberance before it curdled. These were distinct personalities who brought something to the broadcast beyond institutional loyalty. The commentary was an independent layer of meaning placed over the match.
That independence has been systematically eroded. As players became more commercially valuable, as their endorsement portfolios expanded, their social media followings grew, and their influence over broadcast rights and league participation became leverage, the commentary circuit closed around them. Recent former players now dominate every booth in every format in every geography. They share agents with the current players. They share broadcast deals with the boards. They have business interests that depend on maintaining relationships with the people they are supposedly analysing.
The result is a sanitised narrative that the audience finds tough to connect with. The failing tactic is described as bad fortune. The underperforming player has unqualified promise. The selection decision that defies logic is explained as a long-term direction. The criticism that a Laxman cartoon could deliver in a single image with devastating precision cannot be delivered in ten thousand hours of broadcast commentary. Because it is the same voices, the same opinions, and the same careful neutrality all year round, the commentary has become wallpaper. A central bank that stops publishing honest data does not stop influencing the market. It just stops being trusted by the people who matter and arouses suspicion elsewhere. The commentary box has reached a similar point.
Where the emotion went
The India versus Pakistan rivalry became the product rather than the by-product of competition. Packaged, promoted, monetised, and eventually so carefully managed that the matches themselves became secondary to the machinery around them. The pre-match content, the social media activation, the nostalgic montages, the carefully calibrated statements from players who had been briefed on what to say and what not to say. The rivalry felt real once. It has since morphed into a franchise, barring the occasional unscripted moment such as an offensive celebration or a gesture that the PR machinery did not get to first. The stage-managed version is now the norm. That India is the much bigger cricketing (and economic) force now doesn't help matters.
Cricketing emotion migrated to thirty-second clips, meme formats and engagement metrics and something unexpected happened to the grief in the process. Less sustained collective mourning, less national introspection after a significant loss. The Indian cricket team wins more often these days, which numbs the audience to victory and defeat to an extent. The fixture calendar has done what no amount of positive messaging could: it has made loss transient by making the next opportunity imminent. When another match arrives in two days, the grief never fully lands, there is no space for it to accumulate. The policy of resting the best players in matches not seen as top tier adds structural support to the pain-free processing. And, sometimes, the contest itself is bereft of context, a reflection of the widening gulf between the higher-ranked and lower-ranked teams.
What remains is more targeted: the demonisation of individual players, coaches. The collective grief that once bound a nation in shared feeling, which led to sporadic threats and player effigies being burnt (thankfully, things of the past), has fragmented into episodic outrage directed at specific people. The emotion has become less shared but more weaponised.
The supply expansion
The mechanism underneath all of this is simple. In the 1990s, India played perhaps 25 one-day internationals in a year. A Test series against Pakistan or Australia was an event that the diehards organised their life around. The calendar had gaps. Stretches where there was no play, which meant that when cricket returned, there was anticipation of the specific battle. Tendulkar vs. McGrath. Each match carried the accumulated weight of the wait.
That scarcity has been systematically eliminated. And the players themselves can't complain about the scheduling. Three formats, each with its own world cup, bilateral series, and broadcast windows. The Indian Premier League occupies two months of the domestic calendar. Leagues draw players away from national duty into the year-round machinery of franchise cricket. Every boundary is named after a product; every 'strategic' timeout is an advertising slot. The match itself, especially in franchise cricket, begins to feel like the content between the advertisements. This is quantitative easing applied to sporting attachment. Liquidity injected into the system inflates nominal activity while reducing the perceived value that made the underlying asset worth holding.
The player has become part of the same commercial fabric. We knew Tendulkar through his bat. We know the current generation through their Instagram grids and their brand extensions. The cricket becomes one of several things they do rather than the only thing they are known for. Which changes, quietly but fundamentally, how you feel about watching them do it.
The competition cricket now faces
Cricket's administrators might have managed all of the above and still retained the sport's emotional grip on its audience if the audience had nowhere else to go. In the 1990s, it largely did not. A Sunday ODI competed with Doordarshan reruns, the occasional Bollywood film, and the limited social calendar of a pre-liberalisation India that had not yet fully discovered the leisure economy. Cricket was not just the best entertainment available. For large parts of the country, it was the only entertainment available at the scale and intensity it operated.
That monopoly on attention is gone and it is not coming back. Streaming platforms have made prestige television a daily habit. In-person experiences, travel, live music, food culture, wine-tasting, fitness, adventure sports, have become aspirational in ways they were not for a previous generation. The urban Indian middle class that formed cricket's most passionate constituency has developed tastes, habits, and spending patterns that cricket now has to compete against rather than simply occupy by default. Football offers a subtle rebuke. The English Premier League's emotional grip on the same urban Indian audience remains intact because its administrators have not yet made the same trade.
The Common Man, still watching
Cricket had it all, barring enormous money, once. The one-day international that Laxman's Common Man watched in the late nineties carried genuine stakes, genuine scarcity, and genuine consequence. The result meant something that the next match could not immediately undo. What cricket's administrators understood was how to monetise that meaning. What they did not understand, or did not care to understand, was that meaning, once monetised beyond a certain point, stops being meaning and becomes hum-drum.
The Common Man is still watching. But debased currency does not recover its value simply because it continues to circulate. That, more than any score line, is the loss worth mourning.