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How many people in England know who Sachin Tendulkar is?

Sachin Tendulkar's Indian fans may number a billion, but that does not necessarily amount to equal fanfare in the British isles.

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Sachin Tendulkar © Getty Images
Sachin Tendulkar © Getty Images

An unsuspecting member of staff overseeing the British Airways (BA) Twitter account was probably only following the company’s rule book when he or she replied to a tweet expressing dissatisfaction at the service provided by the airline, requesting the ‘angry, disappointed and frustrated’ passenger to provide his full name and address to enable them to look into his complaint. Unfortunately for BA, they were then deluged with further complaints from Indian fans expressing their disbelief (and a number of other emotions) that the staff of their customer services department were not already familiar with the user of the account @sachin_rt. With the help of a few ‘rule of thumb’ estimates, Michael Jones attempts to gauge whether BA staff are the exception or the rule: what proportion of the population of England have not heard of the eponymous Blasters captain?

One of the primary uses of Twitter, it appears, is for customers to vent their anger at poor service received, whether it be from an airline, bank or utility company; as a consequence, any large company will have its own account, from which staff attempt to placate the senders of such irate messages with apologies and promises that their grievances will be investigated. Sachin Tendulkar was hardly alone, then, in utilising that medium to complain that British Airways failed to find seats for members of his family, labelled his luggage for the wrong destination and exhibited what he called a “don’t-care attitude”. READ: Sachin Tendulkar and British Airways, perfect example of rabid mindlessness

BA’s customer service staff are presumably under instructions to respond to any such complaint by asking for the passenger’s personal details in order for them to investigate the matter, and whoever was logged into the account at the time sent a standard reply. He or she was clearly not a cricket fan, but even a cursory glance at the number of followers of @sachin_rt — over 8 million, more than ten times as many as BA’s own account — might have offered a hint that its holder was someone notable.

The company soon discovered another of the primary uses of Twitter: to express offence at a perceived slight. Irate Tendulkar fans quickly directed their wrath at the cricket-ignorant airline, with tweets ranging from a suggestion that BA could lose 1 billion customers because of their ‘sin’, to recommendations that they should have asked David Cameron, who once presented Tendulkar with a photograph commemorating his first Test century in England. Even Omar Abdullah, former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, weighed in with the advice that ‘Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, India’ would be a sufficiently precise address to ensure that his luggage was returned to him. Some took it in better humour, observing that BA had succeeded where hundreds of opponents had failed, in managing to rile a player who maintained an unflappable demeanour throughout his career. Many of his fans clearly believe that everyone in the world is — or at least should be — familiar with the name of international cricket’s leading run-scorer. How close is this to being the case? READ: Sachin Tendulkar thanks Twitter users after episode with British Airways

 

 

 

 

Let us consider Tendulkar’s homeland first. India’s most recent census, in 2011, put the population at 1.21 billion; allowing for some growth in the last four years, 1.3 billion seems a reasonable estimate. This year’s IPL attracted 145 million unique viewers, or just over 11 per cent of the population.

Although Tendulkar was no longer playing in the tournament by then, it can be safely assumed that most of those were following it when he was. Of course, it is not necessary to be an active cricket fan to have heard of him; over the last quarter of a century he has endorsed products ranging from Pepsi to adidas, Visa to Castrol. Anyone who has watched a TV commercial, picked up a newspaper, browsed an Indian-based website or seen a billboard in the country is likely to have come across a picture of Tendulkar sooner or later. There are probably some Indians unacquainted with his name, but they would be in a minority.

However, the picture in England and Wales is rather different (I shall treat the two together, since the same cricket board has responsibility for both, and the team known as ‘England’ also encompasses Wales — although no Welsh player has appeared for England since injury ended Simon Jones’s career; and BA operates flights from Cardiff, so it is possible that the unfortunate tweeter may have been based there). Their combined population at the time of the 2011 census was 56 million, and since the growth rate is low it is probably about the same now.

Interest in cricket in the two nations peaked, unsurprisingly, during the 2005 Ashes: nothing draws in viewers quite like three consecutive nail-biting finishes, and a final result of the home team beating the best in the world. As the fourth Test at Trent Bridge reached its climax, 8.4 million were watching — 15 per cent of the population, a higher proportion than the IPL. At that time, most of these 8.4 million could probably have identified at least a few of the England players, and maybe one or two Australians.

If India had toured immediately afterwards, and the new generation of cricket lovers been able to watch it, no doubt the names of their leading players would also have become familiar to the English public; unfortunately ECB proceeded to shoot itself in the foot by selling the broadcasting rights for home Tests to Sky, which only a minority of viewers had access to.

With a new generation hooked on cricket, the board had the ideal opportunity to maintain that enthusiasm by continuing to provide cricket for them to watch. Instead, all eyes on the money which would sustain the county game — which, with rock-bottom attendances, could never hope to sustain itself — it deprived that generation of any further free-to-view cricket, with the inevitable consequence that most of them immediately lost interest.

Cricket has never returned to Channel 4 or BBC since, and viewing figures have steadily declined. This summer, despite England beating Australia again, the number of people watching it ranged around 300,000 to 400,000: under 1 per cent of the population, and less than a twentieth of those who were watching in 2005 (for comparison, Premier League matches regularly drew 2-3 million; Wimbledon Men’s Singles final 9 million; and the England vs Wales encounter in the Rugby World Cup 12 million).

Of course, nowadays television is not the only means of following a cricket match: others would have been watching online streaming, following text commentary, or for those who prefer more traditional media to these newfangled inventions, listening to the great English institution that is Test Match Special. Figures for the first two are difficult to establish, since they are not broken down by country, but TMS estimates an average audience of 4 million over the summer — ten times as many as Sky. Throw in those following online, plus any who do not have time to follow the matches live but read each day’s reports, and at an estimate there are probably 5 to 6 million people taking an active interest in England’s progress: 8 to 10 per cent of the people of England and Wales.

The starkest contrast between the countries, though, is on the commercial side. Unlike their Indian counterparts, English cricketers are not national icons. They rarely get asked to endorse anything much (James Anderson’s picture appears on posters on London Underground trains advertising a brand of vitamin supplements, but it is likely that most of the passengers who see the posters have no idea who he is either), and they rarely make front page news.

‘Celebrities’, if defined as ‘those people whose every movement gets reported in the tabloid press’, include actresses, singers, footballers, anyone who was on a reality television show five years ago and has done nothing of note since, and the Duchess of Cambridge. They do not include cricketers; a cricketer’s options if he wished to make headlines for anything other than playing cricket would be limited to activities such as getting drunk and falling off a pedalo, making a lot of nasty comments about former team-mates in his autobiography, or punching an opponent in the bar after the match — none of which Tendulkar is ever likely to do.

Searching UK-based websites for stories about Tendulkar in the last year brings up the Twitter row itself; a preview of the All Stars series, which is only likely to have been read by those who were cricket fans already; a report that his son Arjun, as a left-arm fast bowler, had been recruited by England to help them prepare for facing Mitchell Johnson and Mitchell Starc, which would have been similarly unlikely to attract interest from anyone other than existing fans; and the story of him being stranded in an Oxfordshire village after missing the last bus — hardly a major news item.

If anyone in England who is not a cricket fan is unlikely to have heard of Tendulkar through the media, the only remaining option is to have done so through someone else who is. In a simple and entirely unscientific experiment, I asked someone who has no particular interest in cricket, but who has known me for a very long time, if she knew who Tendulkar was: she did.

Generalising to an entire population from a sample size of one would fill any self-respecting statistician with horror, but since the calculations involved in this case are at best approximations anyway, they will not be made much less accurate if we assume that each cricket fan in England and Wales has one friend or relative to whom they have talked about the game enough for the non-fan at least to have learned the names of a few leading players.

Thus, to the 5 to 6 million who actively follow the game, we can add another 5 to 6 million who have a passing knowledge of it: our final estimate is that around 10 to 12 million people, or 18 to 22 per cent of the population, know who Tendulkar is. Put another way, if a person in England or Wales is selected at random, there is approximately an 80 per cent chance that he or she will not recognise the name of the irate airline customer (possibly greater, if some of the above estimates turn out to be too generous): British Airways staff are not alone.

We have been here before, of course — during Wimbledon 2014, when a journalist read out the list of names who had been present in the Royal Box during Maria Sharapova’s match, and asked if she knew who Tendulkar was; her response in the negative provoked a similar outcry to that faced by BA. Russia does have a national cricket team that has competed against the likes of Serbia and Hungary in European tournaments, and in 2012 it became an Affiliate member of ICC.

Unsurprisingly, though, most of the cricketing activity in the country is based around the places with the most Indian and English expatriates — the major population centres of Moscow and St Petersburg. Sharapova was born in Nyagan, a small town in the middle of Siberia hundreds of kilometres from anywhere much, and later moved to Sochi, better known for hosting the Winter Olympics than for any cricketing connections, so it is reasonable to assume that in the early years of her life she was unaware of the existence of a sport called cricket.

Moving to Florida to further her tennis career probably did not improve her chances of encountering a different bat and ball game. Unless she happened to have a chat with Roger Federer — a well-known cricket fan, who once posed for a photo with Tendulkar at Wimbledon — the likelihood of Sharapova learning anything about cricket was remote (Federer had the advantage of a South African mother to introduce him to the game).

Not that that stopped irate Tendulkar fans, who rapidly started tweeting under the hashtag #whoismariasharapova — or tongue in cheek Sri Lankan supporters, who when Mahela Jayawardene played his final Test a month later, saluted him with a banner proclaiming SHARAPOVA KNOWS WHO MAHELA IS.

Coincidentally, the day before Tendulkar made his complaint, the BA Twitter account had posted a picture of Diwali celebrations in Mumbai. One can only assume they copied the photo from elsewhere on the internet — since if any of their staff had actually been to Mumbai, they might have been better acquainted with its most celebrated resident.

(Michael Jones’s writing focuses on cricket history and statistics, with occasional forays into the contemporary game)

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