Wham bam thank you sir

by MATT QUARTERMAINE

THE Indian Premier League, the rampant love child of cricket and baseball, is hidden late at night on Channel 10 most days of the week. If one day cricket is the pyjama game, then the IPL is wearing a flimsy see-through nightie and there doesn't appear to be much underneath. Designed for the short attention span of the modern generation, this form of cricket comes with so many bells and whistles the only time for thought is during the advertisement breaks.

Unfortunately, because the program is late at night it is littered with ads for Jennifer Love Hewitt's under the skin acne treatment and Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O's Big Brother (Am I going to watch? "I Don't Think So").

Each team has only 20 overs to score, so the batting techniques fly out the window like the bottom half of Shane Watson's bat; it's a slogfest. Balls fly great distances and the enthusiastic Indian crowd, faces pressed against the wire fences, go wild. Dot balls are as rare as a Ricky Ponting smile after his dismissal. When a bowler does deliver a devastating over, that is one in which hardly any runs are scored, the resentment from the crowd and the commentators is audible.

The players were bought before the tournament like cattle at an auction, with only the newly retired Darren Lehman looking bovine. Each team is owned by a wealthy Indian businessman or celebrity and represents a city in India. The teams have crappy, tacky names with pretensions of grandeur that could only have been chosen by people with English as a second language; the Chennai Super Kings, the Rajasthan Royals and the Kolkata Knight Riders (is a talking car their emblem?) to name a few. The CEO owners look suitably unimpressed when their team loses and you can see in their faces they just want to continue their usual business practices and sack the lot of them. Songs blare and cheerleaders celebrate every boundary with Pom Pom shimmies and swirling tiny skirts.

With no Aussie team to root for, I briefly check out how Ponting, Watson, Symonds and the Husseys are going, but I have hung around for a couple of blokes. There's Glenn McGrath, still so miserly and accurate he is frustrating everyone, because he's not being hit out of the park. Adam Gilchrist has been "looking" dangerous, but I love seeing the most honest bloke striding to the crease knowing that if he's out, he'll walk one last time. And there's Warnie, the personification of the magic of sport; in the real world he's a block-headed fake blond, bogan tool, but on the field he is canny, intelligent, instinctive and poetry in motion.

I have been bleary eyed, because I can't resist seeing four more overs of the most masterful bowler ever. I'll watch almost any sport on television for a while, but the Indian Premier league is a chance to renew acquaintances with some old friends and legends, one last time.

First seen in Big Issue

7 May 2008

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