World Cup 2019: Viewership records break as cricket fever grips the world

It was back to the ancient at the Home of Cricket. England confronting Australia, the oldest rivals in what to connoisseurs is not merely a game, but a way of life!

The magnificent rusty brick pavilion and multi-tier galleries around it were packed across the spectrum with white faces, with a smattering of Australian yellow and green jersies. The crowd was un-raucous, their applause polite and sporting. There were no sounds of subcontinental instruments, no dhoti and kurta, no frenzied nationalism, not a flag in sight, other than incongruously two Indian tricolours fluttering on the patio of an overlooking penthouse apartment. Yet, as far as the current Cricket World Cup is concerned, this was an exception rather than the rule. 

The 44-year-old apex competition in the flannelled sport may be unfolding 5,000 miles away from India; but Indians and Indian entities are prominently pervasive. Notwithstanding the steady internationalisation of cricket, India’s MRF Tyres is one of four cash down commercial partners of the current championship. The others being the Japanese carmaker Nissan, which has a strong manufacturing base in north-east England, the Dutch online travel and accommodation firm booking.com and the Chinese company OPPO, who’s main intention is probably to draw attention in India, it being also the present sponsor of the Indian cricket team for bilateral engagements. 

According to the International Cricket Council, television figures in India amassed a viewership of 342m during the first fortnight of the tournament even before the much anticipated fixture between India and Pakistan. Subsequently, Hotstar, its official licensee in India for the digital space, delivered a 15.6 million peak concurrent live viewers for the India-Pakistan match – an all-time record for an international cricket fixture. “The nail-biting India v Afghanistan fixture on Saturday at Southampton also delivered similar peak number of concurrent live viewers for the platform,” the ICC added. 

A statement from ICC on Tuesday euphorically claimed: “The ICC Men's Cricket World Cup 2019 is on track to shatter previous digital and TV records and become one of the world's biggest ever sports events - having already delivered over 1 billion video views across digital content on ICC’s platforms and social media channels.”

In Britain, audiences on Sky Television have been the highest for one-day internationals for more than 13 years with the tournament reaching 6 million viewers so far. The India-Pakistan match became the most watched ODI and the 4th most watched match across any cricketing format since 2006 with an average audience of 821,000.

Across other fixtures on Sky up to 20 June, the India-Australia match delivered the highest unique audience at 3.14 million, with the England-Bangladesh encounter not far behind at 2.74 million. The Bangladeshis, especially their magnificent all-rounder Shakib Al Hasan, have arrived on the world stage in no uncertain manner in the championship.  

Digitally, fans and followers have engaged in a variety of ways - on the official ICC CWC 2019 website and mobile app and ICC’s channels on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. The biggest draw was the Indo-Pak clash, which generated 120 million video views across all the official digital and social media channels. 

Other high performing videos have been Liton Das’s three back-to-back sixes for Bangladesh against the West Indies and the Indian captain Virat Kohli’s request to fans to show respect to his former Australian counterpart, Steve Smith, who was booed for his role in ball tampering in a test match South Africa a year and a half ago and for which he was banned from the game for a year.  

The Indian juggernaut will return to Old Trafford, Manchester for Kohli’s team’s next outing in the league stage versus the West Indies on Thursday. It was at this venue that India upset the then Invincibles in their opening match in 1983 before proceeding to lift the trophy. “The cricketing world was stunned,” I recorded in my book Cricket World Cup: The Indian Challenge. It is a dramatically different scenario now. Anything other than an Indian victory will emit shockwaves.