November 25 2003
The baggy greens mix it with turbans and Shane Warne and Ricky Ponting speak Hindi down the corporate end of Australia's one-day tour. After all, Aussie cricketers are as gods in this cricket-obsessed land
Few Australian cricket tragics would disagree that Ricky Ponting leads a world
champion team of prodigious ability, probably the most accomplished array of
talent yet assembled.
But it's a fair bet that those same obsessives, who likely know Ponting's batting average to the 10th decimal point, and what Glenn McGrath and Brett Lee prefer at breakfast, aren't aware that Punter, Pigeon and Bing, Matthew Hayden and the SMS-ing Shane Warne have another talent: they can also speak Hindi, India's official tongue. Or that Adam Gilchrist and Lee are deft exponents of Bhangra, the lively Punjabi music that's sweeping the world's dance clubs.
Take a peek into the secret lives of the Australian cricket team, the ones they live in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Except that across the sprawling subcontinent - the world's biggest cricket market - secret is about the last thing they are.
Indeed, it's near impossible to turn on an Indian television or cross an Indian road and not see the beaming dials of the big stars of the Australian firmament, or "brand ambassadors" as they are known here. There's Steve Waugh wearing Hampstead "suitings" in Nagpur, Lee flogging Timex watches and leisure wear and whisky and bottled water in Chennai, and Haydos spruiking beer in Bangalore. The list goes on: tyres (Waugh), motor oil (Gilchrist), refrigerators, TVs and washing machines (Ponting), cola (Warne), and foreign exchange dealers (the entire team).
With endorsements of about $60,000 a year per product per player, and no end of willing suitors, Australia's tours of India float on a multi-million-dollar river of rupees for the cricketers - and the Corporate India that covets them. Ponting's deal with Aurangabad-based consumer goods giant Videocon International is reputed to be worth $400,000 but, compared with India's homegrown batting sensation Sachin Tendulkar, Punter's a steal. Tendulkar's deal with Pepsi, one of about 20 products he endorses, is worth $2m annually.
"I love Ricky Ponting very much," says Balraj Bubak, a 39-year-old driver for the Grand Intercontinental Hotel in Mumbai. "He is a very excellent player. He is a very good man."
Part of the reason Bubak loves Ponting very much is because Punter spoke to him last month while visiting the hotel to shoot a Videocon commercial. The chance encounter made Bubak's year and went like this. "I said: 'Good morning, sir' to him. He said: 'Hey, good morning, how are you?' I said: 'Yes sir, I'm fine, thank you very much'." It was enough for Bubak, lower middle-class in a solid job by Indian standards, to consider a Videocon refrigerator for the family home. "Thanda thanda pani," he says, mimicking the Hindi for cold, cold water that Ponting says in the ad.
"There are hundreds of millions like him in India," says Jamie Stewart, who by his own admission was a journeyman left-arm slowie in the 20 games he played for Western Australia and NSW in the 1990s. Today he's the Dehli-based pointman for the sports management group IMG, which handles some of the players. "We think we are obsessed by cricket; we've got nothing on Indians. It's their release."
The positioning of the players is revealing of how India regards the Australian team. In their ads for Seagram's Royal Stag whisky, Lee and McGrath are portrayed as cool and laid-back. Lee strums a guitar while "good guy" McGrath kicks back in garb he likely wouldn't be seen dead in back home. In his star TV turn for Videocon, Ponting is impish, the storyline playing on the stereotype that many Indians have of foreigners - that they find India perplexing. Carrying a sports bag, bat protruding, a confused Ponting wanders into a five-star hotel but finds there's no one at reception. The staff are mesmerised by a Videocon TV in the lobby on which Ponting is performing heroics for the baggy greens.
"That Ricky Ponting, he's so cute!!!" shrieks a receptionist and embraces the bemused Punter, who mutters that he is in fact Ricky Ponting. A Sikh shouts at the box: "Fantastic!" Another ad shows Ponting kicking back in front of his Videocon wide-screen TV. "Bada hai toh bhaitar hai," he declares, Hindi for -bigger is better. New Zealand's telegenic captain, Stephen Fleming, also endorses Videocon; his Hindi spoken, Maharajah-style, from the howdah of an elephant.
It's all rather cheesy and the fact that there are two Pontings, one in the hotel and one live on TV, is a detail too far for this campaign. But compared with Warne's star turn for Pepsi-Cola, now winning a pitched battle with Coca-Cola for India's -westernising thirst, Ponting's cameos are the height of good taste.
Warne suffers the misfortune of being cast alongside India's batting god, Tendulkar, in a series of ads-as-stories that manage to be sexist, xenophobic and aspirational, all packaged with Bollywood high farce.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Warne is cast as what Aussie barbecue-goers might describe as a "pantsman" - and as a hapless buffoon. Warne and former West Indian captain Carl Hooper, clad in trendy long coats over their country match kit, swagger into a supermarket, eyeing two leggy Asian babes. Warne is in pursuit of the babes but Hooper brings down a stack of Pepsi, revealing an unconscious Tendulkar. Hooper wakens him by opening a Pepsi under his nose.
But Tendulkar has amnesia and it's here where Warne's previously unknown language skills are revealed. Donning the trademark wraparound sunglasses (indoors), the Sultan of Spin yells triumphantly in Hindi "Iski Toh Gayi" - He's gone! in English - the same term an excited Hindi cricket commentator might use at the fall of a wicket. Warne and Hooper snicker at their good fortune; the batting god Tendulkar can't play; the evil foreigners have triumphed.
But, wait, there's more! A second instalment sees Hooper and Warne back at the pile of Pepsi, with Tendulkar still dazed. They tell him he's a top chef who's off to Honolulu (Tendulkar also owns a self-themed restaurant that purportedly serves his favourite fare). Hooper and Warne load Tendulkar onto a private jet. But the crafty Indian chases a can of Pepsi out of the plane, slamming the door shut as a Sikh pilot flies off with Warne and Hooper locked inside. India wins!
Bikram Basu, general manager of marketing for drinks giant Seagram India, which has Lee and Ponting on its payroll, says Australia's phenomenal onfield success is what attracts Indian marketers. "Everyone likes to be -associated with winners ... and we have so many TV channels to fill."
But have Warne's much-publicised shena-nigans harmed him? "Not at all," says IMG's Stewart. "The Indians are very forgiving." As, it seems, are the locals in Pakistan, where Warne has just signed to endorse Pepsi there, too - just in time for India's planned tour next year.
Back at the hotel, driver Bubak is thrilled that Ponting made 108 not out in the one-day game in Bangalore last week, in Australia's blanketing of his beloved India. "He is the very best player in the world," Bubak beams. Video-con's bosses were doubtless beaming, too.
Test score world record holder Hayden might disagree but what is not in dispute is that India made Hayden very marketable after his stellar tour there in 2001, when he was the only Australian bat to flourish in Steve Waugh's 2-1 losing side.
Today, Hayden is brand ambassador for Foster's lager and its huge push into the Indian beer market. A fortnight ago, at a sponsor's outing in Mumbai, a day before he was caught at point first ball against India at a packed Wankhede Stadium, Hayden was playing a Foster's didgeridoo.
The Australian cricket establishment likes to say that in-your-face India, with its volatile crowds, dodgy sanitation and -combustible food, is the most difficult country on the cricketing globe to tour. This is why, the argument goes, Warne brings cans of baked beans on tour and why Australia hasn't beaten India away since the Bill Lawry-led tour of 1969-70.
But modern India has some of the world's best hotels, where the food, as international as anything in Australia, is to die for. Perhaps the real difficulty these days for our occasionally conquering heroes on the subcontinent might be counting all their rupees.