Sports provide a planned, structured, and systematic physical activity shaped to improve or maintain one's physical fitness(Vizcaíno,2008). Unlike regular workouts, sports are arguably institutions, which through a series of regulated rules, help develop skill-related fitness. The institution of sport, much like other institutions, uses laws and regulations to position actors in relation to one another to create paradigms of relations. Cricket exemplifies how power is manifested in spatial contexts, however in order to understand how power can govern spaces and the people who occupy them through the medium of sports we need to understand how particular sports come to occupy particular positions in social, individual, cultural, and political life. We also need to understand how these sports in particular have been globalized and normalized in our lives. 

The Globalisation of a sport such as a soccer, or arguably cricket results in the export of the sport to a wide range of different spatial contexts. This applies to the sport as both an activity and as a consumer product. At any one time, there are games being played by a variety of different people in different places around the world. Each game necessarily adapts to these contexts. For example, different objects may be used as pitch markers in different spaces, different kinds of kit or equipment may be used, and rules may be altered to factor in aspects of the contexts the game is played in.  Similarly, a single undeviating version of the sport in question is being talked about, watched, listened to, and engaged within a similarly wide range of contexts. The expansion of a sport such as cricket simultaneously as an action that individual bodies engage in, and which therefore depends on processes of embodiment to be achieved, and as an institution of rules, norms, expectations, and associations can be analyzed through Foucault's notion of biopolitics 
 

As elaborated by Foucault in the birth of Biopolitics, he refers to the notion of biopolitics as a form of governing or regulating the masses through biopower which roughly translates to power over life. Through biopower, we can understand how many institutions permeate our daily lives in many ways and eventually have quite significant effects on how we live in the world. These institutes act as microcosms of broader systemic phenomena like control.(Foucault 1979). Biopower is the extension of a kind of logic of bodies, a knowledge of bodies, and how they operate in consolidating a norm about those bodies. This norm is derived from the repetition of acknowledged certain forms of proper bodies and their signifiers. These signifiers can include prescribed attributes such as size, height, weight, and race. These attributes are highlighted and ascribed as markers of a norm and eventually, this paradigm transitions from anatomy politics to biopolitics. Foucault argues that the emergence of Liberalism allowed biopolitical governance to take hold. Liberalism can be characterized as a political discourse that aims to minimize the administration of authority on the part of government institutions in favor of the economic market which will exert control through its own regulations, allowances, and disallowances.

The shift from sovereign statehood, to liberal statehood, did not necessarily mark a lessening of control and increased freedom. Rather, as quantified by Max Weber, it could be argued that control over ‘subjects’ was increased through the bureaucracy. Foucault uses the example of the panopticon to illustrate the apparatus of disciplinary power. Within the design of the panopticon, you don't even need to be under surveillance to act properly you just kind of accept the way you should act because of various power mechanisms that shape you and control you without you necessarily knowing it. This in a way attributes the emergence of biopolitics to liberalism because in the logic of less control there emerged a concomitant belief that the kinds of social interactions or bodily reactions are in a way more natural since they are not being determined by a ruler or government. Associated with this form of truthfulness and reality that was free of coercion, emerged a norm that allowed the establishment of a form of control not only over people's individual bodies but homogenization of control over all bodies. In a way, these norms determine what is fit and what is a misfit in society. 

Sports of the empire, like cricket, were used as tools to embed these norms within the colonies enabling the rich nobles from the princely state to be a part of the British culture and discipline, and at the same time, it enabled the colonizers to establish an authority that became a norm eventually since the game evolved.  Establishment of norms in order to divide labor within the framework of the game categorized who was allowed to bat, bowl, or field during the game. Ever since its evolution from the colonial period, the game has been regulated in order to decide who is eligible to play and for what role. Tracing the evolution of this sport highlights the factors responsible for institutionalizing a colonial pastime and its role as a tool for colonization for the Britishers within the Indian subcontinent. 

The practice of power within this colonial sport can be analyzed by exploring the relation of power with authority in cricket. Within this framework, in order to understand how power works, we can analyze cricket as an institution. Power is not wielded by a few individuals over the many, but something to which everyone is subjected(Foucault 1982). Since its origin cricket has been designed as a form of discipline where the players follow the authority of the umpire which is embedded as a figure for final decisions. Cricket as an institution has laws that govern how a player has to perform, but at the same time, it provides the umpire who is judging the player's guidelines which he has to follow in order to judge them. the umpire may seem to have more repressive power than the players, but both of the bodies are equally subjected to normalizing power. At the beginning of the game, the players played fair with the fear of being called out by the umpire. This idea of being watched constantly by an authority eventually embedded the sense of fair play in the game.

The rules which were bounding the players as laws of what to do and how to do it, eventually became something that was normal to the regular gameplay. It was the way the game was played. the rules, the authority was all a part of the sport itself.  For the colonizers, the discipline in the game represented their idea of administration in their colonies, where the authority of the viceroys was unchallenged and final. The subjects were to be aware that the viceroy is watching every move and has the power to judge their performance. Throughout the evolution of the game, the players eventually realized that even after the umpire being the authority on the ground, they were ultimately judged based on how they performed. so the sense of mastery of the game was born. Several failed performances lead to perfecting the skills and eventually enabled the colonies to perform well as a team within the rules of the game. Even though the game was shaped on the principles of English traditions and discipline, it was still based on the notion of them performing within the space on that pitch, which allowed a sense of power to change the fate of the result. Cricket itself became a mode to express the anger towards the colonizers in a game bound by sportsmanship. Confined within the rules of this Gentleman's game and fair play, they mastered their skill and were eventually able to play better than the inventors of the sport. The notion of teamwork and the sense of competition derived a balance within the team where everybody had to perform equally well in order to win in a team. A lot of this drift in power has to do with the idea of competition that was brought into the game by the Britishers who started Test matches, which acted as a platform to test the metal of the colonies against them. The emergence of this sense of normalizing power led to individuals focusing on performing well and mastering the skills to beat their oppressors. Eventually, this shifted the focus of cricket being a game of the empire to the game of the masses.