As all my friends know, I’m not a big sports fan. I suffer, I mean, I follow my beloved Ravens in the NFL and my sweet potato Layún when he is playing in the Champions League or scoring goals for the National Team (crack), and like any good villamelon I don’t miss a World Cup (after the round of 16), a Baseball World Series or a Nadal-Federer but that’s as far as it goes. Ah, but as the saying goes “if you want to meet Inés, live with her for a month” there is a sport that I am sure I know more about than any of my friends: Cricket. This sport is the star of the best online betting sites in India 2022.
In India, several of the most popular sports in the world are practiced, such as Tennis, Basketball and Soccer, and others not so popular in America but very strong in Asia and Oceania, such as Badminton, Field Hockey and Wrestling; you also find some relatively unknown but very popular ones here like Kabaddi.
You will never see American Football, let alone Baseball. This last one is almost taboo here and it is that in India, Cricket is King (big brother of Baseball). And when I say absolute, I mean it. Cricket is to India what Soccer is to Brazil, and I may have fallen short in the comparison.
Of the 23 countries that have a professional Cricket league, India has the largest (in terms of attendance and budget): the Indian Premier League or IPL. It is the sixth league in the world (among all sports) with the highest number of stadium attendance, and if it is not the first, it is largely due to the high cost of tickets.
The last valuation made of the IPL after the 2016 season was 4.16 Billion Dollars. His star batsman, Virat Kohli, captain of the Indian team has a net worth of 40 million dollars and is closely followed by many others.
Cricket pits two teams of 11 players against each other on a circular pitch. Pitching and batting occur in the center in a rectangular area known as the pitch. It is played in 3 different formats: the Test is the purest of the three, all players wear white and a match can last up to five days with 6 hours of play per day; in One Day, a match lasts approximately 7 hours and in T20, which is the most common and the one played in the national leagues, a match lasts around 4 hours. The rules are not that complex, but I still don’t fully understand it (although the other day I scored my first SIX in Goa, the equivalent of a homerun).
As part of my work, I sometimes do Art Direction for the company’s campaigns, and thanks to this I have had the pleasure of living with different Bollywood artists and IPL players during the filming of our commercials, and despite the fact that we work In closed studios with a high level of security, a good number of gossips always gather outside to watch and take photos. When I worked with Priyanka Chopra or Shah Rukh Khan, you counted gossips by the dozens, but when I work with the stars of Cricket the gossips can be counted by hundreds. For the Indians, the players are more than stars, they are almost gods, national heroes.
