What does IPL stand for? How about Instant Pleasure for your Leisure? A daily three-hour action-packed blockbuster, ‘live’ on any screen near you, filled with mighty blows, close catches to win matches, sizzling sixes and shattering stumps. It’s about thrills and spills that kill the spirit of the game – at least for purists.
Is this cricket? Well, it isn’t meant to be just cricket, it’s the greatest (TV) show on a cricket pitch. According to The Economist, it’s the second most lucrative game on earth – and so great that it might “strangulate” international cricket. For The Guardian, it’s all “glitz, glamour… celebrity” with music, dance, drones and even fireworks.
In other words, the great big fat Indian tamasha.
TATA IPL 2023 is 24×7 entertainment over 74 matches in two months. Since it began on 28 March, Star Sports has telecast nothing else. Switch on the channel and it’s ‘cricket’ all day and all of the night. You can watch Highlights 2023 or go back to Highlights 2021, Highlights 2019, enjoy Rivalries of the Week, begin a Cricket Countdown or a Cricket Countdown Special till you get to a Game Plan, and Jindal Panther Cricket Live for pitch analysis – all of these before and after each game. “Oh wow!” as one of the commentators exclaimed at a loss for better words to describe Faf du Plessis’s 27th sixer in this year’s tournament.
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Family time pass
Each year, the great IPL show gets better and better or much worse, depending on your point of view.
What’s good is that it provides a wholesome time pass for the entire family without tying their eyes into knots like Everything Everywhere All At Once, this year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture.
What’s good is you don’t have to follow every twist and turn of the game, like you have to in a John Wick film. TATA IPL can be treated like background music – the game plays on as you go about your evening routine. Helpful cricket commentators’ loud yelps and yells tell you when to stop and pay attention to the latest six, four and wicket – or the arrival of Mahendra Singh Dhoni at the wicket.
This year, Dhoni has come to epitomise the essence of IPL in a way no one else can or has. Like the IPL, he is a brief, shining, soaring, shooting star. He strides out onto the field, looks around and then goes smack and whack, sending the ball for a couple of sixes before marching back to the pavilion. The crowds go berserk.
What’s good is that as a viewer, you have to make absolutely no effort to discern good balls or bad shots. In fact, you don’t have to do anything at all but ‘enjoy’. The niceties of the game don’t matter, no matter how seriously commentators discuss them: just watch the batsmen go out there and wallop the ball – if they connect, it is a “massive strike” for their team, if they don’t, then too it’s a “massive strike”, only this time for the fielding team.
This may be bad for a discerning love of the game, but for the average viewer returning home from a hard day’s work, it’s easy on the eyes, a visual massage of the senses. Ah…
What is good or perhaps bad about the IPL for TV spectators is that it runs so smoothly it almost seems rehearsed to the point of perfection. Except when Virat Kohli, Naveen-ul Haq and Gautam Gambhir implode during a match as happened this week.
Otherwise, there’s not a hair out of place: before two teams clash on the ground, you have the warm TV shows with their previous encounters, a throwback from earlier years’ games, analyses of their game plans with commentators and former players picking their winning players and predicting the margin of victory. Then there are previews of matches to come —Rivalries of the week, best catches, best sixes, best bowling. You name it, IPL has it.
There is the hour-long build up to the game with another set of commentators. It’s all about a 6-foot 6-inch Tom Moody standing next to a 5-foot 5-inch Sunil Gavaskar talking serious cricket in the studio — a striking visual. Visuals of the teams arriving at the stadium, warming up on the ground, the bonhomie, the crowds waving flags, player interviews, their vital statistics, player profiles, etcetra, etcetra, etcetra – it’s all happening before the match.
Once it’s live, it seems as if every ball is disappearing for a six. Listen to the commentators—their decibel levels rise higher than the balls sailing over the boundary — “Oh dear, oh man, what a shot, it’s a six!”
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Out of box commentary
The TV commentators are almost as crucial to the success of the IPL as the 10 contesting teams. And they’re so many of them in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telegu and Marathi they could for two playing elevens. Paul Collingwood, David Hussey, Danny Morrison, Imran Tahir, Aaron Finch, Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri, Virender Sehwag, Harbhajan Singh, Sanjay Manjrekar, lead this galaxy in the box. Besides teaching us every superlative in the dictionary, they sigh, and swoon, their tongues race faster than a four to the boundary – theirs is a class act. They even slip in mention of TV sponsors: “He played that with such ease…as easy as it is to use RuPay…”
Without their verbal antics, the IPL would miss much of its drama. Why they’re better cheerleaders for the game than the ladies who perform that duty on the sidelines.
And then there are the inexhaustible fans in the stands: you have never seen such ardent, enthusiastic ones before — they dance, they wave flags, they chant, they sing, they applaud, they catch the sixes. They’re just amazing to watch as you sit back lazily in your bed or sofa. It’s clear they have been fully `Charged’ with Thumbs Up.
The other pleasing sight on TV is the fielding — each year it seems more superlative. The athleticism of the game makes it a treat to watch even when just a single is saved by a fielder.
For all its scintillating features, TATA IPL seems to have been so perfectly planned and executed, it seems a little artificial – night after night it simply rolls on, without a hitch. Every aspect of the game has been packaged beautifully and seamlessly, and it has been reduced to its raw essence: what happens when a ball meets a bat….
Lovers of the game worry the game is losing the artistry of bowling and batting skills to sheer muscle power. Definitely, the thrill of watching a batsman hitting a six has lost its fizz.
But most of us don’t worry about that, we sit back and wait for Mahendra the Magnificent to hit another six…As the Star Sports tagline says, “Shor on Game on”.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)