Indian Premier League: Just not cricket

The fifth edition of the Indian Premier League is about to start and Friday columnist Suresh Menon, a cricket buff, feels it is going to be game-changing In 2008, the Abu Dhabi United Group bought Manchester City for $330 million, a team in English Premier League football that is over a century old, with a rich sporting history. In 2010, corporate giant Sahara India forked out $370 million for Pune Warriors, a cricket team that didn't exist until it was bought at auction in a league that was just three years old. And that is the essential contradiction of the Indian Premier League (IPL), this lack of a context. It is the act of paying money which validates everything - from the worth of a player to the cost of a team to the value of the league itself. How do we know that all-rounder Ravindra Jadeja is worth $2 million? Because Chennai Super Kings bought him for that amount at this year's auction. What about the IPL itself? It was valued at $4.13 billion in 2010 by a branding consultancy (which presumably included its fees in the valuation). A year later, it was $3.67 billion. Is that true? We will know only if someone pays that amount to buy it out lock, stock and Chris Gayle's bat. How do they arrive at these figures? Why not $8.98 billion, or $650 trillion? They are equally meaningless, after all. The Australian writer Gideon Haigh calls it "asset valuation plucked from thin air". Scandals worked in its favour Yet the IPL somehow survived its contradictions in the first four years. Court cases, the resignation of a Union Minister amid allegations of favour-mongering, the sacking of the Commissioner Lalit Modi, who reputedly had four live cameras trained on him at every match, the scandal of the supine governing council, Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), and embedded television commentators, all brought under one roof in the moniker created by novelist Amitav Ghosh to describe India's national obsession, ‘Cripoliwood' - cricket, politics and Bollywood. Scandals worked well for the IPL, keeping it constantly in the public eye. But has the IPL gone a scandal too far? TV ratings have fallen. Kochi are threatening to go to court after being dropped from the league; revelations of rule-bending or outright fixing (of players, auctions) haven't added to the credibility. Eight weeks before the April 4 start, there was no clarity on teams and matches until last month when Sahara India and the cricket board kissed and made up. At the time of writing, peace seems to have broken out, but the potential for another lovers' tiff is ever present. Modi, in self-imposed exile in London, keeps letting cats out of the bag with childish glee. Yes, we fixed the auctions, he confesses, yes, we allowed teams like Mumbai and Chennai to get the players they wanted, yes, we kept changing rules arbitrarily. And yes, says his listeners, his credibility was never high anyway. The habit of making up rules on the fly, financial opaqueness, cronyism, disregard for probity and disdain for public opinion are only some of the IPL's traditions. There is too the conflict of interests. The Board President is also a team owner, the chief selector is a brand ambassador. The IPL is saying in effect, forget propriety, smell the money. It's just not cricket Unlike the English Premier League, the IPL is not so much about sport as about money and power. Curiously, the one has been eroding the other. The arrogance of power is diminishing the money (If Modi is to be believed, the cricket board would have lost $2 billion if Sahara India had broken away); the greed for money is diminishing the power (only 8 per cent of the board's income is spent on cricket). In a year when the national team has performed badly in England and Australia, when the Indian team seems to have lost something in transition, the scandal-hit IPL will have to woo sponsors and the public with greater humility. The odds on that happening, however, are roughly one in 4.13 billion. The IPL has become a bitter pill - but one that can neither be swallowed nor spat out. It is too big to fail, yet sensitive enough to totter at every whiff of scandal. This, its fifth year, will be crucial, perhaps even game-changing.