Cricket has changed dramatically in recent years and now can claim to be a truly global game, thanks in large part to new media technologies which bring a global audience for World Cups and other major competitions. However, the globalization of cricket has not followed a pattern familiar in other sports: concentrations of wealth, media, and marketing leading to the domination of Western countries over the rest, and this fact alone makes it interesting for scholars of the globalization of sport. Cricket has followed a very different global path; the non-Western countries (former British colonies) have begun to dominate and have taken control of the economics and politics of the game. In short, cricket has been Indianized. The globalization of cricket has received a massive boost from the popularity of the newest form of the game (Twenty20) which is helping promote cricket as a mass TV sport. The rise of Twenty20, particularly the Indian Premier League (IPL), is transforming the way cricket is organized, played, and watched all over the world. This development both reinforces the globalization of cricket and also underlines that the movers and shakers within cricket are no longer the traditional elites in metropolitan centres but the businessmen of India and the media entrepreneurs world-wide who seek to shape new audiences for the game and create new marketing opportunities on a global scale.
About the Author: Chris Rumford is Professor of Political Sociology and Global Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is also Co-Director of the Centre for Global and Transnational Politics. He is the author of several books including Cosmopolitan Spaces: Europe, Globalization, Theory (Routledge, 2008), and the forthcoming The Globalization of Strangeness (Palgrave). 'Nevertheless, that change is occurring in the game of cricket is adroitly documented within this collection.' --Josephj Maguire, Loughborough University, UK Stephen Wagg is Professor in the Carnegie Faculty of Sport, Leisure and Education at Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. He edited Cricket and National Identity in the Postcolonial Age (Routledge, 2005) and has written widely on the politics and history of sport. He also writes on the politics of comedy and the politics of childhood. He keeps wicket for Dunton Bassett CC Sunday XI.