It's time to love the IPL

Barney Ronay, writing for the Guardian, lists out all that is right with the Indian Premier League and the shortest format of the game.

As ever, though, the best bit is the in-house IPL commentary team, not so much pundits as simply blue-shirted BCCI evangelists. "WE ARE UNITED IN THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES!" Ravi Shastri fog-horned, weirdly, at the toss in the opening game, and most of the time it feels as though Shastri could be talking about his big toe - "Remarkable! Extraordinary! Superb!" - or a piece of cheese at the back of the refrigerator. It really doesn't matter as he is simply a continuous noise, an unwavering tone of relentless triumphalism, wearing on this occasion the expression of a man who has been kept in an underground facility for six weeks, subjected to flashing lights and pulsing noises and then finally prodded out into the desert air and encouraged to wander around with a microphone barking about tracer bullets and incredible spectacles