The Circus called IPL2!!

India seems to be totally smitten by the Indian Premier League – 2009 and why not? It is a fantastic mix of Cricket’s Excitement, Bollywood’s glamour and gyrating bellies of young cheerleaders. One positive out of IPL being held in South Africa and not in India is the unbridled joy one derives out of the dances for long deemed unfit for a country of high morals like ours!!

The cash registers are ringing and boy, it is one hell of a trick to make quick buck. Be it the Franchise owners, Players, the BCCI or Broadcasters the money flow doesn’t seem like its going to stop anytime soon for any of these entities. Hats off to all those who are marketing this event. They are definitely running a good show.

But who is paying?? WE THE PEOPLE!!

What are we paying for?

For those with a little grounding in probability, we are paying to see a tournament in which every team has a 50% chance of playing the semifinals. How I arrived at that number is easy. We have 8 teams in the fray and 4 spots in the semi-finals. So 4/8 makes it 50%. Now, imagine for a moment how difficult (or easy) it is for a team to make it to the semi-finals. Not too difficult I believe. 9 times out of 10 a common man when faced with a challenge where he has a 50% chance of success will back himself to come out with flying colors. And, more than often not people around him will dismiss it as just another thing.

In a country like India, success is when a youngster cracks IIT JEE competing with about 3 lakh others like him for one of the 3000 odd seats on offer. Or even better is an IAS hopeful who cracks the world’s toughest competition to be one of the chosen few who will run this country of a billion plus people as its IAS, IFS, ICS and IPS officers. The probability to crack an IIT exam is (3000/300000) 0.01 and for IAS even lesser!! Compare with 0.5 in case of IPL!!

I guess you know where we are heading. An IIT aspirant after years of hard work may pocket a million bucks as salary, if he is lucky enough to be cherry picked by one of those paymasters from the western world. An IAS earns far lesser than that. (Wait a minute – we are not talking about how much he can potentially earn but how much he legally gets).

Now figure this out. Kevin Pieterson and Andrew Flintoff got 1.55 Million dollars for their short stints at IPL2 and that too without any performance guarantees. No wonder both were dismal failures. Shahrukh Khan’s loss-machine KKR has the strongest brand value and the highest merchandise sales despite being at the bottom of the table.

I don’t have anything against IPL. It is a brilliant concept but I seriously think too much is being made of it when it is no more than another tournament like County Cricket in England, Sheffield in Australia and Ranji in India. Just that it involves more money because of the franchise format.

And, it is the money that is calling the shots. IPL’s Modi is hell bent on making the tournament stretch longer by not going for groups wherein the group leaders contest in the semi-finals. Instead he has gone for a format which has no groups and each team play every other team in the tournament. So, a tournament that could have finished with 19 matches now stretches to 59 matches simply because more matches mean more money for everybody.

(Number crunching)

2*4C2 + 4C2 + 1 = 19 in case of 2 groups format

2*8C2 + 2 + 1 = 59 in the existing format

Does it also mean more entertainment? I don’t think so purely because it brings down the intensity with which matches are played. Teams and players know they can very well lose half of the matches and still qualify to play for the finals. Otherwise how do you explain BRC and DC losing 7 out of 14 and still progressing? On the other side, runaway team like DD made it to the semifinals long before it played its last match and simply let the standards slip in the later part of the league stage.

A tournament as long as this borders on the line of being rejected by the masses because things move too slowly and teams just as have too many chances to make amends because of the number of matches that they play. This is not the way tournaments are played around the world. Think of EPL or the Football world cup or the EURO cup. They are all in the group format.

 

We are really rewarding MEDIOCRITY in IPL. It doesn’t deserve this amount of public’s attention because it is just not worth it. A shorter, a crisper, a more intense IPL is the need of the hour.