the WAG circus awaits its Lalit Modi

The WAG era in cricket is about to dawn. A small beginning has been made. Today some papers carried a report on how Michael Clarke’s ex-girlfriend Lara Bingle is busy tying up a new romance with ex-New Zealand wicketkeeper Adam Parore. The speculation is that they would arrive together at former Kiwi cricket all-rounder Chris Cairns’ wedding. Going by the bitter-sweet relationship the small island shares with its gigantic trans-Tasman neighbour Australia, the Aussie team is also expected to be present at the wedding which would obviously mean Clarke and Bingle would at least be in the same frame long enough for the paparazzi to splash it all over the papers.

Now what do we know about cricket? That anything that ever begins in this game anywhere reaches fever pitch only when it hits Indian shores. We Indians are to cricket what say the US is to world politics.
You need proof. Well Rose Bowl might be where the world first saw Twenty20 cricket or Adam Sanford might have pumped in millions to get the version going in the West Indies, it still took the Indian Premier League to take it to a level where the money is at par with that of Major League Baseball or the NBA. Well I’m not saying this, several front-paged articles in the Times of India have.

Coming back the Wives and Girlfriends (WAG) club, just imagine what it would be like once India hijacks the concept and enslaves everyone to its juicy tidbits like we have done with the IPL.

I really don’t see any reason why. We have a glut of television channels so obsessed with TRPs and eyeballs that they have forsaken normal principles of journalism almost a decade ago.

Secondly we have a huge film industry but too few names who make it to the big bad world of eyeball journalism. It is the same Kareenas, Katrinas, Asins, Vidyas, Priyankas and the like. Now the WAG concept gives all these girls competition. Just about anybody willing to play the game can grab eyeballs. She who wants to go the farthest will go the farthest.

Thirdly the county is opening up like never before. Not in the sense our founding fathers would have liked it to but in the way that every one wants to have his share of the meat in a nation becoming a dog-eat-dog circus by the minute. For proof I will present to you the girls who went about ‘displaying’ their ‘assets’ so that Rahul Mahajan would marry one of them. These girls have balls not in the literal but figurative sense mind you. They know there is a world of princes out there and if that means you have to kiss the toad for an entry pass, so be it. Now these are the kind of girls- small town, big dreams, bigger talk, massive drive- who will readily take part in the WAG circus in India.

Fourthly there is a spate of movie stars who get desperate once the limelight starts going away from them, in India generally when they start hitting thirty and when they start appearing in ponytails like Sridevi and Madhuri. These limelight-delaying women are going to be dynamite. Imagine a Sunset Boulevard sort of heroin suddenly all over the place because her bikini-clad picture is outed on the net with say a Yuvraj.
Fifthly have you seen the pictures Mid-day splashes about the post-match IPL parties? Have you seen the young turks like Suresh Raina, Manish Pandey, Virat Kohli and the likes in those pix? We have an army of players now who know what style is, who know it is a sweet jungle full of prey out there, and who know the fame to be had is far more when you wield your charm rather than just the willow.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed as to which television channel makes the first move on it. Whoever does can expect the kind of eyeballs that even 26/11 live coverage wouldn’t have got them. It is going to be tough making a system out of it. But then even hosting the IPL would have been tough if we had allowed logic to get in the way. Now who would have ever thought that a cricket team from the backwaters of Kochi would start off with a higher valuation in dollar terms than the mighty Chelsea?

We have the tabloids, we the televisions, we have the hunters, and we have the prey. Now who moves first to build the system? India waits for that PR genius who will bring a Yuvi and his private life right into our drawing rooms night after night. And make cricket as irrelevant as ever.