Dhoni thinks the parties that come with the IPL are to blame. The other experts feel that the timing of the IPL was a massive blunder in the sense that it gave the Indian team no prep time for the World Cup. And Arnab Goswami, a host on one of the Indian news-channels kept reminding everyone yesterday that this was a national crisis of sorts. The last might be excused as a TRP generator, and the first as a lame excuse from a captain who suddenly found himself and his team in the middle of a World Cup.
None of the above rants is the reason for the note. However, this is a good chance to look at keeping the IPL alive, albeit on ‘my’ terms, for it is a pioneering effort in cricket.
A conversation with a friend a month ago threw up the fact that the IPL is the way it is, so that the battle of the remotes in Indian homes does not happen. Granted, but what exactly is it that makes the woman of the house, who is a peripheral cricket fan hopefully, to gracefully hand over the remote?
Mandira Bedi in designer sarees? Porn-ready hunks as anchors? Cheerleaders shaking their booties? Or shots of Preity Zinta waving a flag or Shah Rukh Khan looking intense while chewing gum? I grant the middle-Indian wife far more brains and taste. Does she see herself as a mindless bimbo who will watch a game she doesn’t really give an eff about, just because it’s glitzy and has a few of her favourite Bollywood personalities? I would think not.
On the other hand, if one builds on the fact that T20 as a format has enough cricketing excitement in it to lure the peripheral viewer, we could end up creating more knowledgeable fans out of such viewers.
Much as I hate giving Bernie Ecclestone any credit, Formula One combines glamour and sport intelligently. Yes, there are the so-called paddock babes. But once the engines start, it is just pure sport. What if the 2011 IPL was built in a similar manner?
We would start off with a pre-match show with sports presenters and genuine experts. Anjum Chopra is a genuine expert – she has played the game at the highest level and is good-looking in an intelligent sort of way. She reads the game well, and no, she wasn’t discovered by the IPL machine. It was the dowdy DD that first featured her as an expert.
Having cheerleaders shaking their best bits is like a promotion campaign for God. The game is a religion here, and this format is just right as far as driving Indians into a two-hour long frenzy. You don’t need stunts to fill stadiums here in the sub-continent. Just the promise of good cricket gets the queues forming up.
You want breaks between matches? Well, don’t waste it on a gum-chewing Khan, a Preity Zinta dimple and the like. There are enough fascinating, funny and interesting facts about the game to keep everyone watching.
Why do you think a woman will not want to know more about the game? It just could be possible that she doesn’t watch the game because no one’s taken the time off to point out the finer points to her. Okay, if you feel that she will be more comfortable getting her fundas from a woman, get a woman cricketer to host those portions.
There are ways and ways of making cricket more appealing. The way the IPL is headed isn’t one of them. If it continues this way, the bubble will burst. As surely as night follows day.
We are proud to announce that this is the 50th article on cricketcetera (our half century), and has been contributed by Nandu Narasimhan (catch him @ http://www.facebook.com/nandu.narasimhan)
© Shailesh Nigam, Varun Khanna (for respective articles)
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