A lot more of the Indian Premier League is yet to be played and if there have been dark mutterings about “corrupt approaches” and instant assurances of an investigation to get to the bottom of the matter, quite apart from pregnant with meaning expert opinions on how the later part of the competition is going to take it out of the assorted combatants in its expensive buy claustrophobic bio-secure bubble, you cannot really fault the organisers of the tournament for not trying to hold the sunny side up.They have to sell it.

One part of the orchestrated feel-good factor is that the bubble has not been allowed to be pricked, which implies struggles within the isolated interior have been successfully put a lid on. There is not a word any more on from the United Arab Emirates on the comparative stringency enforced in the domains of the different hosts bound by their own quarantine rules, though it fuelled indignant, wondering aloud journalistic outpourings around the time the teams had fetched up there though the action had yet to begin.

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If the mental well-being of cricketers herded into mandatory isolation is by now a popular area of curiosity and discussion elsewhere in the world, one or two admonitions from Virat Kohli could be seen to have had a very telling impact on those potentially recalcitrant ones who might, with uncalculated risk-taking, have endangered the IPL’s smooth progress to its bountiful conclusion.

“We’re here to play the game and that’s that,” said the Royal Challengers Bangalore captain, aware that his global recognisability would be a dyke against intra-IPL feuding. If you wondered how a player argued against a peer’s natural instinct for celebrating life as he knew it, you, of course, needed to be told that the captain as a rebel, looked askance at by the Establishment was too old a story to be repeated.

It did the stand-out man, alone in his glory, no good, let alone the little matter of his bills being paid. “Let-the-backroom-boys-scoop-it-inandivvy-it-up” is the mantra of the new age. And the IPL as a business platform was at it all right, if you believed what it was saying to be true. Midway through the week came a bit of the sound of official drum-beating to the effect that the tournament, once again, was proving a financial hit.

More than 35 deals were said to have been clinched “across the franchises,” resulting in the doubling of the takings over the previous season’s venture. That equalled the more surprising nuggets out of Ripley’s as the show had got going in a gloom-and-doom setting when even breaking even seemed to have been given up on, what with Covid-19 playing havoc here, there and everywhere.

They had had to ship the tournament to West Asia as the coronavirus’ India-specific narrative was as grim as anything by the Brothers Grimm. Industry sources are sceptical but iterated and reiterated, a certain willing suspension of disbelief among the IPL’s adherents can render the truth irrelevant. That is the game.