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Steve Waugh has a point. It was perhaps somewhat unfair to pick Sachin Tendulkar for the man-of-the-series award at the close of the recent three-Test matches which saw Australians make smithereens of India. Both Ricky Pointing and Justin Langer scored more runs in the Tests than Tendulkar did; they also hit two centuries each during the Tests as against Tendulkar's lonely ton in the first Test. Langer's double century in the final Test marked some sort of a record. It was the highest scored in an innings by an Australian against India. And if mention is made of the department of bowling, Glenn McGrath's performance in the series was equally outstanding. How Tendulkar was picked as the man of the series therefore defies explanation.

The mystery of the choice lies elsewhere than in cricketing skill. Australia has a population of less than 20 million; India has close to a billion. The per capita income of Australia is of course nearly one hundred times higher than that of India's, and is almost at the same level as the per capital income in northern American and western Europe. So what the consumer market in Australia can flaunt is the bare sum total of purchasing power of its 20 million inhabitants.

India in contrast may be a horrendously poor country; roughly 15 per cent of her population nonetheless enjoys a level of income as well as a level of consumption which matches that of West Europe's or North America's.

Fifteen per cent of a billion amounts to 150 million; this creamy layer of Indians constitutes a market for goods that is easily seven-and-a-half times the size of the Australian market. The multi-national company sponsoring the India-Australia Test series had done their home work. Never mind the outcome of the Tests; the Indians, the sponsors are likely to have insisted, deserve some sort of a consolation prize in deference to their vastly superior purchasing power in the globalised durable and non-durable goods markets. Sachin Tendulkar was accordingly named the man of the series. This is absurd, some might say.

It is necessary to take cognisance here of another harsh reality. The cricketing ability of the Australians may be way above what the Indians are capable of. But the annual income from product endorsements of Mark Waugh or Shane Warne must be substantially less than the money earned by Sachin Tendulkar, or Saurav Ganguly, or even that consistently non-performing zombie, Rahul Dravid.

Australia may be bustling with cricketing talent; the continent however holds, to repeat, only 20 million people. The market for consumer products Australia can offer pales into insignificance when compared to the size of the Indian market; forget the fact that India is one of the world's poorest countries; its rich are very, very rich and the size of the market they command leaves Australia far behind. Those amongst the Indian players who have made it to the top of the world of advertisement are entitled to take pity on the Australian Test team as a whole; they, the Australians, may be players of far superior calibre; they have nonetheless no clout in the market.

The network of deals and contracts that characterises the Indian cricket team must bemuse the Australians. The overarching challenge is to sustain the demand for the products the Indian players endorse. These players are made to don the image of supermen. They jolly well have to be supermen, for otherwise the wares they are bonded to sell will not sell. There could be no greater tragedy in the global free market milieu than the inability to sell. An uncomfortable situation has arisen in the wake of the three-Test series with the Australians. The market gossip could be lethal; not only are Indian goods of such poor quality as to make it difficult to sell in the global market; their cricketers too are no good at all, the Australians have given them such a drubbing that the market for the wares they had been endorsing in newspapers and the electronic media might shrink perceptibly in consequence.

It might, and perhaps it will. The credibility of the Indian cricketers will certainly decline at least in Australia. For instance, a bunch of Indian migrants had taken leave from work for a couple of days and, high of hopes, had come to watch the games along with their entire families. They were flabbergasted by the Indian performance and are unlikely to easily forget the experience of bitter disappointment; expatriate patriotism will take a dip.

But, for most of the rest, it will be business as usual. Nothing much to worry about, the Indian domestic market will remain substantially out of reach of any evil-doers. The memory of the Australian misadventure will fade, or be made to fade. The advertisers have nowhere else to go; they will cling to the list of players the Indian Cricket Board of Control picks for them. There is to be no abatement of the thraldom associated with the investiture of divinity for the players. One does not know about the players; at least their sponsors suffer from no sense of embarrassment on account of the Australian disaster.

Therefore soothing words of encouragement will soon resume flowing. The cricketers should not feel despondent. Of course their overall performance in Australia is nothing to write home about. But take heart, their captain has walked away with the man-of-the-series award, the Australian skipper's caveat notwithstanding.

The factor underlying the decision to hail Tendulkar and not McGrath or Langer is no different from what explains the recent proliferation of Miss World and Miss Universe awards to Indian damsels. The Indian girls were no less presentable in the earlier decades, but the beauty awards would elude them. India did not have a sizeable consumer market then, the country's aspiring young women therefore received the brush-off. Be proud, times have changed, the Indian girls have a market demand, because India now offers a luscious market for the products put on the showcase by the multinational giants. The Indian cricketers too will in due course survive the embarrassment caused by their miserable display of non-talent in the Australian playing fields. One can take a wager: accumulation of wealth by Mark Waugh will not be a fraction of Sachin Tendulkar's earnings during the forthcoming decade.

You never know though, the blow might fall from altogether unexpected quarters. Suppose the International Cricket Council, which sets cricket rules, is suddenly visited by a streak of wobbly decision-making. Globalisation, it might choose to issue an edict, implies a fair sharing of the spoils amongst the players.

Already a convention exists that prize money earned by individual players during a foreign tour goes into a common pool, and the proceeds are equally distributed among all the players. The ICC might choose to extend the principle to earnings from endorsements as well, domestic as well as international. In such an emerging situation, a Rahul Dravid will have to share his booty with a Debang Gandhi, and the Waugh brothers will turn over their receipts form endorsements in the same box where Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar deposit their earnings; it will be a splendid show of an international sharing of the spoils.

Will such a prospect unnerve the Sachin Tendulkars, the Saurav Gangulys and the Rahul Dravids? Perhaps the suggestion will be regarded as too impractical to be enforced. But a social purpose will still be served if these eminences realise that the huge payment of which they are beneficiaries provide no objective assessment of their worth to society; the free market can often be a cheat, and the players enjoy a kind of temporary bonus because the market for cricket glamour is not yet one hundred per cent perfect. And it is no longer la mode to read Joan Robinson or Edwin Chemberlin these days for appreciating the mystique of imperfect competition. In any case, the concept of equal sharing has to be rejected; that is dirty socialism.