IPL: Define the monster

Fixing the league will take more than just banning after-parties

And so the sixth season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) comes to an end, marked by two apocalyptic images: players, reality TV stars and honorary team owners doing the perp walk with black bags on their heads; and Harsha Bhogle (et tu, Harsha?) doing the jampak-champak dance in the title credits of Extraaa Innings.

This inspired Robert Craddock, described as a noted sports writer, to produce in the Brisbane Courier Mail the most cliche-ridden anti-IPL rant in recent memory, which contained in just the first five paragraphs the following phrases: "smouldering cesspit", "the sunniest of places for the shadiest people", "they come out after dark", "poisoned fruit". And (shudder) "Sreesanth".

Of course, on the regular Test and One-Day International (ODI) circuit, the death of which Craddock laments, all the players go straight back to their hotel rooms, turn off their cell phones and curl up with a mug of warm Horlicks and Wuthering Heights. But then what would explain how every single instance of cricket rigging that we know of flourished in the pre-IPL era? And that those found guilty were not second-rung Ranji rejects but iconic captains of national teams? For historical perspective, Craddock could have checked with anyone who watched the India-Pakistan matches from Dawood Ibrahim's personal box at the Sharjah Stadium in the late nineties, or was invited to that after-party.

A day after it came out, the Craddock piece provoked a series of angry tweets from the Delhi Daredevils' David Warner.

I initially thought it was for this line, in which Craddock suggests that the IPL brings on not just moral depravity, but an alarming physical degradation: "Australian coaches never enjoy it when their players go to the IPL because they often return fat." Indeed. Playing roughly 16 closely packed matches in peak summer in India is the best way to bloat. One could see why this thoughtful generalisation would have particularly galled Warner, whose Twitter photo gallery contains a series of sweat-drenched images of the hyperfit batsman working out in hotel gyms during the IPL season.

As it turned out, the line that led to Warner's Twitter outburst was about a "young Australian player in India ... behaving with increased recklessness as his moral radar scrambles with a large pay cheque which far outstrips his ability". The Craddock piece once again refrained from naming names, but instead took the more craven route of running an accompanying image of Warner alongside Sreesanth. Someone sent Warner the image, and he went ballistic. For this, Warner was fined and rapped on the knuckles by his Board, making him perhaps the first casualty not of the IPL per se, but of an anti-IPL piece rich with unsubstantiated insinuation.

Incidentally, Craddock's conflation of high pay cheques and lowering morals is not original, but beloved to the anti-IPL commentariat as a whole. Quite often, the same commentators will then go on to tweet approvingly during the La Liga, where soccer superstars are traded to Barcelona not for GDP-equivalent sums of money, but because they are huge fans of Gaudi's architecture.

I don't hold a brief for the IPL. It makes for terrific pastime, but is overlong and boring to sustain any serious interest. Elsewhere, it is a wildly popular global cricket event that absorbs a largeish pool of young cricketing hopefuls who otherwise have no chance of playing professional cricket. The malaise that afflicts the IPL - of cronyism, corruption and poor governance practices - is an inheritance from the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), which spawned it. To repair the IPL means to repair the parent body, no mean task given the BCCI's opaque inner workings. This explains N Srinivasan's implacable confidence in the face of daily calls for his ouster. He has the support of a minimum number of the state cricket associations that makes it impossible to dislodge him without a dirty, messy internal power struggle. None of his rivals have the stomach for it. In fact, given the shifting, venal nature of alliances within the Board, it's hard to gauge at any moment how many state boards are for or against it. As a start, it may be worthwhile to direct the current public outrage towards the books of accounts of these associations. Have they spent the hefty remittances from the BCCI/IPL to further their mandate of "promoting cricket at the grass roots"? Or has the money gone elsewhere? The answers may be more of a purgative than banning the after-parties where "the shadiest people come out at dark".

The writer anchors the ground reportage show Truth vs Hype on NDTV 24X7