Cricket
Main article: Cricket in India See also: Board of Control for Cricket in India, India national cricket team, and India national women's cricket teamCricket has a long history in India, having been introduced in the country during the British rule. It is the most popular sport by a wide margin in India and is often considered as an unofficial religion in India. It is played on local, national, and international levels and enjoys consistent support from people in most parts of India. Its development has been closely tied up with the history of the country, mirroring many of the political and cultural developments around issues such as caste, gender, religion, and nationality. The Indian cricket team played its first official match (a Test) in 1932 against England and its performance since then has generally been mixed, sometimes enjoying stupendous success and sometimes suffering outright failure. The highest profile rival of the Indian cricket team is the Pakistani cricket team, though in recent times it has gained other rivals like Australia, South Africa and England.
Although cricket is the most popular sport in India, it is not the nation's official national sport (a distinction held by field hockey). The governing body for cricket in India, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), was formed in December 1928 and is based in Mumbai. Today, BCCI is the richest sporting body in the world.
India has hosted or co-hosted a large number of multi-nation major international cricket tournaments viz. the 1987 Cricket World Cup (co-hosted with Pakistan), the 1996 Cricket World Cup (co-hosted with Pakistan and Sri Lanka), the 2006 ICC Champions Trophy and the 2011 Cricket World Cup (co-hosted with Sri Lanka and Bangladesh). The India national cricket team has won major tournaments like the 1983 Cricket World Cup in England, the 2007 ICC World Twenty20 in South Africa, the 2011 Cricket World Cup which they won by beating Sri Lanka in the final at home, and has shared the 2002 ICC Champions Trophy with Sri Lanka. It had also briefly held the position of the No. 1 team in Tests. The domestic competitions include the Ranji Trophy, the Duleep Trophy, the Deodhar Trophy, the Irani Trophy, and the Challenger Series, all of which are not widely followed, despite cricket's popularity in the country. This parallels the global situation in cricket, whereby the international game is more widely followed than the domestic game in all major cricketing countries. In addition, the BCCI conducts the Indian Premier League, a domestic franchise-based Twenty20 competition, during March–April every year and is extremely popular.
Read more about this topic: Sport In India
Famous quotes containing the word cricket:
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)