Is IPL the Future of Cricket?

I truly hope not but I am absolutely riveted by IPL 2019. It is on TV at ungodly hours of the night so I slavishly stay up all night and feel wretched the following morning/day but do it again that same night. Again and again.

It is wonderful!

The format seems simple: 8 teams play one another home and away. Top 4 play semi-final and final. Pretty easy. Actually it sounds like they took the same format as the Bermuda Evening Cricket League, the oldest T20 competition in the world.

Imagine some of the best players in the world, batters and bowlers, hammering away full bore over a very much shortened period to say a 5 day test match (my preferred format for cricket). Colorful outfits for the cricketers (even we played in colours in latter years), same for the huge screaming, howling crowds and 1,000 decibel Indian hip hop music played continuously and you have total bedlam. It is absolutely wonderful!

As I type I am watching a re-run of a game from a couple of nights ago, only in my own defense because Johnny Bairstow and David Warner are batting together. Again. As a batter myself I just love watching great batsmen batting well. And these guys batted really well in this game. Really well. Again. Ironically neither will be available for the latter stages of the tournament as they have cricket commitments elsewhere so their team will have to do without them. This will be tough as they together have scored over two-thirds of the total runs scored by their side so far in the 8 matches played. Absent them, I wouldn't say the team is rubbish but well they don't score many runs. So maybe yeah, their team is rubbish.

Both got hundreds in this game.... which of course I watched!

The format allows for up to 4 non-Indian players per team and these days there are many cricketers who only play this type of cricket: fast, hard going, every ball hit hard. A new breed of cricket mercenary. The likes of Chris Gayle spring to mind in this category. No longer play test matches or for the home nation, just T20 all over the world. The money attracted to this event is huge so attracts the top, top players .... like Bairstow and Warner and of course the terrific Indians too, remembering they are the #1 Test nation at the moment. Still. And with a population of 1.4  billion all of whom are insane about cricket. Little wonder that this event is a success.

So all those ingredients: money, 1.4 billion cricket mad Indians, great event well supported the world over, ever more proliferating short format cricket events... this means that the organisation has to be tight too. And it is... but of course with a twist. Or rather conditions.

India has the money and the population. England and Australia are the only cricket playing nations anyone wants to watch playing tests. Nobody wants to play in terrorist dogged Pakistan. So given this, it is very unsurprising that these three nations have cricket solidly stitched up, money wise, TV wise, pretty much everything wise.

This reflects reality, so OK I suppose. But then again I just watched a documentary on control of cricket and it is just like the cronyism at FIFA and UEFA in football, and I presume every other sport that generates money. Oh hold on wait, it is pretty much only football and certain cricket events and the rugby World Cup that generates money in sport. And of course the Olympic Games. Whoops, nearly forgot tennis. This is starting to make sense.

Now, first job with anyone looking to take control is first take control. Next job is to keep it. So having taken control of the International Cricket Council (ICC) that's what they did. Top jobs for the boys (and I do know one such from Bermuda in this category -- alright Neil?). Everyone else gets favors aka scraps. But do not, and I do repeat, do not allow anyone to come in who may ultimately challenge you. So the ICC has so far not granted sanction to China to become an ICC affiliate country. According to this documentary, something like 300 million Chinese play cricket! I may have got the decimal point misplaced but what if I haven't?

It is really difficult to not get cynical when a game gets hijacked by business interests and money as many sports have. Trouble is that when the sport is so good and the event so wonderful, you just forget about 'that other stuff' and just enjoy the spectacle.

And what a spectacle IPL 2019 is!