IPL blues

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 4 May

Reading some English commentators on the Indian Premier League, you’d think it was the end of civilisation as we know it. For years there’s been a steady undercurrent of resentment at the expanding influence of India in world cricket. Now, with the IPL threatening to undermine the English domestic season, it’s grown to a chorus of dismay. The verities of cricket seem to be dissolving in the whirlwind of the global marketplace.

Paradoxically, some of those who dislike the market-led Indian advance have lambasted the ECB for missing the boat on 20/20. Having “invented” the game a few years back, the ECB left it to the Indians to take it to the next stage of commercial exploitation, and thereby exposed English cricket to raids from the IPL and ICL. But if the ECB and other boards were to attempt to follow the Indian example, what would be left of the cricket calendar? The 20/20 format may work for a six week star-studded jamboree, but a non-stop diet is sure to pall.

Much of the English panic is merely a belated recognition of the reality of demography: south Asia is where the great majority of cricket fans reside, and over the long run that’s bound to affect the game’s governance.

More important than the geographical shift are the changes in the structure of the game accompanying it. For the first time since the early 19th century, cricket teams are now privately owned. The IPL franchises can be bought and sold, along with their assets (the players), and the profits they generate belong exclusively to the owners.

One of cricket’s historical peculiarities is that its competitive units have been based on counties, provinces and states rather than cities. Now, with the IPL, the long-delayed urbanisation of the game seems at hand. But the new franchises, unlike the English football clubs on which they’re modelled, are not the creations of history and community; they do not belong to the fans the way Manchester United or Liverpool belongs to the fans. They have been created from the top down and sold as a finished but ephemeral item to a passive audience. In that respect, the IPL is a characteristic product of 21st century corporate culture.

Meanwhile, commentators have also been distressed to find that England players place their own financial opportunities above the honour of playing for their country. According to a survey undertaken by the Professional Cricketers’ Association, 35 per cent of those who represented England over the past year would consider retiring from international duties to join the IPL. The results from a survey commissioned by the Australian Cricketers’ Association were even more pronounced: 47 per cent of Cricket Australia’s 25 contracted players and 49 per cent of state-contracted players would consider early retirement from the Australian team to play in either IPL or the ICL.

There’s no reason to expect cricketers to buck the neo-liberal individualist values celebrated at every turn in our globalised economy. Playing for your country, despite the rhetoric, has rarely been a matter of social obligation; because cricket places international competition at the top of its hierarchy, playing for your country was simply the best test of how good a cricketer you were, and the best rewarded. For the same reasons, players now want to take part in the IPL and similar money-spinners, and they expect the cricket boards to clear an appropriate space.

But how will the new 20/20 leagues be linked to the rest of the cricket schedule? And how will the learning process that is so much a part of a Test cricketer’s career unfold in the future? Since 20/20 offers far greater financial rewards than any other current version of the game, isn’t it inevitable that it will supplant those other versions? And will what’s left behind warrant the kind of devotion that cricket has elicited in the past?

Cricket is always evolving – and anxiety about its changing face has been with us since the earliest days of the game. There has always been a fear that money will spoil the beautiful pastime, and that its higher aesthetic will be dulled to the extent it is integrated into an aggressively fast-paced, superficial society.

Cricket long ago lost its innocence, but there’s still good reasons for cricket-lovers to feel ambivalent about the IPL revolution.

Cricket’s strange fate is to find itself at the epicentre of burgeoning Indian economic power. And the IPL version of the game seems an apt reflection of the “aspirational” culture of a self-aggrandising wealthy minority in a society still saddled with mass poverty. It is the celebration of a global elite whose services are contracted to the highest corporate bidder, slickly packaged and easily digestible. As a sporting spectacle, 20/20 consists of a rapid-fire sequence of contrived climaxes. Cricket’s classical equation of runs, wickets and time has been distended: runs and wickets have both been devalued, and time is the primary engine driving the drama. With its emphasis on celebrity and instantaneous impact it’s closer in spirit to Big Brother and Pop Idol than it is to Test cricket.