The Business Of Cricket


Book Description

The Business of Cricket: The Story of Sports Marketing in India. HOW SPORTS MARKETING HAS BOWLED US OVER Sports marketing is all-pervasive today - no matter where you look, there is no escaping a Dhoni, a Tendulkar or a Sehwag. It wasn't always like this. There was a time when sportspersons got fame from sport, but not the money commensurate with that fame. Then Sunil Gavaskar, India's first batsman-entrepreneur, came along, and in his wake followed Kapil Dev and Sachin Tendulkar. Helped by television and competing multinational brands vying to expand their market in a liberalizing India, sports marketing, which in India is synonymous with cricket, exploded. The culmination of this process was the Indian Premier League (IPL), a brilliant marketing concept that was a win-win for players, sponsors, media and viewers alike. This book, written by two sports enthusiasts who are also ace sports marketers with a combined international experience of forty years in marketing, takes us on an engaging and informative journey through the highs and lows of sports marketing in India. Along the way, the authors explain what constitutes good sports marketing, how the market can be expanded, what the prospects are for sports other than cricket, and why the sports fan needs to be better treated. An incisive, heartfelt book that will appeal to sports fans, marketers, advertisers as well as administrators.




The Great Tamasha


Book Description

To understand modern India, one must look at the business of cricket within the country. When Lalit Modi--an Indian businessman with a criminal record, a history of failed business ventures, and a reputation for audacious deal making--created a Twenty20 cricket league in India in 2008, the odds were stacked against him. International cricket was still controlled from London, where they played the long, slow game of Test cricket by the old rules. Indians had traditionally underperformed in the sport but the game remained a national passion. Adopting the highly commercial American model of sporting tournaments, and throwing scantily clad western cheerleaders into the mix, Modi gave himself three months to succeed. And succeed he did--dazzlingly--before he and his league crashed to earth amid astonishing scandal and corruption. The emergence of the IPL is a remarkable tale. Cricket is at the heart of the miracle that is modern India. As a business, it represents everything that is most dynamic and entrepreneurial about the country's economic boom, including the industrious and aspiring middle-class consumers who are driving it. The IPL also reveals, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, the corrupt, back-scratching, and nepotistic way in which India is run. A truly original work by a brilliant journalist, The Great Tamasha* makes the complexity of modern India--its aspiration and optimism straining against tradition and corruption--accessible like no other book has. *Tamasha: a Hindi world meaning "a spectacle."




The Picador Book of Cricket


Book Description

A tribute to the finest writers on the game of cricket and an acknowledgement that the great days of cricket literature are behind us. There was a time when major English writers – P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alec Waugh – took time off to write about cricket, whereas the cricket book market today is dominated by ghosted autobiographies and statistical compendiums. The Picador Book of Cricket celebrates the best writing on the game and includes many pieces that have been out of print, or difficult to get hold of, for years. Including Neville Cardus, C. L. R. James, John Arlott, V. S. Naipaul, and C. B. Fry, this anthology is a must for any cricket follower or anyone interested in sports writing elevated to high art.




A Social History of English Cricket


Book Description

Acclaimed as a magisterial, classic work, A Social History of English Cricket is an encyclopaedic survey of the game, from its humble origins all the way to modern floodlit finishes. But it is also the story of English culture, mirrored in a sport that has always been a complex repository of our manners, hierarchies and politics. Derek Birley’s survey of the impact on cricket of two world wars, Empire and ‘the English caste system’, will, contends Ian Wooldridge, ‘teach an intelligent child of twelve more about their heritage than he or she will ever pick up at school.’ In just under 400 pages Birley takes us through a rich historical tapestry: how the game was snatched from rustic obscurity by gentlemanly gamblers; became the height of late eighteenth century metropolitan fashion; was turned into both symbol and synonym for British imperialism; and its more recent struggle to dislodge the discomforting social values preserved in the game from its imperial heyday. Superbly witty and humorous, peopled by larger-than-life characters from Denis Compton to Ian Botham, and wholly forswearing nostalgia, A Social History of English Cricket is a tour-de-force by one of the great writers on cricket.




This is Cricket


Book Description

Winner of the WISDEN BOOK OF THE YEAR award and the TELEGRAPH SPORTS BOOK AWARDS ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF THE YEAR, this book is a celebration of the elegance and timeless beauty of cricket—its greatest and most stylish players, from past heroes to today’s stars, along with its idyllic and hallowed grounds. Cricket has been played for over three hundred years and in some ways remains largely unchanged. It is this timelessness, and the style and spirit in which the game is conducted, which is celebrated in This Is Cricket. The book brings together such idyllic settings as Sir Paul Getty's Ground in Buckinghamshire, U.K., surrounded by rolling countryside, with the Otago cricket ground in New Zealand set against a backdrop of mountains, as well as the sport's most hallowed pitches, including Lord's (opened by Thomas Lord in 1814) and Melbourne Cricket Ground, which hosted the first-ever International "Test" match in 1877. Readers will venture on a journey to the Caribbean, where the fast bowling attack of the West Indies reigned in the 1970s, and to India, where cricket soared to new heights in the 1980s. From Shane Warne's hat-trick at the MCG in 1994 to Ben Stokes's heroics at Lord's and Headingley in 2019, This Is Cricket captures many of the game's most extraordinary events and players. The striking images of on-field action as well as candid dressing-room moments, some published here for the first time, are taken by some of the most respected photographers in sport. Featuring bucolic village greens, charming pavilions, endearing team portraits, extraordinary catches, devastating bowling, heroic batting, stylish sweaters, and silly fancy dress, this book illustrates why cricket is the second most popular sport in the world and why it is truly loved by so many.




The Business of Sports


Book Description

The Business of Sports, Second Edition is a comprehensive collection of readings that focus on the multibillion-dollar sports industry and the dilemmas faced by todays sports business leaders. It contains a dynamic set of readings to provide a complete overview of major sports business issues. The Second Edition covers professional, Olympic, and collegiate sports, and highlights the major issues that impact each of these broad categories. The Second Edition continue to provide insight from a variety of stakeholders in the industry and cover the major business disciplines of management, marketing, finance, information technology, accounting, ethics and law. In addition, it features concise introductions, targeted discussion questions, and graphs and tables to convey relevant financial data and other statistics discussed. This book is designed for current and future sports business leaders as well as those interested in the inner-workings of the industry.




International Cases in the Business of Sport


Book Description

International Cases in the Business of Sport focuses specifically on the analysis of high profile cases studies within the management of sport businesses and offers an innovative teaching solution to a market that is often overlooked. This book is a truly international text examining sports from a global perspective and including case studies on: football, rugby, baseball, athletics, cricket, motor sports and sailing. Edited by two leading figures in the field, the text provides: a fantastic range of global sports cases authored by renowned experts in the field cutting edge analysis and comprehensive diagnosis of major international professional sport business cases a clear and structured presentation and examination of key issues within each case a strong blend of academic and practitioner analysis and commentary an informative and comprehensive resource for those seeking a better understanding of developments in commercial sport a companion website available for tutors using this text with further analysis, more cases and extra questions and exercises. The combination of academic theory and real world examples in the world of sport business make this is a vital book for students, academics and those already working in the sports industry.




IPL: An inside story. Cricket & Commerce


Book Description

Much like its commissioner Mr Lalit Modi, IPL from the very beginning has always been mired in controversies of all imaginable kinds. From Vijay Mallyas sacking of the team coach Charu Sharma for the teams poor performance in season one to the grand auction of international players for season two in Fort Aguda Beach Resort in Goa, Modi has been able to keep the interest alive by successfully marrying money with sports. This is a new kind of cricket, where players are auctioned and teams and players are owned by frnanchise owners. But this is also the cricket where players from U-19 get a chance to play with Sachin Tendulkar or Shane Warne. IPL: An Inside Story takes a look at almost all the aspects of IPL from who actually first thought of such a tournament to the process of choosing the franchise owners, and from the socio-economic impact of the IPL on Indian society to the politics of shifting the venue of season two to South Africa.




Notes By The Editors


Book Description

'The Editor of Wisden is an important personage. It is he who decides the policy of the Cricketers' Bible and cricketers the world over look to him to give a lead on all controversial problems. His is, therefore, no easy task, but Wisden has been fortunate in its editors'. That was written in 1933, and it is still true. The heart of the Almanack is the section entitled Notes By The Editor. The editor's opinions can change careers, laws – indeed every part of the game. This anthology is a brief dip into the half a million words or so that make up the annual Notes as the editors take a view of what really matters – the spirit in which cricket is played and how to keep it relevant and popular. And, of course, the weather. Throughout the Notes the Editors retain their sense of optimism and fervent love of the game, even when dealing with difficult issues such as bodyline or match-fixing, and they express their views succinctly and stylishly. As John Woodcock wrote in 1983, 'the game is never quite the same from one season to the next' and nor, indeed, are the Notes. However, as this anthology shows, the Notes are always stimulating and firmly expressed, providing an important insight into the cricket of the day.