G'day, all.... hope those of you who do celebrate the festival had a great Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, a friend in Madras faxed me a news clipping that has me intrigued enough to call up the advertising agency in question and ask for a copy of the full report. Hopefully, I'll get it soon, and be able to publish it on Rediff for your edification.

Meanwhile, a quick take on why I thought this report -- the Adwise Indian Cricket Report, produced by Pathfinders, the market research division of Lintas -- is important.

Since Lintas has several big-time corporate clients who are interested in cricket as a medium of brand promotion, it was in the agency's interests to find out what the public actually thinks about the game, in this period of intense flux.

There are quite a few startling figures in there -- but the one that struck me most relates to decreasing levels of interest across the country. Here is the regionwise breakup:

North: 22 per cent of the respondents report that they are no longer interested in the game; while a further 42 per cent felt that their level of interest had declined.

East: 10 per cent no longer interested, 60 per cent conscious of declining interest.

West: 17 per cent completely uninterested, 41 per cent aware of declining interest.

South: 17 per cent completely uninterested, 39 per cent conscious of declining interest.

If I were the brand manager of a company and a public survey turned in these figures about the product I am in charge of, I would begin to worry. Seriously.

I would be worrying about my product. Equally -- assuming I was working in a professionally managed company, and not in that amateur club that goes by the name of the Board of Control for Cricket in India -- I would be worrying seriously about my continued tenure in my job.

The BCCI honchos, for obvious reasons, don't have the latter worry to contend with -- there is no way they are ever going to lose their posts owing to non-performance. It hasn't happened thus far and, given how the BCCI is constituted, it won't happen in the foreseeable future, either.

Isn't it time for them, though, to start worrying about the product they promote -- to wit, cricket? At the drop of a hat, we keep talking of the enormous interest and passion there is for the game in this country. But look at the figures, and you will find -- if you club the 'completely interested' lot with those who report declining interest -- that over half the respondents are no longer the cricket fanatics they used to be.

This survey, mind you, was done by one of our premier ad agencies. What will Lintas do with the results? Simple -- it will use it to assess whether its clients should put as much money into cricket as before. Given that half the country is giving the game the thumbs down, it is obvious that the agency's recommendation will be an emphatic 'No'.

And this is why, if I were the Board, I would about now be going around with bags under my eyes from chronic insomnia.

The administrators need to wake up to the problem (which raises the question -- do you suppose the Leles, Muthiahs and more importantly, Dalmiyas and Dungarpurs, have even read this news item, or been interested enough to call up Lintas and ask for a copy of the report?). And find ways to get the public interested again.

How?

That question provides grist for a column, but I will defer that until I get the report in its entirety. For now, though, I can think of one immediate area to address.

We in India are an event-driven nation. Consider this: When the soccer World Cup was on in France, sales of footballs skyrocketed across the country. When the Olympics kicked off in Sydney, you couldn't board a local bus or train, or walk into a bar, without finding yourself in the middle of discussions about the relative merits of the Australian and American swimming teams, or whether Andrea Raducan deserved to be stripped of a gold because she inadvertently took a cold medicine, or whether Marion Jones' bid for five golds was adversely affected by that lump of nandrolone that goes by the name of C J Hunter.

The bottomline is, if there is a major football event, we go football-crazy. If the Olympics is on, we can talk of nothing else.

To bring the fan back to cricket, we need to create, showcase, an event. And luckily for the BCCI, we have the perfect event coming up on our calendar -- the upcoming series against Australia, on home soil.

There is a lot riding on this series. We beat the Aussies in the one off Test for the Border-Gavaskar trophy, then beat them again in the three-Test series. Australia then went on to become world champions in both forms of the game (officially in the case of ODIs, de facto if not de jure in the case of Tests). And handed us a thrashing when we went there.

What we have now is a Mexican standoff. The world champs will want to add, to their glittering record, the cachet of beating India at home. India for its part will want to win, if only to put the nightmare Down Under behind them. A win will enable the Indians to say, 'Big deal, you guys beat us on your pitches, we beat you on ours, so what makes you world champs anyways?'

It is this face-off that provides the BCCI the perfect marketing opportunity (and not, Dungarpur's frantic efforts to bring it about notwithstanding, an India-Pakistan encounter).

In Australia, they have already begun planning, and preparing, for the tour. The coming months will see a team coming here from Down Under, to inspect the venues and report back to the team management. You can, judging by precedent, expect the Aussie coaches and backroom boys to start working on their premier players -- on the likes of McGrath, Brett Lee, Stuart McGill and the rest to prepare them for the task of bowling on Indian wickets, and on the frontline batsmen to get them ready to counter the turning tracks.

We need to do likewise, and openly at that. The BCCI needs to schedule camps wherein the frontline Indian batsmen, and their projected understudies, are brought together at a venue where really quick tracks have been prepared, to get them ready to face anything the Lees and McGraths can throw at them. We need our spinners to be herded together into a similar camp, where under the eye of the masters of the art, they practise the wiles and guiles they need to tackle the free-flowing Aussies. We need camps on fielding, on running between the wickets. We need to give the physio a fortnight with the boys, to get them to peak fitness.

We need to do these things, in full view of the public. That way, the players will get honed to the peak of fitness and skill, readying them for the most prestigious encounter on our cricketing calendar, and simultaneously, the public will have reason to put match-fixing behind them, and focus on cricket.

The BCCI needs to go even further. Did you notice how, during the Olympics, the organisers went out of their way to get the Aussie crowds behind their swimmers and athletes? They distributed dazzling white boards which, when used in the fashion of a Mexican Wave, created a shimmering effect around the ground. They distributed gloves in the national colours, for the fans to wear on their hands and wave. They picked up every trick in the hypemeisters' book, and used it to brilliant effect.

We need to learn from that lesson. We need to do whatever it takes to bring the excitement back to the ground -- and if it means, to mention another idea, distributing free T shirts in the national colours so that when the Indian team walks out to play and looks around, it is confronted by a sea of red-white-and-green, well, what of it? Sponsors will gladly pay for the privilege of under-writing such an exercise -- all it takes is the vision to conceive of it.

There might be a tendency to dismiss all this as gimmickry. My answer to that would be, so what? Hey, when the circus comes to town, why do you suppose they parade the elephant down the city thoroughfares? It is to drum up interest and get the people to put warm butts in the seats. And judging by the figures I see in the report, cricket could do with beating its drum, as loud as it can, just now.

And hey -- happen the board wises up and gets those camps organised, we just might be well prepared enough to give the Aussies as good as we got, a year ago.

You wouldn't complain if that happened, would you?

Cheers

Prem

Mail Cricket Editor