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Why the IPL Should Fail — by Mukul Kesavan

April 25th, 2008Related|Filed Under

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Why the IPL should fail

There is a real possibility the league will work, but the cricket played so far has been low-grade rubbish, and the whole thing deserves to fall on its face

Mukul Kesavan

April 25, 2008

The cricket stadium at Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi used to be uncomfortable and squalid, now it’s comfortable and vulgar. The concrete terraces have been replaced by plastic seats, there’s a giant video screen for replays, the lavatories are better, but the improvements seem beside the point because they don’t play cricket there any more.

I went to watch the Indian Premier League fixture between a team called the Delhi Daredevils and another called the Rajasthan Royals. It didn’t feel like a cricket match; it was either a neighbourhood game played by very rich kids with extremely cool gear or a charity game played by celebrities for a good cause (themselves). Delhi won. That much was clear. Not much else was. Disoriented by the strobe lights that dazzled my stand at the end of every over, I thought for a while that the Sri Lankans were playing because the Rajasthan team were turned out in a Sri Lankan dark blue. Then I saw Farveez Maharoof bowling for the other side and came to my senses.

But it didn’t matter who was playing because the only player who mattered, the asli khilari (the real champion), had done his turn on the field before the game began. Akshay Kumar, the film star, had been hired as the mascot (if that’s the right word) for Delhi. So before the match began, he did a few wire-assisted stunts mid-pitch and then retreated to the new pavilion’s balcony. He took the crowd’s attention with him.

For most of the three hours that the “match” took to complete, the people in my bay had their backs to the game, the better to adore Akshay Kumar who showed he was a good workman worthy of his hire by standing on a chair, making as if to step off the balcony railing, cheering for the Delhi team and even throwing the t-shirt he was wearing to his fans. That last action summed up the event: after a sporting contest, it’s the winning player who throws a wristband or a shirt to the screaming hordes; after an IPL tamasha, it’s much more likely to be the featured film star.

As a cricket match, it was awful and not only, or even mainly, because it was one-sided. It was a non-contest because it was incoherent. Nobody in my bay knew the names of the Indian players who hadn’t played for the country. That wasn’t their fault, but in the course of a real cricket match you get to know the players, specially if you’re at the stadium because you watch them move about when nothing is happening; cricket has lots of “dead” time in between individual deliveries and overs, which helps the spectator into a state of relaxed alertness.

In an IPL match, the organisers do their best to kill this idle time because their souls are so in sync with that sacred cash cow, the commercial, that they can’t imagine what regular people in a stadium would do with themselves in the 90 or so unedited seconds between overs. That’s where the strobe lights, the snatches of Hindi film songs, the fireworks, the cheerleaders in their little skirts, and the animated logos boosting the home side, come into play.

The IPL formula seems to go like this: take an abbreviated game, buy multi-star teams, chuck into pot with a ladleful of film-star flash, bus in a non-paying public with tiny attention spans, distract them with fireworks and other diversions, and sell the lot to an ambitious television channel. Only, somewhere along the way, Lalit Modi and his Money Men mislaid the cricket.

The cricket played thus far has been low-grade rubbish. The innings played by Brendon McCullum or Michael Hussey or Virender Sehwag tell us more about the bowler’s predicament in the Twenty20 format than the batsman’s gifts. In this ultra-compact version of cricket, the game’s natural bias in favour of the batsman is exaggerated to the point of caricature. Each individual batsman can bat as long as he’s not out, and the batting side has the insurance of ten wickets over a measly 20 overs. The poor bowler can’t bowl more than four overs, no-balls are penalised by free hits, and the slightest deviation down the leg side constitutes a wide. Every bowler is the fall guy, the mug who helps the batsman make the paying public cheer.

Did I say paying public? My mistake. In the build-up to the Delhi match, I was pleased to hear that a system for buying tickets online had been put into place. When I asked a friend, who now works for one of the franchises, what percentage of the spectators in the stadium had paid for their tickets, he grinned and said that I shouldn’t ask the question because he couldn’t give me an honest answer.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that IPL matches are watched by freeloading spectators. It may be that cricket doesn’t need a paying public, given the fact that it’s underwritten by its television audience. It’s the millions of couch potatoes and the eyeballs they add up to that make big money possible in cricket. So why shouldn’t cricket as televised tamasha pay its way? Nobody, after all, has ever lost any money betting on the Indian fan’s appetite for coarse cricket.

There is a real possibility that the IPL will work. The players like the money, the franchisees adore the publicity, the television channels gloat over their sold “inventory”, and Mr Modi loves playing Midas. If the IPL succeeds, Test cricket, if it survives at all, will survive as a sporting curiosity, rather like billiards or real tennis. Once the IPL shows that it’s financially sound, the implications for the first-class game will be catastrophic. Already first-class cricket exists only as a nursery for Test cricket. Given the money that the IPL has to offer, why should any ambitious cricketer waste his energies on the four-innings game? A player stands to make more money in the six-week season of the IPL than in years of Test cricket.

Nor can you argue that stardom within Twenty20 cricket depends on a player’s international exposure because all successful club leagues eventually create their own star system. Already rookies like Robin Uthappa and Ishant Sharma stand to make as much or more money than veteran internationals like Ricky Ponting or Rahul Dravid.

Allen Stanford, the American billionaire, has proposed a winner-take-all five-match Twenty20 face-off between a team of Caribbean all-stars fielded by him and an English XI. The purse? $100 million. Should the IPL find a reliable television audience for the Twenty20 game, we can expect longer league seasons, more tournaments and more extravaganzas of the sort Stanford wants to stage. Along the way, the ICC and its chairman will become obsolete in the same way as the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev did when the Russian Federation took over. No prizes for guessing who’ll play Boris Yeltsin.

But I’m hopeful that the IPL venture will fail. There are crucial differences between football’s English Premier League and the IPL. The EPL’s audience has been built over a century of league football; it’ll be very hard for the IPL to instantly produce the traditional partisanship, the long-brewed loyalty, that sustains league football.

Secondly, as Mike Marqusee pointed out in an essay in the Hindu, English and European club football is played in the traditional 90-minute format that has always defined the game, whereas the IPL has invested massive sums of money in an abbreviated, untried version of the game with no history, no under-girding loyalties, and a very narrow geographical base.

Thirdly, where the EPL sells football, the IPL has made the fatal mistake of selling razzmatazz. Over time this will trivialise the league because the glitz will make it hard for its potential fan base to take the matches seriously. Loyalty, in the end, is a serious business.

Finally, the IPL will fail (pray god) because any form of cricketing theatre in which bowlers are cast as extras, can’t possibly create the tension essential for great drama.

Mukul Kesavan is a novelist, essayist and historian in New Delhi. This article was first published in the Kolkata Telegraph

There Are 34 Responses So Far. »

Comment by satyam on 25 April 2008:

Excellent piece here. Glad someone is saying this!
Comment by jayshah on 25 April 2008:

Well its creating huge hype from what I saw on tv. BUT have stressed before the pure commercialisation of cricket ala champions league of football will be the slow death of ‘real’ cricket i.e. test cricket. IPL is fun granted and I am hooked too but there is a lot wrong with this form of cricket. The sport is becoming a batsmen game, the rules all favor batsmen now…bowlers are being sidelined and I’d predict a decline in good bowlers in future. I hear some commentators saying that bowlers shouldn’t complain, cos they have a chance to pick up a wicket with every bowl. I would counter that by saying it is not because of the quality of bowling but the risks taken by batsmen. There is a subtle difference. ODI will suffer first and how long before there is Ten-Ten replacing T20 because T20 is deemed to take too long. I already feel T20 is slow, the fielding sides take even longer between each bowl to set a field to stop the next 6 being hit.

Fun, but an utter joke for cricket.
Comment by rks on 25 April 2008:

Good to see you.
Comment by Qalandar on 25 April 2008:

are you still in India Jay? How is the trip? Upload pics on shutterfly! and watch tashan at a single screen if you are there…
Comment by jayshah on 25 April 2008:

Q - back home now…had a struggle to do a lot of things in India due to hectic schedule so couldn’t catch the movie and other things unfortunately. Came back today - what a trip and what a country!

Must apologise to Shetty whose helped a lot with my itiniery. I couldn’t get around to being in Bangalore and meeting up, just lost time in the end!

Will put some pics up soon, though I’m not so good with camera’s, hope the pictures are passable. South India is absolutely stunning.
Comment by Qalandar on 25 April 2008:

I don’t think test cricket will be the real sufferer: becuase test cricket ka jo hona tha woh pehle se hi ho gaya thanks to ODIs. I believe 20/20 will cannibalize ODIs, because there is now little reason to watch the latter at all: over the last 10-15 years, the ODI pitches have gotten so flat that 300+ scores are now routine, because people want to “entertain” crowds. But those who want such entertainment can get even more of it from 20/20, and in shorter order, whereas the purists who watch test matches have no MORE reason to migrate to 20/20s than they did to go to ODIs. [Of course these are somewhat abstract and unreal examples; in the "real world" most cricket fans I know follow all of their team's matches; with a test they tend to watch a session or more if they can grab it, with a ODI there is more of a sense of wanting to watch the whole thing, same with 20/20. With tests the weird thing isnot many are actually watching it but everyone nevertheless follows it by way of newspaper coverage etc. I really don't think highly of 20/20, yet I skipped work to watch the world cup final and rooted for india throughout that tournament!].

But Jay’s other point — about an overdose of 20/20s impacting test match skills — is well taken. However, here it could cut both ways: ODIs in a sense saved test matches by ensuring that most matches now have results, as more aggressive tactics were adopted. Certainly the ODI game has raised fielding standards across the board, and 20/20 might well do so too. On the other hand, we definitely see the affects of too many ODIs on batsmen’s technique, and 20/20s will exacerbate this (not to mention, most 20/20 batting is pretty ungainly to watch).
Comment by satyam on 25 April 2008:

Hey Jay great to have you back here!
Comment by rks on 25 April 2008:

Good comment Q.We are at a point where cricket is analogous to Cinema. At one end we have purist saying that we don’t have good quality cricket/cinema and other end we have people who are saying that this is what audiences want.
Comment by jayshah on 25 April 2008:

I fear for pure test batsmen like Dravid or Jaffer’s of this world. Certainly test cricket is faster but I would say that has happened for 2 reasons 1) ODI cricket infiltrating into Test cricket (good thing IMO) 2) General decline in bowlers

On point 2) - in the 90’s we had McGrath, Ambrose, Walsh, Kumble, Warne, Murali, Akram, Waqar, Donald, Pollock - good quality bowlers

Today the next generation of batsmen look healthy, but bowlers - what a decline. They are being decimated. IPL - McGrath and Warne at 38 each are still bowling better than most bowlers and these two are retired practically!

There are obvious benefits of ODI and even 20/20 but the latter is IMO about money and does not have the game’s interest at heart. The one good thing for Indian cricket is emergence of new talent from IPL. Other than that what little additional benefit is provided is being negated by the money, commercialisation of the game. We got bolly stars now, cheer leaders from America, big corporates for what is regarded as a ‘gentlemen’s’ sport.

As soon as money is thrown around, it will compromise cricket players. Loyalty towards a nation - don’t be surprised will be up for question. Happens in football, can happen in cricket.

As an aside, the best moment of IPL was Sehwag smashing all those run’s and no-one cheering for him and him being pieved. Priceless moment and somewhat serile. The mentality of football, where the ‘club’ supporters boo opposition players but cheer them on when they play for India.

The point about 20/20 is will it enhance the interest in ‘cricket’ overall or just 20/20 cricket. If the former (which I doubt) then may work (time will test that) but if the latter then can only see worsening situation for ODI and Test cricket in long term. It might be introducing new fans, but these new fans might just want the 6’s and 4’s and not the superb batsmanship of a Dravid in Test cricket.
Comment by jayshah on 25 April 2008:

Good to be back Satyam - I see I missed a lot with Big B’s blog, Tashan and Sarkar Raj.
Comment by Qalandar on 25 April 2008:

Aside: it felt really good to see dravid’s quality shots and pollock’s tight bowling against dravid in the mumbai/bangalore match.
Comment by satyam on 25 April 2008:

Jay: LOL, lots of Sarkar Raj and Bachchan blog posts here!
Comment by jayshah on 25 April 2008:

I did skim read some stuff, congrats on acknowledgement of comments on Big B’s blog by the man himself.
Comment by satyam on 25 April 2008:

Thanks Jay..
Comment by ILG on 25 April 2008:

Welcome back ,Jay.
We missed you and your juvenile humor too.
Glad you had a good time.
Comment by jayshah on 25 April 2008:

Thanks ILG (I think)
Comment by ILG on 25 April 2008:

Just kiddin.
Comment by coolp on 25 April 2008:

Welcome back Jay !!

Howz ur trip ???
Comment by beld o beld on 25 April 2008:

Bullshit article. Authors like this belong to the mughal dynasty. Just reminiscing about the past does not make for quality. 20-20 will be the most popular form of the game and there is nothing wrong with it. You got to change with times. Btw tests will not suffer. The quality of play will increase on the other hand. I won’t be surprised if the naysayers like mukul are saying this just for the heck of it. I am guessing that he probably doesn’t watch test cricket anyway.
Comment by Qalandar on 25 April 2008:

Re: “I won’t be surprised if the naysayers like mukul are saying this just for the heck of it. I am guessing that he probably doesn’t watch test cricket anyway.”

Actually beld, Kesavan writes a blog on cricket, and is a known commenter on all things cricket. It’s highly unlikely that he doesn’t watch test cricket.
Comment by Qalandar on 25 April 2008:

BTW, I think both Kesavan and those who defend all things 20/20 (”Whatever is, is right” in Pope’s immortal lines) confuse two distinct issues. There is nothing inherently batsman-friendly about the 20/20 format; what has made it batsman-friendly to a crazy degree is the flatness of the pitches, the shorter boundaries, and various rule innovations (free hits for no balls, for instance). There is no reason why pitches should be so darn flat (I’ve been saying that about ODIs for years too, or test pitches like the one in Chennai recently, for that matter). The stated defense is it’s for “entertainment”, but it’s never been obvious to me that crowds are more thrilled by a sixer than they are by Brett Lee or Shoaib Akhtar blasting out someone’s stumps, or by making a batsman dance by means of a sharp bouncer. The 20/20 World Cup featured a number of pitches with something in it for bowlers, and I don’t recall those matches being any less exciting than the ones in the IPL. I do agree (with Kesavan and others) that the balance has shifted too far towards batsmen in ODIs and now 20/20s. If there really us empirical evidence to show that new audiences are attracted by batathons that would not be by more even bat vs. ball contests, I suppose there is a commercial justification for it, but it then does lead to less interesting game from my perspective. And in the long term it incentivizes the “manufacture” of more defensive bowlers (guys who can keep it in the blockhole or bowl straight) rather than the glamorous, aggressive attacking bowlers who have thrilled crowds over the years (sure, test cricket will always need the latter, but it will make less and less financial sense for a top flight athlete to specialize in that way). Batting skills are more transferable, although a fleet of batsmen used to going hard without compunction (or often, footwork) will find the going tough when they compete in other forms of the game.
Comment by Qalandar on 25 April 2008:

PPS– some of the contemporary batsmen have also become whiners; one uneven pitch in the Knight Riders/Deccan Chargers match led to great outrage, as if something crazy had happened (this was a match where 230-240 runs were scored in under 40 overs! How bad could it have been?! 230 for the loss of about 15-16 wickets sounds like a fun game to me, with lots of boundaries and lots of wickets, something in it for everyone) — give me a break! If you can have something like the Chennai/Mohali match where around 450 runs were scored in 40 overs, what is wrong if some pitches strike a different balance?
Comment by beld o beld on 25 April 2008:

Q nice set of thoughts. Entirely agree. To me the cal-hyd game was as exciting as the hyd-jai game.

Btw did you read about sreesanth being slapped by bhajji yday and crying on the field. I am very happy that bhajji doid it
Comment by Qalandar on 25 April 2008:

Nahin yaar, bhajji is outta control…sreesanth is a punk magar phir bhi…
Comment by Qalandar on 25 April 2008:

Mumbai police has said they won’t allow cheerleaders to wear skimpy clothes at the Mumbai games — with the odd result (whatever one thinks of cheerleading as a phenomenon) that the (one-time) most liberal city in the country will have far less of a skin show than supposedly laid back Hyderabad, or boondocks Mohali! The NCP and Maharashtra BJP first raised the issue, the Shiv Sena is never one to be left behind, and the usual spinelessness and hypocrisy followed (I have always opposed cheerleading per se, but the hypocrisy and double standards are mind boggling given what we see in Hindi films, including when the same films are broadcast on TV). Over the last couple of days a slew of politicians have showed up expressing outrage over how this stuff is being beamed to families — but the selfsame families are quite thrilled to watch the IPL, Hindi films, or any other such thing…
Comment by Qalandar on 25 April 2008:

beld: your prediction for the Chennai/Kolkata match?
Comment by beld o beld on 25 April 2008:

True q. But sreesanth deserved a slap and its good bhajji did it bcoz it shows the true colors of them. I hope both are banned. Its funny, symo is getting thrashed, ponting is scoring huge andas. The ipl is putting everyone in their rightful place. Ganguly and haydo shud also flop. That wud be the icing.
Comment by beld o beld on 25 April 2008:

Oh chennai by a gallop I would think. Chennai once again scores 200+ if it bats first.
Btw with its moderate weather, chennai will have the best home field adv in the league
Comment by Qalandar on 25 April 2008:

But chew on this: cricinfo had the interesting stat that as a team, Kolkata leads the IPL’s bowling in all three categories (average, economy rate, AND strike rate)… should be a good game (I’m getting up at 6 AM NYC-time to watch it, hence will sign off now)… I do want Ishant to do well but in general I’ll be rooting for the city of my “naniyaal” (Chennai)…

[Aside: I still feel that the most intelligently constructed, well-thought out/balanced teams are Delhi and Kolkata. The rest are skewed in some way...]
Comment by beld o beld on 25 April 2008:

The bowling avg is skewed q. First match against batting stars like jaffer and dravid! , second on a minefield. Today will be the first big test for kolkatta bowlers. Btw won’t make it for todays match. All flights delayed by over 4 hrs ! Sucks man
Comment by jayshah on 26 April 2008:

coolp - Had a brilliant time, my first time in India.
Comment by satyam on 26 April 2008:

LOL! What a match Chennai/Calcutta turned out to be! Go Chennai! Chennai and Delhi are the two unbeaten teams at this point though the latter have to win another one to match Chennai.
Comment by Qalandar on 26 April 2008:

You were spot on beld… Didn’t expect such a massacre…
Comment by Qalandar on 2 May 2008:

A counter-view to Kesavan’s, by Peter Roebuck:

http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/348180.html