Empty seats at India, Pakistan games signal Champions Trophy 2025's crucial role in ODI future

It’s the final of the NatWest Trophy triangular series, hosts England vs India at Lord’s, the so-called Mecca of Cricket. 13 July 2002, a packed house in the vicinity of 28,000 or so, a predominant sea of blue. The previous year, Chennai-born Nasser Hussain, the England captain, had expressed his disappointment at young Asians supporting India and Pakistan. “I cannot really understand why those born here, or who came here at a very young age like me, cannot support or follow England. Following England has got to be the way ahead," he had insisted.

Hussain’s appeal, if that’s what it was, fell on deaf ears. Not only did the vast majority at Lord’s back Sourav Ganguly’s India, they also celebrated the heist pulled off by your turks Yuvraj Singh and Mohammad Kaif with gay abandon. Similar scenes were the norm at the final of the Champions Trophy nearly 11 years later, this time at Edgbaston in Birmingham, when India met – and beat – the host nation in a thrilling contest.

India vs anyone, anywhere in the world – or almost anywhere – is a practically guaranteed full house in a white-ball international. Such as against Pakistan in Centurion and Adelaide and Manchester and The Oval (expectedly), against South Africa and even Zimbabwe at the sprawling Melbourne Cricket Ground (T20 World Cup 2022), against South Africa in Bridgetown… You get the picture, right?

And yet, the Dubai International Cricket Stadium was, at best, half-full on Thursday night when Rohit Sharma’s side locked horns with Bangladesh in their opening game of the 2025 Champions Trophy. All eyes are obviously on the marquee India-Pakistan faceoff on Sunday, but the general belief was that those who couldn’t secure, or afford, tickets to that clash would settle for another India match. Any India match. That belief proved singularly unfounded, given the tepid response on Thursday.

Dubai hasn’t really been famous for throwing up full houses, truth to tell. It didn’t for most matches during the T20 World Cup in 2021, nor during the Asia Cup in 2022, unless it was Pakistan locking horns with India. The Dubai International Cricket Stadium isn’t a gigantic venue, to be honest. Its official capacity is 25,000, which can be stretched to 30,000.

When bursting at the seams, it can host less than a third that can comfortably be seated at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. And yet, it was so scarcely populated when play began on Thursday that the seams seemed to be closing in instead of being stretched to the hilt.

Are fans really interested in 50-over cricket?

The Champions Trophy, returning after an eight-year hiatus, is only two matches young and already, doubts are being raised over the popularity of the event, of the 50-over format itself. After all, even the opening match of the tournament, between host nation Pakistan and New Zealand at Karachi’s revamped National Stadium failed to put bums on all the 34,238 seats even though it was the first time since March 1996, and the 50-over World Cup final, that a global tournament was being hosted by Pakistan.

Ticket prices can’t be held as the reason for fans failing to turn up in Pakistan. Tickets for matches involving Pakistan start from PKR 2,000 (INR 1,200) while those for ‘neutral’ games begin at PKR 1,000. They aren’t prohibitively expensive though they do mushroom to less attractive figures (from a purchasing standpoint) as one targets higher-end seats, in contrast to Dubai, where the minimum ticket price is AED 250 (INR 6,000) for all other games and AED 500 for the India-Pakistan faceoff.

That is a lot of money for a game of cricket beginning at 1 pm. Summer hasn’t set in yet, mercifully, and the maximum temperature is still below the 30-degree Celsius mark but many stands at the Dubai Stadium are exposed to the elements, and it can’t be a pleasant experience sitting there until the sun sets and it begins to cool down.

But that’s not a deal-breaker, one would imagine. People have gone to more extreme lengths to fuel their passion for the sport and if they were really interested, four or five hours under the sun wouldn’t be a deterrent. The problem is: Are the fans really interested in 50-over cricket? Does it hold the same charm and allure as, say, even a decade and a half back, when T20 cricket was in its infancy, when limited-overs internationals under lights invariably pointed to 50-over matches?

The influx of T20 games, allied with other variants such as T10 and The Hundred, among others, has left the 50-over format, once an unquestioned money-spinner, at a crossroads.

The possibility of the 50-over World Cup in India in October-November catalysing a revival in interest in the one-day game was genuine, given the excellent response to even non-India games in all parts of the country. Stadiums might not have been full to the brim for Netherlands vs Sri Lanka, say, but the magic of the World Cup still drew thousands of fans to the grounds. India fixtures, needless to say, whipped up a storm of the kind the Indian team did on the park.

But that proved a false dawn. Perhaps the crowds came because it was the World Cup, perhaps they came because it was in India. But in other parts including Australia, ODIs have struggled to attract the patronage of the fans who find it ‘too long’. Ironically, record crowds drove the five-Test series against India between November and December even though a Test match is five times longer than a ‘too long’ one-day encounter.

Champions Trophy can play big role in ODI’s future

The 50-over format has undergone so many changes that it is sometimes hard to keep track. After the last rejig, it uses two new balls, which is a license for batters to keep lashing out for as long as possible. Two white balls pretty much take spin and reverse swing out of the picture, better bats, stronger batters and shorter boundaries facilitate a hiding to nothing as far as the bowling fraternity is concerned. Oftentimes, the middle overs meander along, the batting and the bowling sides both going through the motions, waiting for the final 10-12 overs when so much excitement is packed in so little a period. When the players themselves go through the motions, how fair would it be to expect the fans to drown themselves in excitement?

Outside of the World Cup, ODI cricket is in a somewhat losing race to keep itself afloat. Bilateral series foisted for commercial reasons don’t appeal to the fans beyond certain pockets, especially when several big names pick and choose series and formats for various reasons. Without the best of the best, ODIs will struggle for survival – they are doing so even with the best of the best in action – which again begs the question: What’s its standing in the cricketing landscape?

It’s a question that many have been seized of for a long time now. Over the next two and a half weeks, perhaps there will be some answers to a query that holds great import. The remainder of the Champions Trophy could well shape the future of not only this now-on, now-off event, but potentially of the 50-over format itself, once the bed and butter of the sport but now a pale shadow of its former imperious, majestic self.