“Now that the IPL is over, I have no idea what I’m going to do after getting back from work every day. It was the one thing that used to keep the entire family interested - I love it, my wife preferred it to saans-bahu melodramas, even my six year old son would rather watch the IPL than his cartoons. I suppose it’s back to the soaps for my wife and back to cartoons for my son; what am I supposed to do with myself?” One of my friends who still lives in Mumbai told me this just after the last IPL. I may have paraphrased this slightly, and it’s not verbatim, but this captures the sentiments that I’ve heard from a few others who live in India.
Regardless of whether you think IPL should be the only form of cricket that’s acceptable in this day and age, or whether you are firmly in the camp that believes in wearing yellow and orange ties to cricket games and consider T20 to be a form of hit-and-giggle cricket that’s only enjoyed by imbeciles, the fact remains that the IPL is here to stay. Personally, I’m somewhere in between. Although the quality of fielding and umpiring can be atrocious at times, there is some high quality cricket in between the circus and the condensed format makes drama almost impossible to avoid. However, as I semi-passively followed the seventh version of the IPL unfold, I couldn’t help get the feeling that despite its widespread appeal, there are a few flies in the ointment, as it were, that the league needs to work on. There is one really important element that the league needs to get right in order to ensure the worldwide appeal and longevity of the league that it took it’s name from - the English Premier League.
Let’s start off trying to define a seemingly straightforward concept: What's loyalty in a sporting context? For the average English or Spanish soccer fan, that used to be an easy one to answer. It usually meant that your father or grandfather grew up supporting the Local Club and you ended up following weekend matches at their knee and the choice of which team to support was not so much a choice as it was a responsibility that was handed down to you, like a worn jersey. It used to mean buying season tickets, clocking up countless miles through rain and sleet to hostile away games and sticking by your team through thick and thin. The widespread reach of sport via television and the internet has meant a wider fan base and these days, a Manchester United cafe is just as likely to sprout in Kuala Lumpur as in Manchester (or London, as the old joke about plastic Manchester United "fans" goes).
Cricket has no history of club based competition, for the most part. T20 started this trend and the IPL has been the torch bearer in truly internationalizing the appeal of the franchise model to a point where every cricket playing nation hopes to emulate its successes. However, due to the fact that there is no precedent, it is doubly important that the league thinks long and hard about building that elusive, hard-to-define element among its fan base - loyalty. You would imagine loyalty to be developed by three major factors - where you grew up, where your team plays and where your favorite cricketer plays. The trouble is that the IPL makes it hard to support a team based on any of these counts.
I personally have been confused by this since the advent of the IPL. I grew up in Mumbai (Bombay, as I still like to call it), have supported the Indian cricket team since I can remember. I’ve grown up worshipping Sachin Tendulkar, I’ve been a huge fan of Anil Kumble and I think Sourav Ganguly has been the best captain India ever had. Which team do I support then? Mumbai Ranji cricketers have been spread out across the teams, I can’t physically go to games because I literally live on the other side of the globe and I admire cricketers in every team and can’t see myself wishing for Rahane or Raina to fail when Malinga is bowling at them. Could someone help me out here?
I understand that I’m not really the target demographic. The folks who the clever IPL marketers want to turn into season-ticket buying, face painting, jersey wearing loyalists are the kids who grow up in this T20 world and feel the kind of emotion about their IPL team that Priety Zinta feels towards Kings XI Punjab. And currently, there are two real problems that need to be addressed to make this a possibility.
Firstly, the IPL organizers need to sit down and figure out a sustainable model for player transfers. The auction-based approach worked fine for the first season of the tournament, since the league needed to bootstrap, but the fact that almost entire teams are thrown away and new ones built in place every three years makes my head spin sometimes. Consider Robin Uthappa’s journey. He started off playing for the Mumbai Indians, got traded to Bangalore where he played for two seasons before moving to the newly formed Pune Warriors. After the Warriors were liquidated, he ended up moving to KKR where he recently won his first IPL title. Four teams in the span of seven years. Of course, his transfer from Mumbai to Bangalore was the result of an old-fashioned trade and the fact that his employers ceased to exist was beyond his control, but I wouldn’t be surprised if poor Robbie gets slightly confused upon bumping into someone on a cricket field about whether to give him a high five or a stinky eye. Why not allow teams to trade in order to re-balance the team without having to go through a complete overhaul every three years is totally beyond me.
Chennai, in particular, have showed the benefits that could be reaped from sticking to a core to help build a team dynamic (of course, winning a lot tends to help too). It’s natural that a string of losses brings out everyone’s inner Roman Abramovich but a total reset is nothing more than an escape valve and you still need good players and team management to get great results. Don’t believe me? Ask the Delhi Daredevils about their 2014 season.
The other big issue is that the Indian Premier League tends to move quite often to play in places such as South Africa and the Emirates. Somehow, the fact that Chennai did not play a single “home” game at the Chinnaswamy stadium is an utter travesty. I find it hard to imagine the Milan clubs not playing at the San Siro, or the Boston Red Sox playing anywhere other than the legendary Fenway Park. Like the municipal officials who get surprised every year when the monsoons arrive at roughly the same time, the IPL officials were probably too busy counting the moolah to factor in the Indian elections. Here’s a news flash: They happen every five years.
One of the stands at Barcelona’s famous Camp Nou display their famous slogan: ‘Mes Que Un Club’, or ‘More Than A Club’. Although a fairly large part of this logo is politically motivated, this slogan represents what the club seeks to be - more than just the beautiful football that’s played on a weekly basis but an institution, a tradition and a sporting dynasty of sorts. That’s the kind of commitment that’s required for from the IPL clubs and the overall league. It’s not the cheerleaders and the strategic timeouts or the Bollywood groupies, but an aspiration to be more than a league that’ll ensure its long term health. And my friend won’t have to worry about what to watch on television when he gets back home from work for a six-week period every year for a long time to come.
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