IPL an entertainment circus, not a sporting one
The IPL has not yet established itself as a global brand, and it can only do so if its administrators focus more on the sport than the money and the glitz around it, writes Neil Manthorp in India Today .
Siddhartha Talya
25-Feb-2013
The IPL has not yet established itself as a global brand, and it can only do so if its administrators focus more on the sport than the money and the glitz around it, writes Neil Manthorp in India Today.
The IPL is a fun tournament and will make excellent wallpaper in sports bars around the world in years to come. But South Africans are already beginning to see it for what it is, rather than what it portrays itself to be. It is an entertainment circus, rather than a sporting one, designed primarily to enable a very small number of fabulously wealthy people to become even wealthier.
Also in India Today, Sharda Ugra writes that the "Fake IPL Player" blog accurately highlights the pretensions of the IPL.
He even calls himself fake, as if sensing the general tone of the proceedings. Outside the cricket, much about the IPL itself is fake. The numbers being bandied about around it as earnings or audience, the long-term sanctity of any contract signed by its IPL leading lights, the notion that the rules really matter and are not invented on the spot (and then you think up a seven and a half minute break a few days before the event and call it a ‘strategic time-out’)
Siddhartha Talya is a senior sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo