The IPL must survive

As I stood in a government office in Germany, I had the company of the only other South East Asian in the room, an Afghan who had taken asylum in the country. He couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Pashto. And yet, we struck up a conversation in his heavy mix of Urdu and Pashto and my nearly non-existent Hindi. As the conversation shifted to our countries of origin, as it always does, he asked me where in India I was from. With a hint of pride, I said I was from Bangalore. And I asked him if he had heard of the place; after all, it was the IT capital of the country and Obama had taken great pains to learn the correct pronunciation of the name so as to inform his countrymen on where all their jobs were going. “Oh ya, Chris Gayle plays for RCB,” was his reply.

True champions or reality show contestants?

Joseph Nye defined soft power as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than through coercion.” It is the process of creating a favourable impression of a country which could potentially influence the economic and military relations between the nations in question. The fact that we can name the cities of Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sunderland and Southampton in England only on the basis of the regional football teams is a soft power advantage that the UK holds over its European neighbours when it comes to our choice of business or education destinations. The US holds soft power through its many world-class universities and the almost universal presence of businesses such as McDonald’s.

Even as the cops back home are busy arresting bookies and players in relation to the spot-fixing scandal, and the men in power are busy calling for each other’s head, the IPL has become an important addition to India’s already significant arsenal (Indian food, Bollywood, Holi) of soft power. It paints the picture of an emerging economic powerhouse, a nation with a young dynamic population, a substantial middle-class, and a market with seemingly unlimited potential. How else would an Afghani refugee in Germany know of cities like Pune or Hyderabad and be impressed with the amount of money corporate India can spend on sport today? Lalit Modi, perhaps unwittingly, created a powerful medium in the IPL, one whose influence has the potential to go way beyond our borders, sell merchandise in far-off countries, and possibly even inspire people to play cricket in nations where the word stands for a chirping grasshopper-like insect. It is, in an almost literal sense, a golden goose, and we cannot afford to kill it. The IPL must survive for its sheer potential.

Shekar Gupta, in his article for the Indian Express, writes “The BCCI has to make a fundamental choice. Either the IPL is a serious cricketing league, on the lines of the EPL, or it is a tamasha, like WWE wrestling.” And for IPL to survive, the choice has to be the former. In a nation that worships its cricketers and a cricket match is considered a semi-religious experience, there is no way that a scripted cricket league can succeed. And, therefore, the IPL must change from what it is today, and change drastically at that.

2006 was a terrible year for Italian football. It was the year of Calciopoli, the major match-fixing scandal that struck the nation’s top professional football league, the Seria A. At the very thick of things were the top teams of Italian football Juventus, AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio, accused of putting pressure on the referees to affect the result of the games and rigging the referee selection process. When found guilty, Juventus were stripped of their 2005 and 2006 titles, disqualified from the UEFA Champions League, relegated to Seria B and were docked 9 points in their 2006-07 season. AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio faced significant point reductions and the latter two were disqualified from the UEFA Champions League. Juventus chairman Antonio Giraudo was banned for 5 years from football and served 3 years in jail, the general manager, Luciano Moggi, was given a life ban from football, and the entire board of directors of the club resigned, as did the president of Italian Football Association, Franco Carraro.

That is the level of punishment that the BCCI should be thinking about if it wants to re-establish the credibility of IPL as a proper sporting league. It needs to convince the fans that it is serious about the sport and not just about the millions that the league generates. The punishments imposed on the guilty should be of an exemplary standard to make clear the absolute zero tolerance policy towards corruption. The BCCI certainly needs to rethink its policy on letting Board presidents owning teams and stop treating the sport fans like idiots, as it does on a regular basis. And, as fans, we need to stop questioning why the acts of a few in the team or in the management should affect the rest of the team. Cricket is a team sport and we need to treat it like that. While the heroics of a single player could mean victory for an entire team, the wrong-doings of a single player/person affect the whole team negatively.

Amongst the most fundamental aspects of sport that determine the quality of viewing experience is the pace of the game; the uninterrupted, well-paced action that keeps the viewers on the edge of their seats. That’s the reason players with lengthy service routines in tennis are admonished, and longish bathroom breaks frowned upon. That’s the reason football is reluctant to bring in technology, in fear that it will destroy the ‘fluidity’ of game and ruin it as a spectacle. Now, considering all this, the strategic time-out is a joke, and a terrible one at that. The IPL, in the way it functions, must be seriously revamped. It needs to learn to respect the sanctity of the sport. We cannot have players on field plugged in and talking to the commentators while on field, nor can we have commentators saying Yes Bank before every six. It is okay to want the IPL to be a successful commercial model, but business and sport can’t mix. The 40 overs that the players are on the field should be only about cricket and certainly not about how a random actor has always been a fan of a particular team. The owners need to understand that they have no business being on the playing field, much less scuffle with security personality for doing their duty. The IPL can be about entertainment, the cheerleaders outside the boundary line is okay, as are extravagant opening ceremonies, but the boundaries between sport and entertainment must be made clear. And if the BCCI has any intentions of building loyal fan bases, an integral part of any sporting league, it needs to do away with the full auctions every three seasons. While it is an obvious attention and money-spinner, it undermines the importance of the fan, and that just cannot happen. And for heaven’s sake, they need to introduce a red button to choose a pre/post match show of an intellectual level higher than the one rendered by Navjot Singh Sidhu.

There needs to be a line drawn between entertainment and sport

The events of the recent days have dealt a serious blow to the IPL and its credibility. It has made the fans and officials ask serious questions, and that’s not such a bad thing. There have been bans and arrests and a lot of anger, and all of them have put the IPL at a crossroads. What the future holds for the IPL is now entirely in the hands of BCCI. It can admit to its mistakes, sack tainted people, revamp the league and come back stronger and cleaner as a sporting league next season, or choose to wait till the events fade out of public memory, push things under the carpet and reappear again as the massive annual reality show that it is now. For the sake of the sport and its fans, I hope it’s the former. They need to remember that sport has lasted for centuries in human history, but the best of reality shows have lasted only a few seasons. A few heads might roll and a few talents may disappear, but, in the end, the sport would have survived, and that is of vital importance.