Love Of The Game

Team India’s recent form in ODIs has notstopped its fans from believing that it can win the ICC Champions Trophy (Oct 7—Nov5, 2006). Around 81 per cent of those polled in the MAX-Outlook Passion of IndiaPoll believed that their favourite team would claim the title and reverse the indifferentperformance of the last two ODI series.

The poll, powered by Indica Research, was conducted in Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi,Calcutta, Bangalore, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Ludhiana and Coimbatore. As many as 47per cent of the 1,000 people polled were women.

The results, if nothing else, corroborated the belief that cricket is a huge passion inIndia. In fact, it emerged as the single biggest passion, well ahead of music, movies,books, money, career, computers, studies, religion, football, politics and spirituality.Interestingly, every third person prefers to watch a cricket match instead of a film, evenif it features his or her favourite stars.

More than three-quarters of those polled had never been to a stadium to watch aninternational match. A vast majority of respondents were so well-informed about the lawsof cricket and the playing conditions that they could identify Power Play and Super Sub astwo recent experiments in the one-day format.