Four cheers for IPL

Now that a week has gone by since the IPL finals and we've all climbed down from the heady excitement of that last-ball finish, is there anything left to say about the phenomenon that this tournament has unleashed? I feel somewhat like the eighth speaker on a panel who begins his speech by admitting, "Everything has already been said, but not by everybody." So, rather than a coherent analysis, let me just offer a few random musings from the margins:

Our Monarchical Fixation: Sixty years after our maharajahs joined the Indian Union and nearly four decades after their privy purses were abolished, how on earth did a major cricket tournament in staunchly republican India end up with four out of the eight teams bearing monarchical names? The Kings XI Punjab, the Chennai Super Kings, the Rajasthan Royals and finally the hapless Bangalore Royal Challengers, would hardly have been out of place in some mediaeval kingdom. And then to compound the ersatz feudal note, a fifth team called itself the Kolkata Knight Riders. When did knights last ride through the streets of Kolkata? Who dreams up these names, anyway? (I don't object so much to the Delhi Daredevils and the Deccan Chargers, though to most people these days a charger is something you plug your cellphone into; but couldn't Mumbai have come up with something a little less lame than Mumbai Indians?)

The Post-Chauvinist Crowds: As one who began watching cricket in Bombay as a child 45 years ago, i have come to lament the unsportsmanlike chauvinism of our crowds in recent years, whose inability to applaud good cricket except when Indians are playing it has become a national disgrace. (Which Indian cricket-lover can ever forget the shameful riots in the Eden Gardens during the 1996 World Cup and again during the Test against Pakistan in 1999?) In India these days, a fine innings by a foreign player is greeted with a stony silence even by a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands, while home-grown players are cheered with a raucousness that is sometimes out of proportion to their merit. No more of that. Thanks to the mixture of nationalities in each of the IPL teams, partisanship has suddenly lost its chauvinist flavour. Few things in my cricket-watching experience have been as enthralling as the same Eden Gardens crowd, 100,000 strong, roaring in support as Shoaib Akhtar came steaming in on his debut for Kolkata against Delhi. The sight of a Pakistani fast bowler being cheered by an Indian crowd as he demolished the likes of Sehwag and Gambhir is not one we are likely to see repeated in a Test match, but it's heartwarming to see our crowds put national chauvinism aside in the interest of backing their mongrel city teams.

The Threat To "Real" Cricket: Frankly, i'm not worried. Back in the 1970s, i was against one-dayers, before actually watching a deathly England-Australia Test at the Oval in 1975 (when the late Bob Woolmer made one of the most turgid centuries ever scored) and contrasting it with the Sunday League matches that same weekend. One-dayers became an essential complement to the game, and helped revive Test matches, which benefited from the more assertive batsmanship, athletic fielding and speedier running between wickets that one-dayers had created. So i was a little more cautious this time about expressing any pre-emptive criticism of Twenty20, until last year's tournament in South Africa confirmed that any such negativism would have been misplaced. The IPL has been an unqualified triumph, but it doesn't mean that it will undermine Test cricket, or even (as it's now becoming fashionable to suggest) threaten the 50-over ODI. I see no reason why Twenty20 will not simply add to the rich mix of options available to cricket watchers. My analogy is to modern communications, where each innovation has simply come on top of the previous one without eliminating it altogether: letters were not wiped out by phone calls, phone calls didn't succumb to faxes, faxes haven't been wiped out by emails, and each of us who has something to communicate to someone else can still choose to write a letter, make a phone call, send a fax or click on an email. The cricket fan wanting to spend a day at the Test match or an ODI will still be able to do so, while those who can turn their attention to the game after work will now have a four-hour option as well. And last, but not least (except for their attire):

The Cheerleaders! They were glitzy, attractive and energetic, and they brought out the worst in our society: the early lasciviousness towards the skimpily-clad boosters of the Washington Redskins; the censorious hypocrisy of those who frowned that cheerleading did not accord with Indian morals, and especially of the two cities that banned them from performing; and the alleged racism of some of the organisers towards black cheerleaders, which has now reportedly become the subject of a court action in the UK. But most fans across the country simply took them in stride. I'm one of those cricket fans who tends to think that cricket is entertainment enough, and doesn't need either short skirts or clowns on stilts to liven the proceedings, but i couldn't deny that it's fun to watch cheerleaders in the lulls between deliveries. After all, they serve the wonderful purpose of keeping the viewers' excitement up, just in case the few seconds between a six and the next delivery hung too heavy on our hands.

While we're livening up a game that was invented (at least in its organised form) in staid and decorous Victorian England, there's no shame in bringing it into the 21st century, even by borrowing techniques from the Brits' less decorous American cousins. Ashis Nandy once memorably wrote that "cricket is an Indian game accidentally invented by the British". Anyone seeing the IPL might be tempted to conclude that Twenty20 cricket is actually an American game deliberately reinvented by the Indians. Now, let's see what Tata can do to the Jaguar....