They want to eat their cake and have it too

It’s amusing to hear the cricket community say that endorsements do not affect performance. The argument given is that the shoot days are so few, that it cannot possibly impact performance. A second argument is that players get their endorsement value from performance on the field and hence there is no conflict of interest. These are nice arguments, but completely miss the important points where interests do conflict.

From the above arguments, it should follow that if a player has given match-winning performances regularly over long periods (say 1990 to 2006) the player should be leading in the endorsement sweepstakes. However, any casual observer can tell you that in very small windows people like Ajay Jadeja, Yuvraj Singh and Mahendra Dhoni have easily outperformed people like Anil Kumble and Javagal Srinath in the endorsement sweepstake. It is obvious that endorsement value depends on star value and not necessarily to contributions to the team’s cause.

It is evident that the things that matter in endorsements are number of centuries that a player scores, sixes hitting ability and other things that catch the public eye. These things may actually help the team, but at times they may not.

Let us take a few examples. A Pakistani team came to India. They were 2 down in a 6 match series and then went on to win the series 4-2. The Pakistanis had a simple strategy for the flat tracks – send in youngsters up the order to do the kamikaze operations (score fast). If they succeeded, the team got off to a flier, if they didn’t the experienced hands of Younis, Yusuf and Inzamam would take on the responsibility of taking the side to safety. Earlier during the 1996 world cup Sri Lanka had done the same and experienced players took the middle order.

Contrast this with the Indian scenario. Here, the team exists to play around the century record-breaking existence of a few players. The players want to bat in the top three to keep the centuries count. If they fail, it is up to the youngsters to re-build!

There is this strong desire to be the star, the Hercules. We all know that all the century projections will go haywire (and so may the star value or the endorsement value) if a player drops down the order.

Also note that the same players do not want to open in test matches. Here they want youngsters to take the responsibility of playing through 20 overs of the new ball, so that they can be in a good position to pile up centuries. They want to eat their cake and have it too.