It is difficult to re-read Cardus’ prose and imagine him reporting an IPL game © Getty Images

People who had never read Neville Cardus were weeping in his memory. Those who wouldn’t spend an afternoon watching an exacting and gripping run crawl in, say, a New Zealand versus England Test, were shedding tears for the “traditions of the great game”. Critical reactions to the Indian Premier League came wrapped in exasperating hypocrisy.

It is important to understand how we play, describe, consume and celebrate cricket today in comparison with, to pick a random noun, the age when Victor Trumper was justifiably hailed as an artiste even if his Test average – a meaningless bauble that – was only 38. These changes are not unique to T20; they have been true for ODIs (F50, if you like) and even modern Test cricket.

What was once a languid, gentle pastime is today a muscular, rapid-fire sport; there is less grace, more punch. It has given us openers like Matthew Hayden, whose batting has all the charm and delicacy of a butcher but who is so brutally and gloriously effective. It has also led to scoring rates in Test matches routinely crossing three or four runs an over, and remarkable athleticism that is, paradoxically, saving about 40 runs per Test batting day.

All this is a far distance from the easy-paced 1950s, from the romanticism of annual fixtures between Gentlemen and Players. It leaves less time for contemplation and pondering the vicissitudes of life while watching a single innings. Like always, cricket is a metaphor for society – the freneticism of the 21st century breeds IPL; Virender Sehwag sends text messages, Peter May probably wrote in longhand.

Cricket is not alone in trimming the frills. In 1994, Brazil took away the World Cup playing dull, defensive football. It won the final on penalties after an eminently forgettable final that had none of the flair and dash of Pele, Garincha or Zico. Likewise, modern hockey has little room for delectable dribbling and wrist-work.

	What was once a languid, gentle pastime is today a muscular, rapid-fire sport; there is less grace, more punch © Getty Images

My favourite cricket writer is actually E.W. ‘Jim’ Swanton, Hutton to Cardus’ Bradman (or Laxman to his Tendulkar, suit your analogy), and a crisp, spare writer who would have been a natural in a T20 press box. So it’s not the length of the match that circumscribes the writer but the writer’s inherent skills that re-create the magic of cricket, any type of cricket.

That brings us to point three: why has IPL reportage in Indian newspapers been so uniformly pedestrian and non-memorable? This again is an issue that needs deeper examination. With a few honourable exceptions, cricket writing in Indian newspapers, magazines and websites is sub-standard. As the number of column inches and pages devoted to cricket has increased, the quality of cricket writing has dropped.

There are good political columnists around, fine cultural and film essayists, engaging book reviewers; so why aren’t there a plethora of readable cricket writers? Why do so few cricket writers have a sense of narrative? There is a sinister inverse correlation between volume and quality of cricket coverage. Today, editors and newspapers (and executive producers and news channels) are driven by cricket as celebrity. They need the oxygen of access: for that exclusive bite from this batsman’s mother, that prized photograph of that bowler’s dog.

The casualty is disinterested assessment, acute analysis and well-thought out criticism. IPL didn’t create this monster – India’s cricket media brought it upon itself.

I’ve spent most of the past week in Hubli, a small city in northern Karnataka that has been, in a strange way, an IPL eye-opener for me. Every evening, as the work machine shut down, the Indian Premier League was about the only entertainment available or accessible to the strangers in town. As such, I spent the week watching T20 games almost uninterrupted.

As I soon discovered, the rest of Hubli wasn’t doing very much different. IPL had captured the imagination. As a friend pointed out, nothing else was selling. IPL and Set Max had crowded out advertising from other channels and soap operas. Few big Hindi/Indian films were being released in the IPL period, because no film-maker was certain he or she could match the frenzy of abbreviated cricket. Thanks to IPL, lean season corporate advertising – summer is usually a dull time to roll out heavy-duty promotional campaigns – had been rendered an oxymoron.

Not all of this was predicted. A number of well-meaning cricket fans from England and Australia and even within India were genuinely surprised at projections of IPL’s success, wondering if there was enough money to back the idea. In sum, what IPL may have done is created a new, complementary cricket market for the summer months. It will not necessarily take away from the traditional cricket season that runs from October/November to March.

It is best to see T20 and traditional cricket as two separate sports or, perhaps, separate enterprises. In the United States, basketball, American football, baseball, golf and a few other sports are all sustainable. The Indian economy isn’t as big as the American one but it’s grown large enough to support more than one sport.

Unfortunately, for a complex mix of reasons, India is essentially a single-sport society. There is only game in India that has mass following, engages a critical consumer population and invites corporate support. Thus far the sport was (traditional, Test/ODI) cricket. With IPL, the cricket business has multiplied and created another product to vacuum the money that remains.

Whatever the sceptics may say, the fact is IPL is working. It’s carved a new audience for cricket. True, some of the T20 fans may not be around to watch the Test matches when Australia tours India later this year, but never mind. As along as there is enough for each segment, each type of cricket fan – and as long as there’re no moronic two-match Test series – nobody will complain.

Before the IPL season began, I had my doubts whether it would have any implications on the selection of the Indian Test team. Over the past week or two, I’ve had to re-edit that thought.

Having seen Rohit Sharma bat in the T20 World Cup, the ODI series in Australia and now the IPL has been a pleasure. As soon as there’s place in the Indian middle order – which means, when either Tendulkar, Laxman, Ganguly or Dravid walks back to the pavilion for the final time – Sharma should be playing Test cricket. He looks more capable for the longer game than, for instance, Yuvraj Singh.

Next, Gautam Gambhir has now batted with enough fluency in all types of cricket to merit selection over Wasim Jaffer. He should be opening for India in Test cricket.

Three cricketers I hadn’t seen much of before the IPL have also left an impression. S. Badrinath (Chennai Super Kings) is ready for India. Ashok Dinda (Kolkata Knight Riders) and Manpreet Singh Gony (Chennai) could add to India’s fast bowling options in Tests/ODIs. David Hussey will be 31 in two months and it’s difficult to believe he’s never been selected for Australia in an ODI.

There’re names I’ve missed, of course, given the many new stars IPL has thrown up. Whichever way you look at it, it hasn’t been a bad deal for what was meant to be an off-seasonal gimmick. Let’s give IPL its due.

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.