IPL, entertainment posing as a sport

India's hopes of winning the forthcoming World Cup have been badly damaged by the latest IPL auction. Of course the two are connected. Morale is critical in any team. Moreover a community with a compromised culture cannot expect to conquer. The sight of respected men huddled alongside fripperies and jewels whilst bidding for players did little to advance Indian cricket's reputation. Perhaps they were unaware of the grotesque picture they painted to those watching. These were not cricketing folk. These were bees in a honey-pot.

The most commonsensical and yet charming rule behind the NFL’s draft structure is this: the weakest team gets the first choice of player. Never once during the draft, which now lasts seven rounds and two days, is players’ salary discussed. The numbers that are beaten around the experts table concern a player’s records in college football, height, weight, game yardage. They play some TV footage from his collegiate games. The draft is where the NFL picks the most promising rookies and turns them into professional football players. (Its Indian Premier League variant would be teams picking from a mass of the ‘uncapped’ first-class and junior players, who in reality are now left trying to strike ‘perks’-laden deals with the franchises.)

The cricket was forgettable. It didn’t help the cause of the format that Suresh Raina got 41, the second-highest score after Rohit Sharma’s 53. Raina had just been dropped from the Test team after the first Test of the South African tour because his embarrassing inability to play fast, short-pitched bowling had been cruelly exposed. Watching him star in India’s innings was a textbook demonstration of how the T20 format defangs fast bowlers and rewards second-rate batsmen. But, I reminded myself, perhaps it was wrong to use Test cricket as a yardstick; perhaps T20 needed a different skill-set.

And briefly, the match did come alive as a cricketing contest when South Africa’s Van Wyk and de Villiers put on more than 50 runs in quick time, and seemed to put their team in a position to overhaul India’s 168 run total. In the end, India won comfortably, but as the evening wore on, it became increasingly clear that the match and its result were of no consequence because the point of the evening was the Bollywood show that followed the cricket.