Indian Premier League
From Saturday the 18th starts the 2nd edition of the “entertainment jamboree” called IPL 2.0. It is not just cricket, it’s Cricket ++; cricket packaged with several layers of entertainment. It won’t be wrong to call it a Reality Show televised on prime-time. Cheerleaders, dug-outs, strategy breaks, slap-gate and a few emotional moments are all equally important if not more important than the game itself. I’m sure it would make W.G Grace turn in his grave.

I too was a firm critic of the T-20 format until sometime back. Infact last year I wasn’t even following it during the first month. It was only when the Royals started upsetting one team after another did I actually start getting hooked onto it. (The triumph of the underdog somehow has this ability to galvanize the entire nation). The debate of the purists has been that IPL is the final death knell on the already dying game on test cricket and the magnet called IPL with all its lucre would pull the gen-next cricketers away from test cricket and towards it. Rahul Dravid might have grown up practicing the art of leaving the cricket ball but be rest assured tomorrows cricketers would prefer investing that time in perfecting the art of “switch-hitting” instead.
I was wondering if all this is good or bad for the game? My sense is that it is good, purely from the point of view of getting newer audiences to the game. Take the classic case of cricket in the Caribbean. After ruling the world in the 70s and 80s cricket had reached its nadir there in the last decade. Matches played to empty stands, the usual rege music that one associates with cricket in this part of the world missing, and news of students opting for much more lucrative options like basketball and soccer had become synonymous with this region. The pipeline of quality players had dried up completely.

It is against this backdrop that I happened to watch the recent T-20 encounters between England and West Indies. (Stanford Challenge and the one played as part of the England tour). Both the matches played to packed audiences, games of shorter duration, music and entertainment galore and much more bucks to be made for all the players involved. All the necessary ingredients to attract the youth back to the game!
Cricketing legend and my guru Brian Lara recently said something on similar lines "Cricket is a dying sport and I believe that Twenty20 is going to be beneficial for many reasons.
"This new game has brought a different spectator. Not necessarily the right ones I think. But at the end of the day, spectators and television is what make sport and I'm very happy and very welcoming of the Twenty20 game,"

Whether these players and audiences, once attracted to T-20 be equally committed to the 5 day format of the game is unknown, but then as time moves on, everything changes and I guess this great game has to change. Only then can it hope to attract the right talent, television, money, spectators, media and a lot more…………..