Viewers forgive a soft picture. They never forgive a dead crowd.
Here is a test. Mute a cricket broadcast and watch for five minutes — the game still makes sense. Now keep the picture but replace the crowd with silence. The whole thing collapses. Sound is not a layer on top of the broadcast; it is the broadcast.
Crowd sound is geography
Where the crowd sits tells you where the boundary is. The bowl behind the keeper tells you what the bowler just did before your eyes catch up. We treat crowd microphones as cameras — positioned, aimed and balanced the same way.
"You are not fixing bad light. You are making good light feel consistent.
Mix it right and the viewer feels the moment before they see it.