As the sixth installment of the Indian Premier League veered off to a somewhat anodyne climax, the pervading allusion of the public sentiment was “in cricket we no longer trust”. Even as the colossal Eden Gardens was packed to the rafters for the final, the prevailing cynicism couldn’t be missed, best demonstrated by jeers that welcomed BCCI boss N Srinivasan to the presentation ceremony.
Stripped of innocence as the game was, the cricket fraternity was essentially critical in its perception of the gentleman’s game. Each run-out, each dropped catch, each missed stumping and, indeed, each no-ball evoked raised eyebrows.
Sample this: The last over of Rajasthan’s innings in the Eliminator, Mumbai Indians’ Lasith Malinga bowled two wides of surreal proportion. The stands were scantily packed for the match, but the coinage, the now dreary portmanteau, “spot-fixed” was doing a verbal Mexican wave. Malinga’s aberration could have been just incidental, but the context of it couldn’t be missed.
This edition, for all its competitiveness, would be referred to as the “dreaded” sixth, with almost a “Friday the thirteenth” ring to it. The spot-fixing scandal that erupted at the fag end of the tournament – 16/5 in cricket’s hall of shame – threatens to swallow the tournament.
However hard you try, you cannot but view this season through the prism of the spot-fixing-scandal glasses, though without this, the tournament would have attached to it fancier, and pleasanter, reference points – “Tendulkar’s last”, “Mumbai’s first” or maybe even “Gayle’s 175”.
In all fairness, the tournament was competitive. Until the last leg of the tournament, seven teams were in contention for the playoffs. There were tense finishes, low-scoring thrillers, surreal twists, bizarre turns, high-quality batting and bowling, unreal fielding, the obscure seizing the day, a new champion and so on and so forth. In short, it had everything that the tournament had promised at the time of its initiation.
This edition accommodated men of all hues. Batting wasn’t just about sheer aggression, but more about pacing the innings. So with the bowlers, as would testify the their assorted presence in the top 10. There were pacers, medium-pacers, slingers, mystery spinners, left-arm and off-spin variants, and most pleasingly leg-spinners. The fielding, especially catching, just got better. One needn’t look beyond Kieron Pollard’s boundary-rope juggling to drive home this point.
It also defied the economics-performance correlation theory, for two (Rajasthan Royals and Sunrisers Hyderabad) of the top four teams had a shoestring budget. For India, the tournament unearthed promising cricketers such as Sanju Samson, Mohit Sharma and Karan Sharma.
The tournament wasn’t without routine on-field scuffles, with Kolkata skipper Gautam Gambhir being a serial offender, and provided another reminder of the financial behemoth that it is, as another franchise wound up. But how better IPL would have been without the controversy tremors of seismic magnitude!