What about the fans? BCCI could have avoided the Dharamsala mess

Siddhartha Nanda, a cricket fan who works in a consulting firm in Bengaluru, holidayed in Dharamsala last winter. On the morning of December 22, he visited the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association (HPCA) Stadium, and took the photograph you see below.

Work in progresspic.twitter.com/G1esYXGAxZ

— Sid (@sid_2893) December 22, 2022

At the time, the HPCA was relaying the stadium's outfield as part of its plans to revamp the ground's drainage.

On December 8, the BCCI announced that the HPCA Stadium would host the third Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, from March 1 to 5. Looking at the state of the outfield on December 22, Nanda wondered if it would be ready in time.

And he wasn't alone.

Luke 'Sparrow' Gillian made two trips to Dharamsala, in October and January, to scope out the logistics of bringing a large group of travelling fans to watch the Test match in March. Gillian is an Australian cricket superfan who has travelled to more than 200 Test matches since 1995, and organises tours for large groups of fans under the banner of Australian Cricket Tours (ACT).

"I've been to Dharamsala twice now," Gillian says. "Went in October last year for two weeks, and I came out again three weeks ago when I did another lap of every venue [hosting the Test series].

"I thought we would be lucky to play in Dharamsala, because there just wasn't enough grass, and that had been growing for about two months to that point, and I thought, 'if that's all they've got after two months, they're not going to have enough in the next three weeks, no way'."

Nanda and Gillian were right to have their doubts. On Monday, the BCCI announced it was shifting the Test match from Dharamsala to Indore.

Like all BCCI press releases, the one that made this announcement, signed by secretary Jay Shah, was a masterclass in brevity and carefully curated detail. It summed up the reason for the venue swap in one line: "Owing to harsh winter conditions in the region, the outfield lacks sufficient grass density and will need some time to develop fully."

"Lacks sufficient grass density" was certainly one way of saying that the outfield, as ESPNcricinfo has reported, still had bare patches where grass cover had not yet taken hold, when the BCCI inspected the ground on February 3 and 11.

The release did not mention the relaying of the outfield either. The BCCI must have known what stage this process was at when it announced the venues for the series, a full 14 days before Nanda took his photograph.

Perhaps the BCCI expected the HPCA to have the ground ready in time for the match. Perhaps the winter in Dharamsala - a town situated in the upper reaches of the Kangra Valley in the Western Himalayas - was harsher than usual.

But the BCCI must have known this was a possibility, and that there was some risk to choosing Dharamsala to host the Test match. The board went ahead and made that choice regardless.

It may have done this knowing its capacity to shift venues swiftly, if needed. The BCCI has twice moved the IPL overseas when it has coincided with the Indian general elections, and once, midway through the tournament, during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. During the 2016 men's T20 World Cup, the BCCI, as hosts of the tournament, helped the ICC shift the India-Pakistan match from Dharamsala to Kolkata at short notice, over security concerns.

When that happened, then ICC chief executive David Richardson said this, among other things, while addressing the media: "The decision was not taken lightly. The ICC and the BCCI understand the disappointment that is likely to be felt by many over the decision to move the match."

There was no mention of fans' concerns in the BCCI's statement on Monday. This wasn't unexpected, considering the experience the board puts spectators through at any given day in any of its stadiums, but the absence of any recognition that fans exist, never mind an apology to them, felt particularly galling in this instance.

This was a Test match in March for which the board had announced the dates and venue back in December. This was a venue where the board knew - you would hope - that the state of the outfield could be an issue. And the venue was Dharamsala, which is almost unique in Indian cricket for the number of travelling fans it attracts.

The HPCA Stadium is easily India's most picturesque ground, backdropped by the snow-capped Dhauladhar range. Dharamsala, and nearby McLeodganj, are major tourist centres. Matches at the HPCA Stadium often coincide with visits from hundreds if not thousands of travelling fans, some driving there from Delhi or other nearby North Indian cities, some travelling from more distant parts of India, and others visiting from overseas, all there to experience the joys of cricket and hill-station tourism.

The draw of Dharamsala becomes clear when you speak to Gillian. He says 12 Australian fans travelled with ACT to watch the Nagpur Test, and around 60 will be at the second Test in Delhi, while "55 at the moment" are set to travel to Ahmedabad for the fourth Test.

A total of 152 fans signed up for Dharamsala.

"People would come to Dharamsala for it being Dharamsala, before the cricket," Gillian says. "Cricket is a byproduct and a time-filling entertainment."

Gillian is on his seventh tour of India, and is used to the changes in tour schedules, but he says he's never had to deal with one happening so close to the match.

"I've been watching cricket in India since 1996," he says. "I was celebrating that this was the first Indian cricket tour in all these years [where the schedule] has not changed before the first ball. But even worse, it's changed after the first ball."

For now, he says there have been no cancellations. "They're all heading down [to Indore]. They've realised that they've paid to come this far, and I'm doing my best to limit the damage."

The damage has been extensive.

"Flights, hotels, match tickets have all gone. I've paid deposits to the hotels, because I said [to them], 'you will need 1000 bottles of beer. We'll have parties on day zero, day one and day five - there's 150 of us and we'll drink you dry'. So I had to pay a deposit, which is fair enough. That is gone, unfortunately. If we get something back from the hotels, it's only up to my agent in Delhi to argue on our behalf."

Other fans, travelling individually or in smaller groups, have had to pay heavy prices too. What irks a lot of them is the feeling that the situation was avoidable.

"They could have at least said it's tentative when they announced it," says Bishen Jeswant, a fan from Bengaluru who had made flight and Airbnb bookings along with a group of friends from within and outside India. "They could have said it was subject to the ground being ready. Then we wouldn't have made our bookings."

Murali Satagopan, a product-marketing manager based in Lisbon, had travelled to Chennai to meet his family, and pushed back his date of departure by a month - from February 10 to March 10 - to attend the Dharamsala Test. It would have been his first match at an Indian stadium since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

"The financial loss is not the biggest loss for me," he says. "But this was about the excitement of seeing five days of a Test, and it's also a key third Test - where we could see India win the Border-Gavaskar Trophy and qualify for the WTC final.

"There are many emotional things attached to it too. Virat Kohli and I are pretty much the same age, and all these guys, guys like [R] Ashwin and [Ravindra] Jadeja, seeing their careers coming towards the end, we don't know if this kind of team will come together again. A new crop may come, but I want to tick this off and say I saw an iconic Test in Dharamsala when India sealed the WTC [final spot] and went on to win the Border-Gavaskar Trophy."

Mahesh Sethuraman, a Singapore-based banker and one of the hosts of the 81 all out podcast, was due to fly out to Dharamsala too. He asks why it was so essential to schedule the match in Dharamsala when India has so many other venues to choose from.

"I'm not offended by the fact that they didn't apologise to the fans," he says. "I'm offended by the fact that they finalised the schedule two months back, and if you were remotely in doubt [about Dharamsala], even if there was a 1% probability that you couldn't host the match there, you could have picked another venue. You could have given the match to Eden Gardens - Eden Gardens has not hosted an Australia match for 20 years, for heaven's sake. You could have given it to Chepauk, or Chinnaswamy. The scale of how much the BCCI takes the fans for granted is mindboggling."

At a time when what it earns from ticket sales is a fraction of a fraction compared to its revenues from selling broadcast rights, the BCCI probably doesn't have much of an incentive to prioritise spectators at its grounds.

But by not prioritising them, it could be missing a trick. Gillian says the BCCI could be doing a lot more to use cricket as a means to bring more foreign tourists to India.

"The fact that the BCCI never confirm a schedule more than four weeks before [a series] makes it impossible to get the inbound tourism that cricket deserves in India," he says. "Cricket deserves it, and that is cricket across the country. Indore deserves to have 500 Australians or more come to visit. So too does Ranchi or Rajkot or Visakhapatnam, wherever they do it, but without the time [for fans] to prepare to visit, it's a lot of foreign investment that's not coming.

"The BCCI are so invested in money and earning money, yet they ignore this element."

It would take a seismic shift for the BCCI to embrace this sort of thinking. It gets by perfectly well, financially, without having to. And its relationship with the paying spectator remains what it is. The situation is perhaps best summed up by Sameer Mohan, a product manager from Bengaluru who is one of a group of fans who host the Bits and Pieces podcast, whose planned and fully-booked Dharamsala plans came to nothing.

"The best way to enjoy cricket in India as a cricket fan is on your own couch," he says. "Take a holiday, order takeout, get your poison of choice, huddle with your loved ones, and then just watch."