Jhakas | Sanjay Jha
It is interesting, entertaining and vastly amusing to see how cricket experts from the IPL legion have suddenly begun to sing a different tune the moment the Men in Blue were ultimately bundled out of the T20 World Cup in the Caribbean islands, which has become a near-tortuous treacherous terrain for India since the monumental debacle in the 2007 ODI World Cup.
Their principal premise is that the Indian team under MS Dhoni was "just not good enough" and secondly, that IPL's bowling quality was hugely suspect. The first can be said of any losing team/individual on any given day to a better well-prepared opposition so we can ignore that banal rhetoric as it is sans any debatable merit. But it is the latter issue that we need to focus on. Of course, none of the revered gentlemen of that august club believe that the hectic summer schedule or the post-IPL fashion parties and social networking diktats had anything to do with India's woebegone rout. Maybe that too is understandable as you cannot go against a cash-rich formidable employer within days of singing hosannas about IPL till we reached for ear-buds. Frankly, these stalwarts need to be taken with a bucketful of salt, pepper and chilly powder. Continue reading below
Since IPL has itself openly declared that the entertainment quotient is integral to the tournament's success and branded it as a reality-TV show exhibition, why are we waking up belatedly to the reality of it's puerile, sub-standard fare? The hidden truth is that the IPL has been deliberately planned in its original structural design to create "balanced teams" so that it results in close encounters of the fourth kind (90 per cent of matches concluding in last over) leaving spectators on ground and TV viewers salivating day in and day out for more "thrilling finishes in the last over or better still last ball" mode. It is a slickly produced caper manufactured with adroit finesse. The sponsors aren't complaining (obviously) especially those who have booked premium last over slots.
It is easy to see how it works:
1) By creating "icon" players at the very beginning in 2008 IPL split the heavy-duty top cricketers into different camps. So Virender Sehwag, MS Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar can never be part of the same IPL team. The earlier announced decision to have fresh auctions involving all the players post-IPL 3 was summarily revoked recently on the flimsy excuse that the franchise owners will lose their brand investment in a player if he moved to another franchise, totally contradictory to the earlier declaration. Why? It happens all the time in the English Premier League (EPL) which IPL proudly claims to be the facsimile of. Thus Sachin is stuck with Mumbai Indians and Dhoni with Chennai Super Kings on a no-choice basis. Where are the forces of demand and supply determining price? This is artificial manipulation of player values.
2) By imposing an aggregate salary cap of USD seven million on players per franchise the IPL ensures that no team can ever buy the best players even if it can afford to do so. It is common knowledge that Mukesh Ambani's (even Vijay Mallya's) team has ocean-deep pockets and without expense limits they could create a Mumbai Indians playing XI comprising of Sachin, David Warner, Sehwag, Suresh Raina, Rohit Sharma, Angelo Matthews, MS Dhoni, Kieron Pollard, Zaheer Khan, Malinga and Harbhajan Singh. Tell me, realistically speaking, would not then Mumbai Indians be an astounding favorite for the title despite the unpredictability of T20 and the occasional hiccup? But this is precisely what IPL does not want should happen. "No favorites" is their implicit covert policy for sustaining the IPL interest, as they do not want lopsided teams and wash-out results, as any sport intrinsically has as a regular course. IPL teams can practically speaking never be seeded. It is a glaring anomaly.
3) In EPL out of the 20 teams in the fray, the usual suspects in the favorites list include Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Aston Villa. Since its inception in 1992 , only four champions have won the championships - the real favorites; Man U (11), Chelsea (3), Arsenal (3) and Blackburn (1). By contrast, in IPL we already have three different champions in 3 tournaments itself; do you get the picture? The two bottom-ranked teams of 2008 were the winners/runners-up in 2009!
4) The IPL Governing Council clearly believes that by forcibly making all teams systematically "evenly matched" they could feed on the desperate fascination of the hungry viewer for that great last ball thriller of a finish. It is a typically myopic vision, the manufacturing of a synthetic result. Unfortunately, this is coming at a huge cost - the quality of cricket on display. As Sandeep Dwivedi (Indian Express dated May 13th 2010) correctly points out that "in Yusuf Pathan's knock of 100 in 37 balls, 75 runs came off Ryan McLaren, Ali Murtaza and R Sathish, bowlers nowhere close to getting into their respective national T20 sides". Similar logic applies in the brutal hitting by Raina, Vijay and Ms Dhoni revealing that they plundered non-mainstream bowlers for their huge runs. While spectators may have been delighted at the extraordinary plundering, nobody noticed the pedestrian bowling quality accompanying those magnificent sixes. Pathan's knock could create delusions of grandeur and a false sense of complacency all around, and worse, for himself. We stupidly enough believed that Indians were in great form and ready to take on the world when they went to the Caribbean.
Not surprisingly, the same IPL experts are today denouncing the sub- standard bowling quality of IPL compared to those of other international teams and doing a dramatic about-turn and appearing self-righteous. Not on, Sir, because just the other day they believed that IPL was an outstanding platform for World Cup preparation!
India has paid a price for deluding itself that IPL is the panacea for achieving cricketing nirvana. But living in a fool's paradise comes unfortunately with high rentals.
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