IPL 5 :The Success Story

Yes, it’s been an exciting couple of weeks, sorry months – or has it been a year already? Ok, it may not have been year, but it certainly feels like it. The Indian Premier League (IPL) bandwagon has rolled along into its final lap and seems to be running along quite successfully. With uneven television ratings, stellar mis-fields and horrendous batting techniques to boot, and of course a freshly discovered spot fixing scandal, the two month long party circuit, with a dash of cricket thrown in between, has quite certainly made a mark for itself.

It comes along everyday, most of the times with two back to back matches, it’s entertainment alright – eight hours of unadulterated, made for the family, pushed-down-your-throat blast of sweet and invigorating fun. The tournament has been very interesting so far with six teams out of the nine involved still in contention to make the three slots available in the playoffs – Delhi has secured its spot in the playoffs. Nearly ten games so far have gone till the last over, the frequency of which has been quite incessant. The tournament is thriving, people are flooding into grounds to watch their heroes live, splurging obscene amounts of money in the process and spending quality time with their families dancing to the music and checking out cheerleaders (huh, Cricket? Yes they’re there in the background!).

The IPL can attribute much of its success to the overall organization of the whole event, while a less successful sporting event would schedule its matches in such a manner that it facilitates the fitness and performance of the players and maintains relevance to the fixtures, the ‘successful’ IPL has managed to organize it in such a way that Mumbai has played both its legs with Kolkata within a span of seven days. Same goes for Punjab which has just gone through a stretch of five games where they played Delhi and Deccan both two times each.

Why should we have context, when you know the viewers are going to tune in anyway? How does it matter if the same teams have played only a day before who remembers it? True, a highlight of the IPL has been its ability to create minimal retention value for each of its games. While the usual sporting-culture worldwide follows a tradition of replaying and relaying memorable match-ups so as to satiate and engage a viewer’s interest, the IPL has quite successfully adopted a technique of use and throw. Yes, why would you want to remember and recollect an instance of a last ball finish when you can watch a similar scenario in a match being played the very next day?

Add to these mesmerizing features, the loud and over enthusiastic commentators and dancing cheerleaders in the studios, the latest edition of the IPL has been a hoot and a half. It has been a remarkable season so far, quite extraordinarily, the bat has dominated the ball in most matches so far and batsmen have managed to evade every batting technique in the manual to successfully score free flowing runs through innovation and sheer dumb luck.

Truth be told, the IPL has also had a few lows as well. However, with the discovery of a functional spot-fixing scandal existent in the tournament, the tournament has quickly gained ground in becoming a tournament followed for its ability to create publicity and hence gain popularity. Like everything entertaining and popular in the Indian entertainment space (Film and TV), the IPL has achieved to build maximum popularity with minimal content, shoddy execution and an overdose of “fun”, skillfully packaging it all in a marketing vehicle and squarely parking it in our living rooms.

With another few days still to follow, the tournament is only going to become more annoying and brash. We can do well to buck ourselves up and tell ourselves that yes this is fun and exciting – Last ball finish in every match, you would have to be a fool to hate this!