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.

For cricket enthusiasts there is nothing to match the meaningful contests and excitement generated by the game’s subtle shifts in play. Conversely, huge swathes of the world’s population find cricket the most obscure and bafflingly impenetrable of sports. The Changing Face of Cricket attempts to account for this paradox. The Changing Face of Cricket provides an overview of the various ways in which social scientists have analyzed the game’s cultural impact. The book’s international analysis encompasses Australia, the Caribbean, England, India, Ireland, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. Its interdisciplinary approach allies anthropology, history, literary criticism, political studies and sociology with contributions from cricket administrators and journalists. The collection addresses historical and contemporary issues such as gender equality, global sports development, the impact of cricket mega-events, and the growing influence of commercial and television interests culminating in the Twenty20 revolution. Whether one loves or hates the game, understands what turns square legs into fine legs, or how mid-offs become silly, The Changing Face of Cricket will enlighten the reader on the game’s cultural contours and social impact and prove to be the essential reader in cricket studies. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

This book examines historically how cricket was codified out of its variant folk-forms and then marketed with certain lessons sought to reinforce the values of a declining landed interest. It goes on to show how such values were then adapted as part of the imperial experiment and were eventually rejected and replaced with an ethos that better reflected the interests of new dominant elites. The work examines the impact of globalisation and marketisation on cricket and analyses the shift from an English dominance, on a sport that is ever-increasingly being shaped by Asian forces. The book's distinctiveness lies in trying to decode the spirit of the game, outlining a set of actual characteristics rather than a vague sense of values. An historical analysis shows how imperialism, nationalism, commercialism and globalisation have shaped and adapted these characteristics. As such it will be of interest to students and scholars of sport sociology, post-colonialism, globalisation as well as those with an interest in the game of cricket and sport more generally.

This volume covers the "third rising" of West Indies cricket. As the sport becomes ever more commercialized, large amounts of money have established sponsorship & support systems to give cricketers around the world every possible advantage. Beckles assesses what impact the globalization of cricket has had on the cricketers of the Caribbean. He also describes the emergence of what he argues is a debilitating sub-nationalism in the West Indies, & the effect this has had on the game, & the prospect for integrating West Indian nationhood in the twenty-first century.

This book examines historically how cricket was codified out of its variant folk-forms and then marketed with certain lessons sought to reinforce the values of a declining landed interest. It goes on to show how such values were then adapted as part of the imperial experiment and were eventually rejected and replaced with an ethos that better reflected the interests of new dominant elites. The work examines the impact of globalisation and marketization on cricket and analyses the shift from an English dominance, on a sport that is ever-increasingly being shaped by Asian forces. The book’s distinctiveness lies in trying to decode the spirit of the game, outlining a set of actual characteristics rather than a vague sense of values. An historical analysis shows how imperialism, nationalism, commercialism and globalisation have shaped and adapted these characteristics. As such it will be of interest to students and scholars of sport sociology, post-colonialism, globalisation as well as those with an interest in the game of cricket and sport more generally.

This is an exacting social history of Indian cricket between 1780 and 1947. It considers cricket as a derivative sport, creatively adapted to suit modern Indian socio-cultural needs, fulfil political imperatives and satisfy economic aspirations. Majumdar argues that cricket was a means to cross class barriers and had a healthy following even outside the aristocracy and upper middle classes well over a century ago. Indeed, in some ways, the democratization of the sport anticipated the democratization of the Indian polity itself. Boria Majumdar reveals the appropriation, assimilation and subversion of cricketing ideals in colonial and post-colonial India for nationalist ends. He exposes a sport rooted in the contingencies of the colonial and post-colonial context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. Cricket, to put it simply, is much more than a ‘game’ for Indians. This study describes how the genealogy of their intense engagement with cricket stretches back over a century. It is concerned not only with the game but also with the end of cricket as a mere sport, with Indian cricket’s commercial revolution in the 1930s, with ideals and idealism and their relative unimportance, with the decline of morality for reasons of realpolitik, and with the denunciation, once and for all, of the view that sport and politics do not mix. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport

The globalizing influence of professional sports Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice. Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global—and globalizing—sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones. Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.

Globalization and Sport argues that although sport is a source of pleasure, it is also part of the government of everyday life. The creation of a sporting calendar, movements of rational recreation and the development of public sector physical education, are read as ways of disciplining and shaping urban-industrial populations.