Indian Premier League , Is this really cricket?
Posted on April 22, 2008
Filed Under Cricket
The multi-million dollar competition has been hyped as one which will revolutionize the game with a fizzy cocktail of cricket, entertainment and celebrity shows.
Starved
So how do you serve up entertainment to embellish a game which is religion for millions of Indians? It’s a fairly uncomplicated recipe.
Take a large helping of Bollywood stars, sautee it with some more Bollywood music, and then add whatever you can lay your hands on - cheerleading girls, stilt walkers, cyclists furiously riding around the ground, acrobats hanging from the stadium roof.
It appears to be working in an entertainment-starved country where an evening out in the big cities essentially means flocking to shiny, air-conditioned malls to shop, eating unappetizing precooked food, and catching a Bollywood movie at the overpriced cineplex.
No wonder then that, for the inaugural ceremony, the organizers hired cheerleaders from America, stilt walkers from Holland, stunt acrobats from Germany and laser operators from China and Malaysia to serve up a visually stunning show. It was helped by 250,000 watts of sound and 50,000 watts of lighting through lasers and sky tracers. Many of the players on the field were imported too.
But such ‘classy entertainment’ like getting skimpily-clad foreign cheerleading girls is sometimes threatening to go out of hand at the competition.
The Situation and Reality on the Ground as Expected
In Bangalore beer-addled spectators exhorted the girls to come down and dance with them, screaming in unison to a Bollywood song, "Come to us, come to us, now!"
And in Mumbai, swooning men implored the shimmying girls, "Madam, madam, shake hand, shake hand!".
Analysts say cricket and the cult of celebrity are feeding off each other at the competition.
"The cricket uses celebrities to feel good about itself; the celebrities use the cricket to stay in the headlines. It’s a symbiosis of a particularly cynical kind," says cricket writer Lawrence Booth.
Meanwhile, as Bollywood stars dance and cheerleading girls do the jig, electronic scorecards are yet not working in many stadiums, and at the weekend match in Calcutta, there was no drinking water available for over 70,000 spectators.
Also, a floodlight blew its fuse stopping the game for half an hour and the dustbowl cricket pitch invited the wrath of players and analysts alike.
Clearly, there is nothing revolutionary about all this, and how it will change the game - for the better- is unclear.
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