India Lose in Abu Dhabi....So?

India lost the first of the two one-days against Pakistan in Abu Dhabi. After the loss, I found myself wondering, oddly enough, so what?

I ran through some possible answers. May be it would have been nice to to win the first ever game on this ground. Well, on second thoughts, who the hell cares. We can't win the series now. Big deal. Any game against Pakistan is a do-or-die game. Really? Defeat takes us off the steam. Captain thinks otherwise.

Seriously, it doesn't matter that we lost. Simple reason: we play again tomorrow. We play five more one-days within the next month (in West Indies). We keep playing except for a couple of months in the summer.

As in any issue, the opposing groups assume opposing stands. Players don't want to play so much. ICC keeps on scheduling more and more games. And critics take all kinds of positions, as in here and here.

But I guess, the conventional wisdom is that it's bad. I am not so sure.

Well, what's "bad"? Bad for cricket? How can playing lot of cricket be bad for cricket? Bad for cricketers? Tough luck. It's their job and they are paid more than they could want. If some teams want, they can come up with systems to rotate key players.

No, it's not bad for any of those reasons. The strongest argument would be that it's bad for the interest in the game. I did not worry too much that India lost only because I knew that we play a lot. Not winning a game is not the end of the world.

But I am not so sure that this is bad either.

As I read somewhere scarcity is strength. But strength for producers. On the other hand abundance is strength for consumers. Eventually producers in this case will realize that.

But till such time, as a consumer, I am quite happy that India play almost throughout the year. That way, I can pick what games I really want to follow. Basically, the costs involved in following cricket will drop. I can't really complain about that, can I?