IPL points to a bleak future for cricket
The Indian Premier League's market-targeted speed brings a depressing echo of the age
George Binoy
25-Feb-2013
The Indian Premier League's market-targeted speed brings a depressing echo of the age. Why not offer an alternative rhythm? asks Mike Marqusee in the Guardian.
There's nothing new in the power of money shaping cricket's destiny. It's 230 years since Thomas Lord put a fence around his ground and began charging admission. Gamblers and publicans sponsored much of the game's early development. But the ideology of cricket, as it developed in the 19th and for much of the 20th century, disdained the cash nexus. Sordid monetary affairs were disguised behind the cult of amateurism and its ugly shadow, "shamateurism".
The difference now is that money is in the forefront of the game's culture, its power shameless and explicit. And with the IPL's introduction of private ownership of major teams – by far the most significant and potentially invidious of its innovations – that trend is institutionally entrenched. Not since the mid-19th century (with the exception of the Packer interlude) have representative cricket entities been private assets. As in other industries, the change from patronage to ownership will prove a giant step. Whether in the right direction is another question.
When Twenty20 started a few years ago, it was famously labelled as Mickey Mouse cricket by the oracle of cricketing puritanism. But then India won the inaugural T20 World Championship in 2007 against all odds and all hell broke loose. The IPL arrived the following year and Mickey Mouse, it was realized quickly enough, was in fact Godzilla, writes Ayaz Memon in the Daily Telegraph.
For instance, a 22-year-old rookie India player is reported to have bought a three bedroom apartment in tony area in mid-town Mumbai within a year of his playing in the IPL. How high the stakes now are becomes evident from the fact that it took the great Sachin Tendulkar almost a decade to invest in an apartment in a similar neighbourhood. The rookie, I hear, has also bought a Porsche and lives life in the fast lane in more ways than one.
George Binoy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo