The IPL has destroyed cricket's soul

The IPL revolution has been driven by thrill-thirsty fans and not by what the game itself requires, Akshaya Mishra writes on Firstpost.com. The problem with that, he says, is it will reduce cricketers to products of an assembly line that caters only to the basic minimum of the fan need.

In the reductionist approach of the average fan, cricket is all about hitting the ball hard and high the sound of woodwork being dismantled. Greatness here is a quantity that comes in the denominations of fours and sixes. Everything else – the joys of unique skills, the cases individual courage, the test of character in great fightbacks, in all, the combination of abstracts that make sport so beautiful — turned irrelevant.