Cricket World Cup final set to unite Indian fans and bring global attention to India’s dominance in the sport

An Indian fan in the stands during India-Pakistan on October 14 (Pankaj Nangia/Getty Images)

On Sunday he plays in the World Cup final of his favorite sport, the only one of the most popular in which he has international relevance

After over a month of matches lasting almost an entire day, the Cricket World Cup hosted by India ends on Sunday with a highly anticipated final between the home national team and Australia. It was the first edition of the Cricket World Cup hosted entirely by India, which distributed the tournament matches evenly between ten cities, from north to south: some larger and better known such as New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, others more other suggestive ones like Dharamsala, a city at the foot of the Himalayas and close to the borders with Pakistan and China.

India were considered big favorites right from the start and last Wednesday they secured a place in the final by beating New Zealand. They have won all ten matches played so far, in which they have met all the participants in the tournament, including Australia, England and great rivals Pakistan. In Sunday’s final they have the chance to win again after twelve years since the last time, when they organized the World Cup together with Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The final of that tournament was won in Mumbai against Sri Lanka, and the entire country celebrated for days, with celebrations and crowds that can only be seen in India and only for cricket, a discipline for which Indian passion has reached levels unparalleled, despite having been invented in England and brought to India in the colonial period.

The crowd at the semi-final between India and Pakistan at the last World Cup won by India (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

Indian fans at the gates of Mohali stadium (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

Cricket has become one of the few things that bring together and sometimes unite over 1 billion and 400 million people in a country so vast and complex that it does not have an official language, as it is the union of several states that are linguistically and culturally different from each other.

Together with China, India is one of the two most populous countries in the world and also among the largest in terms of land area. The differences within these two countries are enormous, which also makes them difficult to decipher from a Western point of view. And even in a period like the current one, in which many forms of entertainment easily reach global proportions by making more remote societies and places known, the role of these two enormous countries, and in particular India, continues to remain rather marginal.

An employee spreads pesticide at the cricket stadium in New Delhi (Getty Images)

For about two decades China has regularly participated – sometimes even hosting them – in major sporting events such as the Olympics, but its participation and above all its impact on the Chinese population are part of the political program of the dictatorship that governs it. India, on the other hand, which is the largest democracy in the world, has remained almost always absent from the international sports scene, if not disinterested, and its demographic and cultural weight in this area remains largely underrepresented.

This happens because India continues to keep to itself in sports. It has never hosted the Olympic Games and in its history it has won just around thirty medals: the same as Ireland and fewer than Estonia. The Indians still play little football: years ago they tried to establish an ambitious national championship, but the interest did not last long. Even in the other most popular professional sports, India never gets talked about, with the exception of one, cricket, the only discipline in which a selection of Indian professionals can be seen competing at a high level, and therefore a glimpse of all that that moves around.

An Indian soldier tries to contain the crowd at the entrance to the Ahmedabad stadium before India-Australia, quarter-final of the 2011 World Cup (Getty Images)

Fans’ phones over the railings of the Chennai stadium before India’s debut at the ongoing World Cup (Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)

More than half of the entire turnover generated by cricket in the world comes from India, whose national championship established in 2008 – the Indian Premier League – is valued at around 7 billion dollars and attracts the best foreign players every year: primarily English, South Africans, Australians and New Zealanders. In September 2020, in a period in which the coronavirus pandemic was out of control in India, the championship was even transferred to the United Arab Emirates in order to get it started, thus avoiding compromising the economic stability of the entire international movement.

Precisely because of the enormous impact that cricket has on the Indian population, the government and in particular the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi have been very involved in the organization of this World Cup, for many even excessively so. For example, Sunday’s final will be played at the Ahmedabad stadium, which with 130 thousand seats is the second largest sports facility in the world. Since 2021, the stadium in question has been named after Modi, who in the past was head of the cricket committee in the state of Gujarat, where he is originally from and of which Ahmedabad is the capital.

The Indian public at the entrances to the stadium in Mohali, Punjab (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

Also for this reason, on the eve of this World Cup the Guardian he had written: «This is an aggressive political campaign, an electoral demonstration six weeks before the next elections in a country where the representative of national sport seems to have been assimilated by the party in power».

On Sunday the Ahmedabad stadium is expected to be sold out with over 130 thousand spectators present, practically all Indians. Since the end of the semi-final in which India beat New Zealand, the prices of flights to Ahmedabad and hotels in the city have increased tenfold compared to the previous days. The same is happening in Gandhinagar, a city not far from Ahmedabad, and in Indore, where the other airport in the region is present, even though it is almost 400 kilometers away.

– Read also: The five new Olympic disciplines

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