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Leaving county cricket...
© Siddhartha Vaidyanathan
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Usually at this time of year I would be going through my first-game-of-the-county-season ritual: wrap up warm, pack the binoculars and the latest edition of Wisden, think of a quick summary of my winter with which to regale press-box colleagues, and – important, this – glance nervously at the April skies. My options today would have included the Rose Bowl, Canterbury, The Oval, Chelmsford, Bristol, Grace Road and Edgbaston, names that evoke a certain nostalgia even as I write them. Instead, I am in Bangalore, where – in case you have just arrived from Mars – the revolution begins on Friday. It is the kind of decision freelance journalists think of as a calculated risk.
The players I’ve chatted to so far here have done their best to deny that their sole motivation is money. Now it’s my turn. The mood in England towards the Indian Premier League is mixed. The comments under the blog I write every week for guardian.co.uk reflect a bit of enthusiasm, some curiosity, plenty of indifference and a lot of hostility. I was undecided myself, which is why I’m here now. And until my departure on May 5, I will be logging my impressions of a competition that might – just might – end up doing what everyone keeps saying it will do and change cricket forever.
These are strange times to be an anglocentric cricket person. When I spoke to Rahul Dravid yesterday, he was surprised I was out here when virtually none of my compatriots is. The chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, Giles Clarke, has repeatedly outlined his opposition to centrally contracted players participating in the IPL, while the players themselves express their irritation as tactfully as they can without being hauled up in front of the board. Now Sir Allen Stanford, the Texan billionaire, is offering a money-spinning alternative of his own. The IPL might yet look like small fry.
Predictions seem futile, but underlying it all is the thought that a successful tournament here could change the structure of the English game for good. This, I think, is what scares a large chunk of English cricket followers, who are as used to following the fortunes of Surrey or Lancashire (if not at the ground, then through the papers or on the web) as they are to the changing of the seasons. The IPL offers no such familiar comfort. It is a distant threat in a nation whose clout round the high-table of cricket politics has outweighed England’s for years.
But this is a fact of life, and not one that troubles me. Personally, the IPL excites and intrigues more than it disturbs. How seriously will the players take it? Will the fans identify with their local franchise? Will the cricket itself become the story? And what on earth is going to happen to Test matches? Perhaps I’ll know a bit more by the time I leave.
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