Since I didn’t compulsively follow the IPL this year, I missed out on a few things. Aakash Chopra — a really, really good writer (a rarity among athletes) — has a review of the best moments in IPL 3 and he mentions this David Hussey catch, which is quite stunning:
Ducking Beamers: A Cricket Blog
Examining the Cricket World — With Adequate Protection, Of Course
Posted in April 2010 …
The IPL Scandal In The New York Times
Continuing Samir Chopra’s and my series on “Cricket In Unexpected Places,” Page 3 of the New York Times‘ Business section had a good write-up on the IPL scandal over the weekend. Nothing new, but it puts all the pieces together and includes an interview with the man himself, Lalit Modi:
In an interview, Mr. Modi, 46, denied that he had done anything wrong. He said his relatives invested in the I.P.L. three years ago because they had faith in him.
“In the beginning, nobody wanted to come in,” he said as he smoked a Dunhill cigarette on a terrace of the Grand Hyatt Hotel here. “All the people who came in were friends and family who believed in the idea. The entire media said this was a lousy investment, it’s not going to work.”
Even his critics acknowledged that Mr. Modi, who previously helped bring ESPN andDisney to India as their local partner, had succeeded where others had failed. Cricket is as important to Indians as basketball, football and baseball combined are to Americans. But officials who oversaw the sport were never able to fully exploit its appeal.
Mr. Modi said when he first joined the organization that oversaw the sport, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, it collected just $300,000 in revenue per match, primarily from ticket sales and broadcasting rights.
Now, he said, each of the 56 league games a season brings in an average of $30 million. Games attract audiences of 20,000 to 55,000 depending on the stadium. On television, the current season has reached about 138 million viewers, up from 121 million last year, according to TAM Media Research.
All Hail, Chennai Super Kings
Unlike Samir Chopra, who recently posted his IPL loyalties, I didn’t have a dog in this season’s fight. I don’t know why; each time I think I could back a team as a reasonable fan, I found reasons to dislike it.
But each season, I’ve been relatively happy with the winners: the Rajasthan Royals were just too darn cute not to root for (what, with their knack of winning each game in the last over); the Deccan Chargers never hurt nobody (except V.V.S. Laxman) — and this year, the Chennai Super Kings proved themselves competent enough for the title (granted, the Mumbai Indians should have won given their performance in the round robins, but so what — it helps when you have a certain Sachin Tendulkar pushing the scales). In a perfect world, the Royal Challengers Bangalore would have taken the, uh, bottle, if only because Anil Kumble deserves all the limelight in the world.
As for player reviews: you have to be very, very happy with Suresh Raina, whom I think has clearly settled any dispute about whether or not he’s the leader of the next generation. Rohit Sharma didn’t do awfully (he finished in the top 10 batsmen with 400-odd runs), but Raina did spectacularly (461 at 46, a full 13 ahead of Sharma). No player review post of mine would be complete without a whoop-dee for Irfan Pathan, my one true love. One day, the cosmos will realign and do justice by this man; until then, I have to be satisfied with top 5 bowling statistics and not too bad with the ball either. If this guy played with a better team, he would be heading to the Caribbean (okay, okay, I exaggerate).
Speaking of which! Let’s move on to the real thing, the Twenty20 World Cup; the thing that got all of us interested in the format to begin with. I’m rooting for Bangladesh and Afghanistan. No, really!
My IPL Mood Cycles, Postmodern Style
With three IPL seasons almost complete, I realize my responses to the Twenty20 extravaganza follows some discrete phases:
1. The IPL launches; extreme apathy bordering on anger. Don’t like the IPL; why does it have to intrude on the calendar; who cares about the latest team shenanigans; the shameless marketing ploys start to grate; can barely remember what happened last year. And why oh why do I have to read another article about how the IPL has changed everything in cricket? If that were the case, why are thing so much the same? (The French version of that sounds better.)
2. Matches 12-30: How can I resist all this bluster and spectacle? Some players that I like are doing well; great feats are performed and records start to fall (did you see that catch; how could that guy hit X off Y balls?); some teams start to do very, very badly (last year, KKR; this year KXIP) but everyone likes an underdog; who are the latest new media sensations (last year, Fake IPL Player; this year, EyePeeYell on Twitter); I wonder what my one true love Irfan Pathan is up to; what about the rest of the bachha lok (Suresh Raina, Rohit Sharma, M. Vijay, M. Pandey, Virat Kohli)? Throw in a few anti-Lalit Modi posts to assuage your conscience.
3. Matches 30-40s: Boredom begins to set in again. How many matches do these guys play (14 each, what’s the point, wouldn’t 10 each make much more sense, especially since the World Twenty20 Cup is around the corner)? How many sixes can anyone watch; why won’t the Bollywood Groupies (Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta, that Rajasthan Royals woman) just clear out already; surely they have some actual films to promote?
4. Matches 50s to Finish: Ah! Excitement! Close finishes all around; poor Rajasthan Royals, surely they must prove one day Season 1 was not a fluke; all the teams closely bunched together — does that mean despite mismatched franchise values, they all play the same? — I wonder whether semifinalists deserve their berths; who shall win let’s get this over already I want to stop seeing international players lovefest already; you guys are supposed to hate each other!
Not exactly Finnegans Wake, but you get the drift.
The IPL-Shashi Tharoor Tragedy (2)
Every once in a while, a blogger gets a whiff of scandal and just lays into it. E.g. supremo (my Latin fails me): Prem Panicker, and his exhaustive, excellently-linked post on the Shashi Tharoor debacle. He repeats the points I made here, but does so much better and clearly reads more than I do. As they say in India, this stuff is “too good”:
Buzz says Pranab Mukherjee had a falling out with the MoS [that is, Shashi Tharoor], and the latter, feeling pilloried, bit back hard. Miffed that a junior talked back to him [a bigger crime than corruption, in Pranab-da's scheme of things -- he is used to hectoring his colleagues unchallenged], the FM is understood to have put his foot down and demanded Tharoor’s head on a platter. The MoS is expendable; at a time of rising prices and with various finance related bills due in Parliament, the FM was not.
[In a case of supreme irony, CNN-IBN is as I write this quoting the Finance Ministry as saying Tharoor did not benefit from the Kochi deal. True -- he could not have, since there is as yet nothing to benefit from. The damn franchise has to get up and running for there to be any monetary benefits. At a larger level, it is faintly ridiculous for Mukherjee to take the lead in getting Tharoor out, and then have his ministry give him a clean chit].
Panicker also sounds the right notes on media criticism, noting that so far, articles have focused on Tharoor but not the bigger questions surrounding the IPL and the BCCI administration (e.g., why does Maharasthra waive the entertainment tax for the IPL? Why does it receive subsidies when it purportedly makes so much money?). Here in the United States, the newspapers pay enormous amounts of attention to new stadium deals; they almost always involve shady developers, questionable contracts and tax breaks and few tangible benefits for host communities (the same can be said for the Olympics). But in India, Panicker writes, people just aren’t paying attention.
And finally, he links to this Economic Times article that had all of India talking this week:
NEW DELHI: ‘Mr Lalit Modi has had a trail of failed ventures and defaults till four years back but has a lifestyle now that includes a private jet, a luxury yacht and a fleet of Mercedes S class and BMW cars all acquired in the last three years.’
Thus opens a highly confidential and explosive report by the income-tax department that has been in the possession of the government for six months now but formed the basis of any action only on Thursday evening after a raging controversy over secret ownerships and sweetheart deals in the Indian Premier League, or IPL, stalled both houses of Parliament.
Cricket Blog Deaths
In tribute to spring, I decided to clean my blogroll. I came across a few dormant scribes, so I wanted to post an “in memoriam” to:-
All Padded Up; Are You A Left-Arm Chinaman (say it ain’t so!); Beer And Sport; Cover Points (once a very faithful linker; now silent since summer 2009); Cricket 24×7 (in name only, alas); Cricket, The Brilliant Game! (now spam); Hawk-Mouth; Kameelperd Cricket Girl; Morning All; My Two Cents (this shouldn’t have ended, but it has); Off The Mark; Past Point; SouLBW; SpunOut; The Googly; The Silly Mid Off.
To those blogs whose deaths I’ve grossly exaggerated, sorry — email me and I’ll add you back. But to the others, it was good to read you when I could. Sorry I didn’t comment; you’ll be missed.
And to the rest of us zombies, keep those posts coming.
The Fake Anil Kumble IPL Player
Cricket Minded has a few stern words for Anil Kumble’s Twitter account, which recently featured disparaging remarks on Jacques Kallis, Sreesanth, Malayalis and even the color orange. Purna writes:
His job is on the line, so he takes it out on others. Way to handle the pressure old man! Hey Anil, if you can’t deal with the captaincy, don’t take it. This: the tweeting, the public speaking, keeping it together when your job is on the line…all of this shit is part of being a captain.
OK — Twitter has already gotten Lalit Modi and Shashi Tharoor in trouble, so it’s not beyond the realm that Kumble would lose his usual reservations online. But even a cursory glance at the posts confirms that Anil Kumble isn’t Anil Kumble; some joker no doubt had the foresight to land the account and use it to his own benefit.
You have to look for the “Verified Account” sign on Twitter pages, Purna. And, really, so what if the “old man” wants to mouth off about Kallis? I think he’s earned it, no?
The Baffling IPL-Shashi Tharoor Scandal
I’ve been baying for an IPL scandal since its inception, but I don’t know how to feel about this one, which has just ensnared first-time Member of Parliament (and one of my favorite authors) Shashi Tharoor. Here’s why I’m conflicted:
First, I don’t understand why it was so controversial to release details on the owners of the Kochi franchise. Granted, it was a bit flippant on Lalit Modi’s part to do so by Twitter, and it’s still unclear whether or not he had a hidden agenda of his own (the Kochi CEO has said Modi offered him a bribe to drop the purchase; Tharoor says Modi didn’t want Kochi to be the base). But it seems utterly ridiculous not to insist that people should know who owns what in an IPL franchise. Right?
Second: So, Modi raises a stink, and the ownership details are revealed. It turns out that one Sunanda Pushkar received a stake in the franchise for free, but it’s not clear why — she says it’s because the franchise wanted her marketing skills; the opposition in Parliament says it’s because she’s “friendly” (an Indian colloquialism for “in a romantic relationship”) with Tharoor. I know this appears like a conflict of interest, but it isn’t actually one. Tharoor has a friend — or lover, whatever — who won a stake in an IPL team. The allegation is that Tharoor somehow influenced things behind the scene to steer business to his friend, but there’s no evidence of that.
So why is this guy — probably the smartest guy in the Indian Cabinet behind Manmohan Singh — resigning? (It’s possible the Congress Party wanted to ditch Tharoor after his many little media-scandals, and simply used this brouhaha as a pretext.)
Finally: there’s my predicament. I don’t like Lalit Modi, but it seems like he did the right thing (though he could have also pushed the other franchises to reveal their stakes to the public). I like Shashi Tharoor, but am saddened he embroiled himself with the likes of Modi (then again, an M.P. should do what he did and try to steer business to his district). I don’t know whom he’s sleeping with, but I’m not sure enough of a case has been made he indulged in a conflict of interest.
The only way to salvage this thing is to push for bigger reforms and more transparency in the IPL and the BCCI. Jayaditya Gupta made this point better than I can on Cricinfo; let’s get the petitions going.
A Requiem For The ICL
The latest news from the IPL — that is, off the field — is full of intrigue and scandal. Taxmen raiding the IPL offices (or not raiding, Lalit Modi insists, but simply turning in for a stroll)? The Cochin team putting in a bid with backers who didn’t know what they were backing? Twitter twitter?
Of course, we don’t know if anything illegal has taken place. We don’t know much about anything, really; the BCCI and the IPL are hardly paragons of transparency. But I wanted to just pass a little note about how badly I feel about the ICL’s demise. It always struck me as patently unfair that a group of athletes could not organize themselves and practice their trade without the BCCI’s authorization. The specter of the ICL belies any claim that the IPL is a triumph of the market; if the IPL is winning, it did so by quashing the competition, not engaging it.
I don’t know if the market could have tolerated two Twenty20 leagues. But I think there would have been so many other benefits (Econ 101 tells us enough about that). In the IPL, we have a situation highly prone to conflicts of interest and corruption: one man controlling access; huge amounts of money; shifty politicians (and I hate to count Shashi Tharoor in this group, but what is the matter with this man?) hanging around.
Ian Bishop Loves Wavell Hinds
Really, he won’t stop talking about it! Ireland are currently creaming the West Indies, holding them back to 100-odd for 6 with only a handful of overs to go. Now, I’m sure Kieron Pollard (at bat) will redeem the Mumbai Indians final and all will be well in the Caribbean, but Ian Bishop’s doing that annoying commentator thing where they get fixated on an idea and refuse to let it go!
In this case, Bishop’s angry that Wavell Hinds was not selected, given that Chris Gayle was injured before the game. Fair enough point — no, more than that; it’s a damned good point. But one that he’s made in over 15, 16, and 17 (including a shot of Wavell Hinds sitting, leading to Bishop asking, “Why is he sitting there and not playing?” We know, Ian, we know).
Am I being too hard on Ian Bishop? Well, let me explain why! In the mid-1990s, I was a chota boy learning my maths in Fifth Standard at Campion School, Mumbai. The West Indians were in town on tour, and for some reason, they stopped by our humble institution. A few local boys tried to bowl at Brian Lara — who hit all the balls out of the nets — while the rest of the W. Indians had us line up for autographs.
Now, I had to leave this whole exercise early (being a busy lad, and all that). So I tried to go right up to the line for Ian Bishop and ask for an autograph, but he just looked at me and said, “There’s a line.” Yes, he was being fair, and yes, I should have told my piano teacher I couldn’t come that day (yes! PIANO! I had to choose between Ian Bishop and a stupid piano lesson!).
So if you’re out there, Ian Bishop: you hurt me deeply. And I hate Wavell Hinds for it.