A Fairer IPL and a More Enjoyable Telecast

A Fairer IPL and a More Enjoyable Telecast

Who wants to make IPL fairer, you dimwit, I hear you say. It is not impossible that the phrase “fair game” has gone AWOL. But, did you forget that there is an award for “fair play” in IPL,you know-it-all, I respond.

I do swear by playing any sport with a sense of fair play. Just do a Game Theory on it, and you would find that if life is anything it is light years away from being fair (letting an obese man die instead of four athletic types is fair game). In name or in deed, fairness is here to stayat whatever level of dilution. 

What about the second part of the heading, More Enjoyable Telecast? As it stands, IPL offers some interesting game play only during overs 16-20, of team’s batting. Sometimes, five or six wickets fall or 70-80 runs are scored in that stretch, neither one is enjoyable on TV.

It is perhaps four to five months to IPL auction for 2026. Therefore it is just the time to suggest changes to IPL rules and regulations.

I would guess that IPL matches’ gate receipts are in the low single digit. Who comes to see all sweaty pom-pom girls strut their stuff anymore? None. That is just as well because only that many people, if that, lay any emphasis on the game of cricket. No issues, male or female.

Those who do attend matches at the stadiums, what they come to see are the so-called “SIXES”. Yes, I had to put that all in uppercase, to make sure the reader understands that the inane commentary that comes through TV is not audible to the home watchers. 

I hate watching IPL games on TV. The reasons are many, but the most grating one is the ignorance of the people at the stadiums. A batter hits a six that goes as far as 60 meters and the stadium erupts. To keep up with that euphoria, the commentators pick one superlative among the few they have a ready list of (though MS Word gives them a long list) and try manufacturing excitement in the TV/mobile phone audience. This is not even nonsense, except for those who cannot identify sense even if it hit them in their face.

Excitement should come from the beauty/timing/effort/effortlessness of the shot, even if it be in a losing cause. Making the boundary marker close in on itself that even I can hit a sixer is stupidity. The uninitiated do not know why this is so and it is my duty to educate them. The boundary lines close in on themselves to accommodate more spectators!

I know it is not the gate receipts to the state cricket associations that motivate the shorter boundary lines. It is, rather that more the spectators, more the concessionaires’ profit (with a paper bowl of popcorn costing Rs. 100/−; sorry, if I have undersold popcorn; I have never been to an IPL match) and more the fee for the state cricket associations, after a cut to the BCCI and IPL franchises.

Now that I have already talked about sixers, I have a comment or two on the telecast as regards the same sixers. As the ball flies off the bat, the camera follows it dutifully, keeping it at the centre of the frame. Yes, the camera person is doing her job as dictated by the director, who has never seen a cricket match. 

The spectator at the stadium does not watch only the ball; she takes in the vicinity too and this helps her make her personal judgment of whether the ball would clear the boundary line. There is a joy in being right in this judgement. The TV viewer is deprived of the opportunity for this judgement. Is it pre-judgment? May be.

The above are just roaming the periphery. Let me hone in on the centre. In the initial years, commentators called some batters who substituted for someone else a pinch hitter. This was taken from American professional baseball, the Major League Baseball, in which if the pitcher is the next at-bat and there are two players in scoring positions (bases second and third), the head coach would put in a batter, and concurrently remove the pitcher, from the line up to improve the odds of scoring runs (this can happen even in other cases, as when the pitcher has pitched far too many balls till that point). This is far from why a player is substituted in IPL. Nowadays, of course, I do not hear the term pinch hitter, and that is for the good.

When I have gone down MLB this far, let me go a little further, though not relevant to IPL. In MLB, if a batter can play from both sides of the home plate, he is called a switch hitter. This does not exist in cricket. Thus far and to my knowledge no batsman has played both right and handed shots. Does a batsman change his grip while executing the reverse sweep? I do not know. 

In the most recent edition of IPL, from about 16th or 17th over, any batsman coming in to bat swings his bat merely to make contact with the ball, it appears to my unsophisticated eye. And, enough number of times, the ball just flies off, and a sixer ensues (mentioned briefly earlier). This is pathetic.

Other times the batsman is given out, an lbw or a catch is effected. The bowler is given credit. This too is pathetic. This needs to be explained.

The bowlers who are engaged in the waning phase of the innings, the only direction to the batter from the coach, the captain and other sundries (like the Assistant Deputy Batting Coach) is for him to make contact with the ball. Of course, a bowler is likely to bag his third wicket. 

Think hard. Was it really his third wicket? No, it was his (2 + n/10)th wicket, for the nth player in the batting line up, in the reverse order. That is, if one of the opening pair went out, his total wicket would be (2 + 9/10) = 2.9. If it is the last batsman in, his wicket would be worth only (1/10), like grace marks in a test in an academic setting. Up to about the 7th in line, players can be expected to play (though they may not, given the conditions) cricketing shots, but beyond him, the batsman can do nothing beyond executing slog shots, no matter how many balls he may have swatted in the nets.

That is, Shubman Gill’s wicket is more worth to the bowler than, say, Mohammed Siraj’s. One may wish to fine tune the numbers, but the basis cannot be disputed.

One of my relatives was quite dismissive of my take on what the cameraman should follow as ball skies. “Is that all your beef with IPL?” I said no. This post is a detailed answer to him, though I am not sure he would see this. When he is too busy to go to a match (easily affordable to him whatever the price of the ticket), he would not spend any time on reading through my scribbles here.

Raghuram Ekambaram