For what it’s worth, here’re my thoughts on the Indian Premier League.

The format: It’s exciting but repetitive, and after the first two or three games the cheerleaders became a distraction, even a chore, getting in the way of the game. To be fair, these are points others have made as well and I can only nod in agreement. Perhaps more judicious use of Indian music and cultural products would make more sense to Indian crowds over the longer term. Somebody in Mumbai has suggested a bhangra troupe; film songs specific to players or descriptive of the situation (a six or a dismissal, as the case may be) could be other, equally corny ideas.

In the vintage years of Test cricket, boundaries were occasional. One-day cricket (F50 if you prefer) made fours and sixes common. T20 threatens to make them commonplace. If a six is hit every other over it is going to cease to be exciting. T20/IPL will need to devise new benchmarks. Perhaps vertical targets will be set: “Hit the red line near the clubhouse balcony and score eight; hit that black line on the floodlight tower and score a 12.”

Agreed, both those sound ridiculous, but so much about T20 is out of the ordinary and the conventional that it will soon have separate rules and scoring patterns being institutionalised for it. You can’t play it as if it were a compressed version of an ODI or a Test; it’s not. You don’t write text messages in accordance with Wren and Martin rules of grammar, do you?

The teams: After the player auction, I remember telling a friend that Mumbai and Jaipur were the weakest teams. Mumbai was a “Dad’s Army”, and Jaipur seemed to have lost the plot. Shane Warne has proved me spectacularly wrong by inspiring and leading the Jaipur team into close to the top of the table, at this juncture.

Even so, I’m still betting on Chennai, Delhi and Kolkata making the semi-finals. Jaipur and Mohali are my current favourites for the fourth slot. Nevertheless, given that one top-order innings can decide the match (McCullum, Sehwag, Hayden and Gilchrist have all provided examples), any prediction is the equivalent of planning a leisurely stroll on a minefield. That aside, the departure of Hayden, Hussey and Oram is going to have other teams fancying their chances against Chennai.

One question that was raised before the IPL was how the old guard would take to the newest format. Dravid and Laxman have looked completely out of sorts, and need not be first XI sure-shots in IPL 2009. Given his ODI history, Ganguly was expected to relish T20 but even he’s disappointmed. Tendulkar’s been kept away by injury, of course; but the larger message is obvious: the IPL has played out generational change before Indian crowds.

To go back to the mobile phone metaphor, epic novelists cannot, should not be asked to write text messages. In a perfect world, they should fade away with memories of their skills intact.

One classicist who’s shone in the IPL, however, is Glen McGrath, who gave up playing for Australia a year ago. He’s been the bowler of the tournament so far and still looks good for another two years of international cricket. His spell against Bangalore on Wednesday (April 30) night was exceptional by any standards – Test, ODI, whatever. It takes rare courage to quit sport – or anything – when your powers are still with you. McGrath is in that league; he’s done IPL an honour by signing up for it.

The brands: One of the challenges for the eight franchises is to build loyalty to the club, beyond loyalty to an individual player. Those who were Manchester United fans in Bryan Robson’s time, remained United followers in Cantona’s era and are gladly cheering Rooney today. That template is the IPL franchisee’s dream.

It’s unfair to be asking this question in year one, month one, but how have the IPL teams fared in terms of building brand loyalty? There is, of course, a degree of local following – Delhiites back the Delhi Daredevils, Mumbaikars want the Mumbai Indians to win. The real test is how much support a team has garnered outside its base station.

Here, individuals are proving magnets rather than corporate or collective identities. Dhoni’s fans are rooting for Chennai, Sehwag’s adherents for Delhi and so on. Among the owners, Reliance/Mukesh Ambani and Kingfisher-UB/Vijay Mallya could have made a cross-country impact but have been let down by underperforming teams.

To my mind, the biggest success has been Kolkata’s. Knight Riders is seen as Shah Rukh Khan’s team rather than Saurav Ganguly’s. The Shah Rukh tag has brought in incremental sponsorship and following. It’s a wise move. Saurav will be gone in two years or so, Shah Rukh will still be around, and still be iconic. To have a non-player who won’t retire as your “key man” makes good business sense.

	Just because Harbhajan slapped Sreesanth doesn’t also mean that he called Andrew Symonds a monkey. There is no correlation © Getty Images

Four months ago, he was the wronged Indian, the “Sikh warrior” who had been done in by malevolent Australians. Today, he’s the villain, the hot-head who’s gone too far, been banned for the rest of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2008 edition – and who was probably guilty as charged by Andrew Symonds too.

The most ridiculous aspect of the Harbhajan Singh-Sreesanth controversy – which in any case is the most riveting episode the IPL has thrown up so far – is the fickleness of the cricket media and the regiments of newspaper commentators and sound-bite pundits. With specials programmes like Chhante ki Goonj (The Resounding Slap) and Tamache ka Takkar (The Clash of the Slap) – and I hope I have those names right – making a further mockery of news television, Harbhajan has gone from national hero to international anti-hero, from one ridiculous extreme to another.

There is no doubt the stand-in captain of the Mumbai Indians needed to be punished for hitting Sreesanth. Whatever the provocation, whatever the pressure, this was not on. It went too far.

Yet, four things need to be pointed out.

First, just because Harbhajan slapped Sreesanth doesn’t also mean that he called Andrew Symonds a monkey. It does not necessarily prove Sachin Tendulkar was lying when he gave evidence in Harbhajan’s favour in Australia. There is no correlation. Let us not get carried away.

Second, Sreesanth’s guilt may be less recognisable but he surely deserves a strong reprimand as well. He has been obnoxious throughout the IPL. He has sledged, abused and provoked rival players, even junior batsmen and plain tyros. It could be understood if he were resorting to verbal warfare when faced with a batsman who had reached 95 off 35 balls. Sreesanth, however, has more often than not begun the battle.

Third, even if one were to be extraordinarily charitable and exclude the recent tour of Australia and explain it as a case of a volatile cricketer being targeted by a clever opposition, the fact is Harbhajan is not the best behaved sportsman in the world. Sreesanth hasn’t slapped anyone yet but, overall, he’s even worse.

Nevertheless, each time this is brought up, it is explained away with some pop sociology or similar claptrap: “This is the new, aggressive India”; “For years, we have suffered, now we will give it back”; “These are boys from small towns, middle India – they don’t care for reputations, they are not deferential to the white man”.

I once brought up Sreesanth’s behaviour on a television programme and suggested somebody have a chat with him. It was instantly apparent that almost everyone in the studio disagreed with me. Ajay Jadeja, a fellow guest on the show, jumped to the fast bowler’s defence and said he was absolutely fine and it would be unfair to curb his natural instincts.

Agreed, bad behaviour is as old as cricket. Some of what the Australians did under Ian Chappell – and seem to be doing now under Ricky Ponting – cannot be condoned. There is a crucial difference between playing hard and playing dirty.

If Indian cricketers – “new”, “aggressive”, “super-confident”: choose your adjective – want to give it back when assailed or want to occasionally needle a batsman as he walks to the crease, I have no problem with that. There is an ocean that separates such acceptable gamesmanship from plain boorishness. Waving his bat, exercising his pelvic muscles mid-pitch, screaming and shouting, bearing his teeth, grimacing menacingly without reason, Sreesanth is the most visible face of this cricket boor; at least on television. The face, let us accept, is ugly.

Precedent can justify anything, and nothing. Kepler Wessels hit Kapil Dev in the shin in the early 1990s, John Snow knocked down Sunil Gavaskar in the early 1970s. Neither was right and both should still be embarrassed. Harbhajan and Sreesanth are no better, no worse. There are moral absolutes on the cricket field. The state of Indian society and its evolutionary juncture cannot change those absolutes.

Fourth, while Harbhajan is going to be sitting at home for the rest of the IPL and will forfeit his millions as well, it is my guess that Sreesanth has lost more in the long run. As Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s column in the Hindustan Times this [April 28] morning suggests, the Indian dressing room is less likely to take a clear-cut, good-bad binary position on the unseemly business. To the rest of the Indian squad, there need not be one obvious villain and one obvious victim.

My hunch is Sreesanth will face a few barbs for, to use a friend’s phrase, “ratting” on a colleague and breaking club rules. This is not a value judgment; it is a cold, cynical assessment. By making a public scene, playing the wronged guy, crying on camera, blaming it on his “fever in the morning”, Sreesanth has betrayed a streak for exhibitionism and a low emotional quotient.

On television, it works in his favour. In the Indian team bus, it could be his Achilles’ heel.