Cricket is a religion that everyone follows in India.. And Sachin is everyone's God.. Although everyone worships one cricketer more than the other, Sachin is the God-Supreme.. The God of Gods.. The creator of interest, the sustainer of the love of the game and the destroyer of the opposition ALL in one tiny, smiling piece of man.. That said, he unites the country when we play the WC.. The whole country comes together to watch a game that is in our DNA to love and follow..
So when the concept of IPL was thrown in, cities playing cities in the shortest, most aggressive and probably the most entertaining form of cricket, the Twenty20 version I was supposed to be intrigued.. But NOPE!! Never happened.. Somehow, the thought of cities playing each other did not work for me.. I watched EPL every year since 2001 and was hooked to it.. As a big ManUtd fan, I also could not stand a Chelsea/Arsenal/Liverpool supporter and could spend endless hours trash-talking..
Why was cricket different for me?? As a sport that brought the nation together, cricket would divide the country into 'city' supporters.. The sport that made everyone proud of being Indian (when we win), would start a rivalry based on which city you were born in and where you lived.. I did not care less than very few native Bloreans were part of Royal Challengers Bangalore..
Digressing a little here, what is with the name?? Royal Challengers?? So meh!! As part of popular culture, 'Royal' in Karnataka is almost always referred to Mysore.. Challengers?? The way we played in IPL 1.0, yeah RRRRIGHT!! More cricket-challenged than challengers.. Royal-challengers together does not even make sense.. The color of the team.. I wish I were colorblind (although technically, I can never be colorblind).. I remember some famous designed conceptualized the barf-inducing combination of reddish-pink and gold (or dirty yellow)..!! I am still confused whether it is Bengaluru or Bangalore.. But the Anglicized name stuck with the team..
Back to IPL.. So, auctioning of the players resulted in insane amounts of money poured into the 'league' and players selected to play for a team like toy being sold on eBay.. The buildup to the game was a heady mix of cricket, Bollywood, models, cheer-girls and politics.. And while the cricket was good, everything else also became equally important.. The team had its song/dance, foreign cheer-girls (fully clad in some cases to appease all the naysayers of skin-showin the country), numerous after-parties to celebrate 'cricket'.. Eessssh!! I would have punched anyone who compared IPL with EPL.. EPL is serious football.. And NOTHING else..!!
My BIGGEST pet peeve of IPL.. It does not breed healthy competition.. What started as a battle between cities for cricket soon transcended to an open war of your culture v my culture, your language v my language.. Cricket used to unite.. But I guess that news is soooooo last week when we won the WC.. Alright folks, get the war paint out.. Looks like my city is better than yours..
1 comment:
Very well said and right to the point.
However you cant really compare cricket and football at club level competitions. Football is mainly a club level sport with very few international matches in the year (other than WC and continental championships), while cricket is more of international sports. And since club football is the highest level, its played much more seriously than IPL.
Btw, it would have been interesting to predict what would have happened had Zee Telefilms got the rights to Indian cricket in 2006 (as it was the highest bidder). However politics resulted in them losing their bid and they started Indian Cricket League in 2007. BCCI started the IPL in response to ICL. So without ICL, there would have been no IPL, Manish Pandey and Sourabh Tiwary would have still been unknowns and certainly less money would have gone into the game than it is now
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