IPL 2016: Not the usual pot of entertainment

Almost halfway through the 9th edition of the Indian Premier League, an ardent cricket fan may be forgiven for finding it a bit tasteless, boring and uninspiring. And murmurs of disapproval, vis-a-vis the abject sameness in the tournament have already started circulating in India as well as the rest of the world.

After a prolific run of success in the first few seasons, with packed stadiums and TRPs for broadcasting channels soaring to astronomical levels, India’s mega T20 extravaganza finally seems to be getting a hang of the ‘new normal’.

This year, the attendance in the stadiums has mostly been unimpressive, and television channels have started accepting the sad reality of the fast dipping viewership for the IPL. The reasons for such downward trends are also explicit from the way the tournament has progressed this time around.

Lack of thrilling matches

Clearly, excitement and thrill have become the raison d’etre of T20 cricket. And, quite surprisingly, it has been the absence of nerve-wracking finishes and tight encounters that has drastically dented IPL’s brand image this year. Not that the organisers should have done something special to achieve that, but the cricket loving crowd has clearly not been impressed by the unacceptable imbalance between the teams contesting in most of the matches.

At one stage, after the completion of 15 matches this season, it had almost become a bygone conclusion that the team batting second would win the contest hands down! And that was because by that point, only once had the team bating first managed to bag a win. Even though that trend has fortunately been cast aside with the passage of time, but the results of some of the matches can still be gauged well before the half way mark.

Same faces, same venues, same tactics

Something that the Indian Premier League has certainly not been able to emulate from the better-placed football leagues in the Western countries is the idea of high-value transfers. Even the idea of transferring players between franchises is also not an established one yet. This had led to stagnation in teams, as the key players continue to be a part of the same franchises.

Thus, the excitement of seeing a Virat Kohli play for the Kolkata Knight Riders or Rohit Sharma signing up for the Delhi Daredevils has been missed by the IPL crowd. Imagine how it would feel if you were to visit the same hill station at a particular time every single year. It would be pretty boring, after a certain point of time.

To add to this monotony induced by the players, the tactics used by the different teams have also remained much the same over the years. Thus Mohali, for example, rarely ever witnesses a packed stadium, because the poor standards of the Kings XI Punjab franchise over the years have not been improved to any extent. It’s the same team playing to fail every single time, and the management seems to have lost track of the whole issue. The Mohali crowd responds every time with poor attendance in the stadium.

Big hitters are all the same

Explosive batting is one thing that can surely cheer the viewers up. However, when the explosive batsmen remain the same over the years, staleness tends to set in with respect to our expectations from them. Thus, if the viewers already know that none other than Gayle or McCullum or de Villiers or Russell is going to plunder the runs, they shall scarcely be interested in watching others bat.

The IPL has thus lost its sheen by not being able to unearth such power hitters over the years, especially from among the Indian domestic circuit. The idea of watching the same Yusuf Pathan or MS Dhoni keep bludgeoning the ball every other day surely loses traction with time. Imagine how excited we were when a young Manish Pandey had stunned us all with an electrifying century in IPL 2009 in South Africa. Such surprises, it seems, have more or less vanished from the tournament.