You Are Not Watching
The Whole Game

Near the boundary rope, a kid was waving a foam unicorn horn. Behind him, the Oakland Coliseum was filling up — South Asian families, tech workers still in their hoodies, lifelong Bay Area sports fans who had wandered in one evening out of curiosity and never stopped coming back. This is what cricket in America looks like now. Five years ago, none of it existed. Now it feels as though it always had.

I had stood on that same ground weeks earlier to sign our partnership with the San Francisco Unicorns. The stadium was empty that day, just us and the occasion. What stayed with me, watching it fill up now, was the thought that the child in the stands, like the rest of us, could see the spectacle of the game without seeing the layer that actually decides it.

Twenty plus years in marketing will teach you that, though it took me longer than I would like to admit. I spent the early part of that career chasing the visible win: the launch, the headline, the room’s reaction. It took time to understand that the work holding all of it up rarely gets a name, let alone an audience.

Watch a single over closely and you will see almost none of what matters. A bowler shifts his wrist a few degrees, and the ball that looked like a half-volley becomes the one that takes the edge. A batter reads the field half a second before the bowler commits, and a defensive push becomes four runs through a gap that existed for exactly that long. None of it is visible from the stands. By the time you see the moment, the decisions that produced it are already over.

You are not watching the whole game. Nobody in the stadium is. The part that decides the outcome happens in a layer you cannot see — fast, under pressure, on incomplete information, in the half-second before there is anything to photograph.

It is where businesses live too, and I have spent my career in that layer. The decision that determines whether a company gets the next two years right is rarely the dramatic one in the boardroom; it is the thousand small reads underneath it, made at speed, on imperfect data, by people who will not know for months whether they were right.

That is one reason why Persistent became the Official Re(AI)magining™ Partner of the San Francisco Unicorns. A logo on a jersey was never the appeal. What resonated with me was the opportunity to explore a simple idea: what if technology could help make the invisible layer visible? The pitch is one of the few places where you can watch intelligence prove itself in public — in real time, under real pressure, with the result on the scoreboard for everyone to read.

The partnership was signed at the Coliseum a few weeks ago. There were no slides. There was a cricket bat carrying both identities, and jerseys exchanged and signed.

That is the part our CEO, Sandeep Kalra, kept returning to. “Cricket, like business, is becoming a game of intelligence as much as execution,” he said. “The ability to convert data into real-time insight is increasingly the difference between good and great outcomes.” It is a line I have heard him use about enterprise clients in almost identical words. The conversation moved between cricket and business so naturally the distinction barely seemed to matter.

The timing is deliberate. Major League Cricket Season 4 is underway, and the franchise is entering its most ambitious chapter yet. I have never seen the appeal in proving a technology against an easy problem. MLC is growing fastest in California and Texas, in front of a fan base that is young, diverse and at home with technology. This is a hard, fast, closely watched environment, exactly the kind of place where a half-formed idea gets found out quickly.

It helps that the franchise is reaching for the same thing we are. The Unicorns are not looking for a sponsor; they are looking at how the game itself is changing, and that is a far more interesting brief to be handed. It is also the brief I have spent my career on: taking something complex and turning it into a story people can actually act on, whether that person is a coach reading a probability or a fan reading the game for the first time. The technology has to land in two places at once: in the dressing room, where it makes a decision clearer, and in the stands, where it makes the game itself easier to read.

I am less interested in how many people see this and more in whether a fan who knows nothing about cricket walks away understanding why a decision worked. That, to me, is the only test that matters. One of the first places this takes shape is Persistent Coaches’ Corner, a property we are building with the franchise to bring the reasoning that usually stays in the dugout into view. The work is early, and we are building as we go.

Let me be precise about what would make this matter, because it is easy to be vague. Not a few million people seeing our name over a season. It will have mattered if it produces conversations we could not otherwise have had — with clients we host at matches, with a franchise willing to explore real work on data, performance and fan engagement, with a market that comes to associate us with helping decisions get made faster under pressure, not with a list of capabilities. That is also why this is happening here, in North America, where our clients live with exactly these stakes every day, and not only in a case study.

The trophy has eluded the Unicorns so far, and I am not going to pretend a marketing partnership changes that — the players will decide it, as they should. But I keep thinking about the kid with the foam horn. He has no idea any of this was once impossible. He just knows the game is his now.

That is what it looks like when something new takes hold and stops feeling new. The kid does not need to see the layer to feel it. Most of what made it possible will stay exactly where it belongs: out of sight.

#GameReAImagined