It is perhaps time to put aside any lingering reverse-colonial anxieties, maybe even to simply enjoy the IPL a little
It's coming. Rattling at the windows. Waggling the door handle. Erecting its cement advertisement hoardings on the front lawn. And some time in the wee hours unfurling its great spongiform tongue in through the letter box and whispering up the stairs its alluring monologue of DLF maximums, tracer bullets, Karbonn Kamaal Catches and the like while you shiver and sweat and dream about a brilliant future of men in gleaming C-3PO helmets striding across a floodlit oval ringed by hordes of capering BRIC-economy consumers who don't know or care what a back foot defensive is but who love wearing big sunglasses and waving and cheering – not, you know, really at anything, just generally – and whose destiny it is to sack unknowingly and at great geographical distance the deserted shrines of Headingley, Canterbury and the lost city of Rose Bowl.
Or perhaps, on reflection, not. This has often been the tone of the more fearful responses to the aggressive sporting colonialism of the Indian Premier League, not just in England but anywhere its vibration is felt. As is often the case with such things the reality of five years of IPL cricket has been more prosaic: neither as dramatic nor as cretinisingly barbaric as some had feared. More fun and more richly nuanced – although not much more – than many assumed. With Pepsi IPL6 due to kick off on 3 April this is perhaps a good moment not just to preview cricket's most noisily lucrative competition, but to run a systems check, to inveigle a damage report out of poor sweating Mr Scott down in the engine room six years on from lift-off. The IPL is back. Do we still need to be afraid?
No doubt with good reason, the preamble to IPL6 has been more thrillingly widescreen than ever before. The IPL website's own clock, ticking off the seconds until the first new ball offering is flayed over backward point by some adrenaline-seized opening slugger, has the air of a thrillingly doomsdayish countdown. And this is the most consistent of sporting behemoths: unshakeably upbeat, relentlessly excited, and brilliantly convinced of its own absolute centrality not just to Twenty20 cricket in the month of April, or world sport, but to pretty much everything that has ever happened.
This time around the competition will kick off with an Olympic-scale opening ceremony, the kind of Statement Ceremony that says: this is indeed a world championship, a world championship that happens every year – and which is, as it turns out, always won by India. Pre-publicity pictures have offered tantalising glimpses of a dancing waxwork Elvis Presley being strangled by Hawaiian bongo players (this turns out to be the legendary Shah Rukh Khan weaving his inimitable magic) plus "flying drummers", a performance by the American rapper Pitbull (no, the Spin neither) and ongoing negotiations with Jennifer Lopez, a kind of R&B Adam Gilchrist in her own right, still out there toting the silhouette of indelible global superstardom about the place, a little stiff in the joints, a little more Vegas tribute-act with every passing year.
"The Opening Ceremony of the Pepsi IPL 2013 will be as outstanding as the cricket that we will witness over the subsequent seven weeks," IPL chairman Rajeev Shukla has insisted, with the air of a man who, this time, means it double. While not perhaps make-or-break, it is still a vital year for India's gloriously successful domestic T20 league. Dogged perhaps by World Cup fatigue in India, last year's IPL was a commercial disappointment, major news for a competition in which, to quote Pitbull's own acronymic debut album M.I.A.M.I., Money Is A Major Issue.
Broadcast revenues dropped by an estimated 30% last year as advertisers cooled on the high cost of IPL-based cement-promotion and mobile phone hawking. Beyond this, the IPL's own "Brand Value" has eroded steadily from the giddy days of imminent world domination when 20-over slog razzmatazz was all set to take over from football, the Olympics, Hollywood and organised religion as the greatest show on earth.
Plus, and perhaps more crucial to its reach beyond India's own frontiers, the basics of the competition are still a bit of a mess. With 76 games scheduled over seven weeks there is frankly too much cricket, a relentless interchangeable gorging on high-speed inter-state thrash that also serves to emphasise the lack of tonal variation in the format itself. Twenty20 cricket at its best is a bit like eating an expertly constructed hamburger, whereas the IPL at times feels like an unrelenting facial hamburger-assault, jaws clamped, cheeks bulging, spraying chunks of bun and gristle as you open your mouth to splutter, couldn't we just … you know … just have a few quiet overs of … even as further rubberised gobfulls of glistening product are being crammed between your slobbering lips.
Plus there is the enduring muddle of teams and personnel. The IPL has had four different winners in five seasons: on the face of it evidence of competitiveness, but also a reflection of the generally confusing identity of these revolving rosters. MS Dhoni's Chennai Superkings seem the most coherent brand, tribute to the Indian skipper's gold standard competitive charisma. But beyond that … erm, Hyderabad Sunrisers anyone? It takes time to make these kinds of team identities stick, but more importantly a sense of existing outside a few weeks in April and May, of having a concentrated geographical centre and beyond this of actually producing rather than simply importing players.
Perhaps this might help to explain the slightly bizarre recruitment pattern at the 2013 auction, which saw "the Big Show", aka Glenn Maxwell, one of the more bafflingly over-promoted figures in world cricket, sold to Mumbai Indians for a sensational $1m. Those are some expensive bits and pieces. Pune Warriors also paid $700,000 for young Aussie fast bowler Kane Richardson: a real talent by all accounts, but quite what direction he points himself in from here will be fascinating to observe. And, of course, beyond the influx of youth the creaking superstars remain – Ricky! Rahul! Gilly! – patched up and wheeled out like late Roger Moore James Bond, corseted into their sponsored safari suits, still creakily chasing girls and wrestling bad guys beneath that extra caking of slap.
And then there's the other stuff. The IPL brand has not escaped the tarnishing effects of wider events. After protests at the treatment of Tamils in their home country, it was announced this week that no Sri Lankan players will appear in Chennai, capital of Tamil Nadu province: genuine real-world concerns but deeply off message as far as the IPL's relentless positivity is concerned. Last year's unproven allegations of spot-fixing have hardly helped things along. The dissolution of the Deccan Chargers was another mini-disaster. And recently there have even been preliminary investigations into the details of franchise finances, with Kings XI Punjab co-owner Preity Zinta reported to be among those questioned.
On top of which player behaviour has been poor at times, perhaps understandably so for those in England with experience of the similarly disorientating pressures and rewards of football's Premier League. Luke Pomerbasch of Royal Challengers Bangalore was accused of assault at a post-match party last season (Pomerbasch denied the accusation and charges were withdrawn). Wayne Parnell of South Africa is still thrashing out the consequences of being present at a party where a police raid found cocaine and MDMA being consumed.
It is hard to know what to make of all this, beyond perhaps the unhelpful but still sympathetic observation that a slightly embattled IPL looks to the jaded Anglo-observer actually more interesting, and even more likeable, than the familiar triumphalist version. This is, after all, cricket's most potent modern innovation, a competition staged in the one cricketing nation with the will and the means to promote the sport on this grand scale. Wanting to preserve the best parts of old-school cricket doesn't have to coincide with wishing the IPL would fail. In an ideal world all forms could thrive in mutual, energetically rivalrous semi-harmony.
Plus, of course, let us not forget that the county championship, the domestic competition most obviously threatened by the IPL's success, was in its own time a kind of mutton-chop four-day IPL, created solely in order to cash in on the new Victorian leisured classes. No doubt at the time there was dismay at the commercialisation of village sport, at the picnicking classes taking over the noble pastoral pursuit, perhaps even at the end of cricket as we know it.
And the truth is the IPL is no more than a contributory symptom of cricket's inevitable transformation in the satellite TV era. If its effects have been short of the instant apocalypse some predicted, its altered gravity is still tangible. England may have only two players present this year compared to 23 Australians, and might even consider themselves outside this subcontinental drama, but the IPL and its global sister leagues remain a fiscal time bomb when it comes to England's central contracts. The ECB's stance has been unyielding: Test cricket must remain the priority. But a hardcore of contracted players are if not exactly disgruntled, then at least far from gruntled: certainly they are underpaid compared to the Australians, who also get to play in the IPL. Plus, for all the focus on Tests England have just been outplayed in New Zealand by a nation with six IPL-bound cricketers, four of them Test regulars. A resolution is required.
All things considered, as the IPL comes crunching up the gravel driveway, playing its stereo too loud outside your bedroom window and clanging the door chimes, it is perhaps time to put aside any lingering reverse-colonial anxieties, maybe even to simply enjoy it a little. For one thing the idea of a listing, operatically tarnished IPL suddenly looks a whole lot more interesting than an IPL set on simple commercial annihilation. For another the IPL isn't going anywhere: the only major free-to-air cricket available on British television, it is a competition that is clearly much better embraced by the pre-existing scheme of things. Unbolt the door, turn on the porch light, spend a few minutes studying those bulging team rosters: this might even be fun.
*PUJARA: GREAT IN WAITING*
Having dwelt on the more unpredictable aspects of Indian cricket, the Spin feels duty bound to linger a little on the more obviously pedigree bits. In reality the most immediate threat to the fortunes of India's Test team isn't a bit of a cross-bat thrash every April, but instead the departure of a generation of lingeringly lauded greats. Replacing the central components of one of the great batting lineups of modern cricket would vex any nation's resources. And with this in mind: all hail Cheteshwar Pujara, a batsman who really does look, the Spin feels it is pretty much safe to say now even from its own innate position of jeering scepticism, the real deal.
Here he is: the world's next great elegant right-handed Test match batsman. Pujara's 82 not out to lead India home in the fourth Test against Australia on a tricksy pitch was another genuinely fine innings from a player who seems unfazed in all situations, to date anyway. Currently, Pujara has 1,180 imperiously correct Test match runs at 65.55, with the only caveat that 11 of his 13 Tests have been played in India. Two matches in South Africa brought just 31 runs.
Success abroad will no doubt come: Pujara has a wonderful technique, obvious cricketing intelligence and a hunger to play. He stands alone as the Spin's preferred candidate to lead the next generation of world's best batsmen. Similarly R Ashwin has continued to make a fine stab at filling the world class spin bowler-shaped hole left by the retirement and decline of the Kumble-Harbhajan axis.
Learning as he goes in long form cricket the loping, nerdish, cool calm and collected Ashwin now has 92 Test wickets at just over 28 with nine five-fors. But like Pujara, outside India he remains not so much untried as very slightly tried and found wanting. Three chastening Tests in Australia brought nine wickets at over 60. And yet there is real talent here: if it has been expressed only in Indian conditions perhaps there is also cause to celebrate this sense of variation. Not so long ago there were complaints that pitches the world over – not to mention the experience of touring itself – were becoming undesirably samey. Not so, apparently. More good news for Test cricket. Which is, so we keep hearing, supposed to be exclusively in the bad news business.
*CRICKET WINS 0-0*
On which note, a final thought. Just concluded: a 15-day rain-sodden 0-0 draw that ended in a moment of fist-pumping drama arrived at over six hours of umbrella-gnawing tension. If you were to come up with Test cricket now and attempt to launch it as a major global sport, you'd be laughed out of the room. A glorious anachronism, it really shouldn't exist at all. And yet – weirdly slow, oddly non-interactive, bizarrely long attention-span – it still does. Another 0-0 victory for the summer game!
*STILL WANT MORE?*
England's bowlers must get back in the swing after their Auckland escape, writes Mike Selvey, while Andy Wilson profiles Matt Prior in the wake of his series-saving, final-day knock.
And you can watch all the best reaction to England's series draw in New Zealand and much more on our dedicated video channel.
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Barney Ronay
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