IPL 2022: A boring tournament overall with a zombie-like quality to matches

The IPL 2022 final is tomorrow. The first match was played on March 26. 60-odd continuous days of anything is excessive.

It’s been quite a boring tournament overall. There was hardly any intensity and there was a zombie-like quality to the matches.

This was reflected in TV viewership. There will be disagreements on by how much it fell but no one can deny that they have fallen quite a lot. Different people have different explanations for the decline.

Some say it was because of the availability of alternatives like OTT. Others say it was because there were too many teams. Yet others say it was because Mumbai and Chennai flopped so badly and because Bangalore was huffing and

puffing throughout. And so on.

No one, however, is asking the most important question: the quality of the cricket itself. As the old saying in advertising goes, if a product is poor, it will not perform.

The main thing about any tournament is not how close the contests were. These can go down to the last ball even amongst school level teams.

Instead the main thing is how the contest was on average. That is, how consistent were the players. And it is here I am afraid that this year’s IPL disappointed hugely.

The play just wasn’t good enough to hold your attention for very long. In spite of the valiant efforts of the commentators to talk them up, the performances were mediocre.

I am not going to go into the details of each game. Suffice it to say that cricket is an essentially non-linear game, where the initial conditions tell us nothing about the final outcome. It thrives in this uncertainty.

But even amateurs can make out the difference between excellence and mediocrity. We watch so much cricket that we have developed an instinct for it.

The same thing, by the way, happens with say film songs or food or Mr Modi’s speeches. We just can tell. It’s become ingrained.

It is necessary, therefore, to ask why the matches have been so mediocre. I can think of four major reasons.

One is that the number of grounds on which the matches were played limited the number of wickets on which they could be played. The players had got used to them by mid-April. They had also got used to the atmospheric conditions.

The second is the presence of too many Ranji and Duleep trophy level players who were perhaps acquired because they cost less. The overall level therefore came down.

The third was age. Most of the best players are now well past their sell-by date. You can play a few brilliant games in your mid-30s or later but it’s unlikely that you will be as consistent as you were when you were when you were younger.

Fourth, since the number of teams have been allowed to increase, why must they play each other twice thus making the tournament extra long?

So the combination — predictable wickets, familiar weather conditions, the best no longer quite the best, and the rest just not up to the mark playing in too many matches — made the quality of the games very ordinary. In fact the women’s

games have been better, cricket-wise.

I think we may well have a permanent, or at least a long term, problem in the IPL regarding its quality. There are two many teams and an unwillingness of the team owners to spend their entire pot to get at least six top level players.

So since we can’t now reduce the number of teams or force owners to spend more, IPL could have peaked. This is bad news for the BCCI. It’s fallen into the golden goose trap.