“No picture, no cricket.” – a Mumbai taxi driver sums up the game’s television age.
Telford Vice | Cape Town
IF you don’t like the IPL, best you click away now. By like, we don’t mean taking every ball of every match as seriously as an appointment with your boss. Because the IPL is difficult to like in that earnest way — too much hype, too much money, too much cricket. Just too much.
The tournament is like a fire. If you’re too close, your cricketing soul could be burned to a crisp. Or lost forever in the smoke, not to mention the mirrors. To not live in India but be in the country during the IPL is to feel the heat of the fire’s flames and be rendered heady by its fumes. It can also be exhilarating, a wave to catch and ride all the way to the shore.
But that’s the preserve of civilians adjacent to the drama. The soldiers enlisted in the IPL’s logistics, administrative and hands-on workforce shamble through interminable weeks wearing the same look of hazily glazed anaemic weariness. Limp and unexcited, they endure endless hours of intense busyness, a travel treadmill, an outrageous order of what must be done day and night, night and day to keep the circus on the road. They become some of the most efficient human beings on the planet. If not, they don’t last. And they’re the lucky ones.
Many of the media people involved with the tournament never escape their screens in the cause of churning out another preview, screed on screed of online written ball-by-ball commentary, an umpteenth match wrap, one more quotes piece. Leave the room? Don’t be daft. Rinse, repeat, and try not to end up with pressure sores.
These poor souls, compelled to take every ball of every IPL match they cover indeed as seriously as an appointment with their bosses, are able to tell you all about the trees that make up the tournament but little about the woods they comprise. The luxury of taking a step back and seeing the bigger picture, the unfolding spectacle, the wondrous theatre, is not for them. Maybe they’ve seen it too many times and the magic has rubbed off. Maybe, if they pause for breath and perspective, they might not be able to offer a meticulous analysis of the next ball. And will thus be summarily summoned by the boss to explain themselves.
For them, and their bosses, the IPL is not fun. So if you’re privileged enough not to have to take the IPL seriously, don’t. That makes it fun. Considering the other reason for the IPL’s existence — vast amounts of money — is far removed from most of our realities, fun is all we have.
That doesn’t have to mean attending games as a fan, which is expensive and exhausting. You’re not a spectator at an IPL match. You’re an audience participant, expected to do the ever more manic bidding of the ever more manically motivated stadium announcer. Some of these curious creatures, at once powered and shocked by their inner electricity, seem to regard the actual game as players might a pitch invader. They sound insulted in the silence forced on them by a bowler having the temerity to lurch into a run-up just as they’re about to scream something manic into their microphones.
The announcers have odd but apt bedfellows at the Cricket Club of India (CCI) in Mumbai, where the members groan at the thought of any match at their beloved Brabourne because it means they are not free to take a stroll around the ground that day. Little wonder big cricket became fed up with them enough to build Wankhede, just 700 metres to the north of the Brabourne, and decamp there in 1975. Even in its haughtiness the Brabourne is a place of apparently effortless elegance, all luscious lines and confident curves evoking a world that, for most of us, has never existed: of deep, dark, polished wood and glamorous comfort, and not having to think about how to pay for it.
How the membership of the CCI squares all that with the fact that their fiefdom has hosted 15 games in this year’s IPL with another — mercifully the last of them — to follow between Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals on Friday would be good to know. Doubtless they felt similarly when the tournament invaded their ground for seven games in 2010, then for the second preliminary final four years later, and for three matches in 2015. That’s a total of 27 good walks spoiled, surely a source of malevolent muttering around the bridge tables.
The mutterers would be aghast to learn that the majority of IPL fans couldn’t care less where matches are played. If they have no hope of being there, why does the venue matter? Besides, who needs a ticket to watch what is primarily a television product? As a Mumbai taxi driver told a couple of reporters as he drove them to the Brabourne to cover a tour match he didn’t know about during South Africa’s Test series in November 2015: “No picture, no cricket.”
If the game isn’t on television, it doesn’t really exist. The IPL has done more than anything to enforce that as modern cricket’s central truth. Certainly, the best way to enjoy — perchance to like — the tournament is from afar. If you can take in what remains a thrilling show without paying a pretty price to be herded into a heaving stadium to squint at the action from too far away, why wouldn’t you? Unless, of course, you hope to appear on television yourself carrying out a stadium announcer’s inane orders.
The IPL we see on television is far from all there is to the IPL. We see the product. We do not see the machine that makes the product, the many moving parts that tick over in sequence to ensure that when we flick the switch what we want to see is what we get. If you like the IPL for the IPL’s sake, you probably don’t think about that. But maybe you would like it more if you did — if you knew it was a three-dimensional, 360-degree phenomenon that lives and breathes beyond the confines of a television screen or the boundaries of a place like the Brabourne.
Despite all appearances to the contrary, and the tournament’s own efforts to cast itself as a carefully packaged fantasy, a cricketing confectionery, the IPL is bracingly, beautifully real. It runs on blood as much as it does on sweat. Seriously, what’s not to like about that?
First published by Cricbuzz.
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