Couch potato's day out: Eat cricket, dream cricket

NEW DELHI: It's time again to eat cricket, breathe cricket and maybe dream cricket - if you manage to get some sleep after the live telecasts, post-game analysis, and daily gameshow announcements are through. Max alone is set to telecast some 11 hours of fresh cricket a day: Live screening of matches plus four hours of additional programming per match through Extraaa Innings. This is where Mandira Bedi, Sandhya Mridul, Maria Goretti and Charu Sharma will woo "the floating population, those who are not connoisseurs of the game, with cricketainment," says Rajat Jain executive vice-president and business head Max. Jain is unfazed by the sniggering Ruby Bhatia invited during EI's last innings. "Anything new faces resistance. Cricket analysis has always been very male-oriented. We plan to humanise the cricketers and widen the viewer base. During the ICC Champions Trophy, female viewership rose by 261 per cent." For diehards, says Jain, "Who can be better than Kapil Dev and Arjuna Ranatunga, assisted by Tony Greig and Jeff Thompson?" ESPN offers an option: "Our specialists - Harsha Bhogle, Sunil Gavaskar, Geoffrey Boycott (joining in from England), Alan Wilkins, Ravi Shastri and Navjot Singh Sidhu - will draw a loyal audience through Taking Guard and Follow Through." The ESPN spokesperson is honest: "If you can't show the match, you do the next best thing." Taking Guard begins an hour before the match and yes, you guessed it, Follow Through will follow after the live telecast is over. From a beech-set in Cape Town, the 30-minute programmes (repeated twice) will analyse the day's matches, take us shopping, disco-dancing and dining out with World Cup heroes. For the live telecast, Max will have competition from DD which has widened its coverage to include a total of 43 matches (16 live and 27 delayed), implying a match per day on the terrestrial network. Sony will counter by beaming the 'second' match of the day live too "so the fans do not miss out on any action," says Jain. "Of course we will take care that popular soaps like Kkusum are not interrupted." This could work as another ace for Sony as the cable operators could be blocking some popular channels to beam the game live from South Africa.