Thinking twice or thrice about picking up that ticket online, not because it was exorbitantly priced, but because other expenses had 'eaten into' your savings; cringing at the cost of the nibbles you'd have to buy during a five to six hour stay at the stadium; taking the bus to the office for a week to make up for the fuel consumed by the long trip to the stadium, because the bus fares aren't as low as they used to be; choosing to watch the games from home instead, only to flip channels in between to find the programming on the news channels more amusing and compelling. The 2014 edition of the IPL is in its final week, and most of us barely noticed.
Although IPL had been diagnosed with an insidious sclerosis ever since symptoms of betting and match-fixing became visible to the world, few would've anticipated the tournament's being confined to the apolitical small talk space of conversations. But, drama on the field is only interesting when there is an unchangeable stasis in everyday life, and when our fate seems to rely on dots other than those in a cricketing over, we are bound to prioritize possible preoccupations, anxiety over the future undeniably trumping the thirst for vicarious thrill.
The apolitical small talk, though, does find occasion quite often, even if only for a few minutes, in a conversational arena where you'd be saying anything against the truths proclaimed loudest only if you had gladiatorial pretensions. And the IPL's big-hitting, unsurprisingly, is the usual topic. Unlike in the case of earlier editions of the tournament, however - when people would unequivocally gush over the power of Gayle and Pathan and Dhoni sending balls into the gallery and out of the stadium - this time, every knock that featured the once-held impossible feat of scoring only in boundaries at strike-rates soaring faster than the Sensex, were looked at with suspicion: 'I'm sure that it is all fixed.'
Glen Maxwell had a remarkable start to the tournament, with two scores of 95 and an 89, hitting sixes with a consistency that nearly refuted the existence of vagaries that create drama in the game, as also in life. A colleague, reacting to this phenomenon, had this to say: 'The boundaries are smaller. But, that doesn't explain what is going on. It has got to be scripted. He should come and bat at one of those small playgrounds in my neighbourhood, and I will bowl to him. I bet you he won't be able to hit as many sixes as he has been, and certainly not off almost every ball. And that's not because I'm an expert bowler, but because it's just impossible to keep hitting sixes at such a rate!'
Murmurs about match-fixing quickly formed a chorus on Sunday, as Mumbai Indians decided to liberate a very demanding scenario facing them from the confines of the impossible. Rajasthan Royals' Aussie paceman, James Faulkner, bowling the decisive four balls, conceded two sixes of two identical low full-tosses. The second six was struck by a batsman facing his first ball, with the Mumbai Indians needing a boundary to leapfrog Rajasthan in the league table in terms of net run rate. Had Faulkner given away anything less than a boundary, the Royals would have been among the top four teams. A very plausible explanation of what had happened would have been that the bowled tried to bowl yorkers and missed his mark on both the occasions, serving up full-tosses instead. But, such reasoning is so boring!
Interestingly, most of these fans cheered Yuvraj Singh when he scored six sixes of a Stuard Broad over. If you can't hit a six off almost every ball, how could Yuvraj have done it off every ball?
It is understandable is the skepticism surrounding the IPL given the outlandish sums of money involved and the thriving 'underground' betting market for cricket in India. Yet, the cynicism seems exaggerated. Even when aware of where the ball is to drop and how it is to turn/swing and bounce, we can all agree, that it does still require supreme skill, poise, and power to smash every ball out of the park. And even if everything were scripted, the bowler would need immense expertise and unwavering confidence to put the ball at that specific spot on the pitch, which had been marked out in the script. As such, even in the supposed worst case, there is still sufficient reason to be in awe of what the cricketer can do: unfailingly bat and bowl to plan. To ceaselessly scent for the squalor is to squander the sight of the sublime.
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