The world within cricket: The IPL paradigm

Fans come in their thousands to watch the IPL

Technically, the seventh season of the IPL begins today. But in the minds of fans, the appetisers had already begun months ago. Despite bobbing in the sea of controversy with everyone – right from BCCI officials to team owners and even players – being involved in the murkiness, the IPL still finds itself firmly entrenched in the hearts of those who prefer to see the tournament simply as an offshoot of T20 cricket rather than anything else.

Honestly though, it’s still a bit astonishing for me to come to terms with this kind of fandom. To understand that where only international cricket used to exist with cricketers most content to being brand ambassadors of their national colours, there would now be corporate teams which would own the cricketers. Even after all these years of IPL’s continued run of dominance.

More than what the IPL may look to be to its fans, there is however so much more to T20 cricket. Granted that the fancy concocted terminologies for ‘boundaries’ and ‘sixes’ and ‘catches’ make the IPL an interesting affair. Yet none of these fanciful words can compare to the excitement that T20 internationals bring out.

Each team may have its own motif and its own theme song to sway the crowds. I have to admit that the Knight Riders’ theme song – Korbo Lorbo Jeetbo – is one that’s always stored on my music playlist, but the thrill of listening to the national anthem gives a different feeling altogether to the pumping heartbeats. It’s a feeling that never fades away, no matter how much popular IPL and several other entertainment-centric events may seem to gain precedence.

Looking back at the recently concluded ICC World T20, I was struck by the sedateness of the event in comparison to the proactive manner in which the IPL is being promoted presently. It’s not a question of right or wrong, but about the correlation that perhaps in the hoopla that the IPL has come to be, despite the tumult surrounding it, international cricket isn’t what it used to be previously.

As it is, kids that I know of seem to talk more in the IPL lingo with greater emphasis placed on performances in the event than totals – both teams’ and individuals’ – achieved internationally. The Sachin Tendulkar that we know of from Tests and ODIs was to them a product of the IPL with nothing but the franchise of Mumbai Indians to shape him and his career.

When Dravid and Tendulkar retired at the end of 2013 IPL, lamentations were made about how the two teams would lose their biggest jewels even as, other elders had wry smiles on their faces about how irreplaceable these two players were to the Indian cricket team. Most of the kids hadn’t even seen Dravid play, let alone at his prime, while the stature of Tendulkar was merely titular to them.

It was as funny as it was heart-wrenching. To them, these guys were passé, noticeable only because of their contribution to the IPL. Even then, their worries were only about whether the teams would be able to find someone better to take their places than about the ramifications of the two players’ retirements itself.

Some kind of generation gap, it looked to me. It was a thought that gained even more substantiality watching these kids mutter about their team choices and player choices while playing their version of gully cricket. One of them wanted to be Shane Watson because he had worn blue and that was the colour of Rajasthan Royals while another, a left-hander, decided he was going to be Yuvraj Singh who was going to knock every ball outside the compound gate. Way back when I was a kid, I always wanted to be Sourav Ganguly opening for India while my (then) youngest cousin was going to be Shane Warne bowling cool ‘leggies.’

It was one of those things that never failed to make me laugh, even though it was a term that I never could understand back then. I still don’t know what my cousin meant by it, even now, all these years after Shane Warne’s retirement. But the word leggies is just a metaphor for the larger picture in the horizon.

Cricket today, more significantly T20 cricket, is like the word ‘leggie.’ To a kid, it denoted the concept of leg-spin perhaps, but ended up becoming a very one-sided interpretation unclear to everyone around him. Speaking of IPL and looking just at the IPL picture is just like trying to understand that word, with a wholly bigger universe existing outside of it.