Lockdown makes players chatty
MUMBAI: Before the coronavirus outbreak, Indian cricketers seldom made positive news for their interactions with fellow cricketers (including team-mates) on social media. Remember when one player ‘unfollowed’ the other, or their celebrity wives did the same, and those moments gathered storm and became outright controversies?
That was then and this is now. During the national lockdown, Indian cricketers have managed to make social media interactions with fellow or former cricketers into a brand-building exercise. And everyone with a mobile phone and a connection is lapping it up. The favourite destination for these interactions has been InstaLive and every Indian cricketer worth his million-plus followers has taken to it—from captain Virat Kohli (whose 56 million Instagram followers is the most for an Indian, ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi) to Yuzvendra Chahal and everyone in between.
These conversations have kept the Indian cricket fan distracted, at least momentarily, from what should’ve been the business end of the IPL season. But more significantly, these interactions are keeping the individual brands of the cricketers alive, say brand strategists.
“A cricketer is evaluated by his last three games, and when there are no last three games to look at, there could be question of a dip in their brand value,” says Harish Bijoor, a brand strategist who runs an eponymous consulting firm. “Right now, in the time of no sports, it is important for these superstars to do all it takes to keep eyeballs on them. You can see all of them putting in the effort to keep their brand alive.”
Of the lot, Rohit Sharma—with 13 million Instagram followers and counting—has been the most active. Sharma has done everything from setting up InstaLives with team-mates to being a guest on Instagram shows with former cricketers like Yuvraj Singh and
Kevin Pietersen.
Harish Krishnamachar, who was once a core part of Sachin Tendulkar’s management team, and now runs a brand consulting firm on sports, believes that brand-building may not always be the cricketer’s core reason for conducting these public conversations. “They are used to always being in the public eye, and this has proved to be the best way to remain visible,” Krishnamachar says. Some of Sharma’s clearly unscripted conversations, conducted in an intimate ‘Bambaiya Hindi’, is testament to this. In one particularly sombre conversation, fast bowler Mohammed Shami opened up to Sharma on the lows of his career, including contemplating suicide.
Others, however, have played to their strengths to further establish their public personalities. R Ashwin, the thinking man’s cricketer and a selfconfessed cricket nerd, has a show on Instagram where he recalls memorable matches that he was a part of, while Chahal, known to be a prankster, has posted funny videos of making his parents dance. Chahal has 3 million followers.