It, honestly speaking, is not quite the egg-orchicken debate being revived in a strenuous exercise to reinvent the wheel when you feel called upon to think aloud as Sourav Ganguly does when saying that we need the Indian Premier League so that life returns to normality. Given the continuing rage of the novel coronavirus, humour of any kind is difficult to be wrung out of it.
These extremely trying and taxing days and weeks and months should have our guardians of sport in so many arenas doing their best to find out how practice is being sought to be resumed in countries that are obliged to cope with the pandemic like us.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s financial worries, though, force it monomaniacally to bang on about the IPL, illustrating an obsessive interest in pot-of-gold tournament action which for obvious reasons will not extend, for instance, to the Ranji Trophy. How many times have our administrative worthies even spoken of the other domestic tournaments so far with reference to the 2020-1 season in spite of the same daunting uncertainties being confronted by all of them alongside the one the BCCI considers the jewel in its crown?
The royal regalia, however, will have lost a lot of its sheen if and when everything other than tomorrow’s takings cease to matter. If it is a fact that Sri Lanka, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates have offered to host the IPL so that the BCCI’s logistical problems are got rid of ~ and they too get to stick a finger into the pie ~ there is hardly any doubt that holding those none too telegenic games in stadiums far from anywhere will be few state associations’ cup of tea.
Eloquence is reserved for the glamour show and a hush falls on the rest. Is that the bigger ~ or the smaller ~ problem for the officials in the Indian game’s portals of power? Our everyday coronavirus count, coupled with blood-curdling forecasts for the period that synchronises with the cricket season, suggests an immediate future in which sport of any variety may turn out to be a luxury we cannot really afford. It will be a terrible blow.
Playing catch-up may harden sportspersons’ characters but it very seldom is a preferred option. But if the cricket board decides to deem its job well done once the IPL gets going in a blaze of publicity and its mandarins pat each other on the back when it climaxes equally dramatically, Ganguly, as a former Indian captain, will have failed us and the game should everything else be forgotten about and cold-storaged.
The obsessive preoccupation that the IPL has been is bad, to let India’s wide array of competitive forums feel marginalised in official thinking is worse. It is akin to being, as a batsman, good on the off side and bad on the on.