A Summer without IPL
It wasn’t until a week ago that I started to realize how much I missed the IPL and how much of a void the absence of the tournament has left in my life. Casually flicking TV channels at around 10 PM on Sunday, I came across the IPL 2014 encounter between the Knight Riders and the Sunrisers.
Yep, the game where Yusuf Pathan went berserk to seal a spot in the qualifiers for KKR. I clearly remember watching the entire match live - Oh those brutal hits from the bat of Yusuf - but I was genuinely taken aback by the minute details that my mind had chosen to forget. For instance, I had absolutely no idea that Anirudha Srikkanth played in that match. And I was genuinely shocked when I saw him spill Yusuf’s catch when the latter was still new to the crease; all this while, my mind had somehow fabricated the innings to be a flawless one. I expected myself to sit through the highlights like any other game, but about 8 overs into KKR’s chase, I was run over by this truck of nostalgia and fond memories that simply did not allow me to keep my eyes on the television. Next thing I know, I’m staring at the white wall in my living room with my mouth wide open, reminiscing the times when summer literally equated to the IPL.
I was 12 years old when the IPL came into existence. I’m 24 now, meaning the tournament has been a dear part of me for almost half my life. Forget family and friends, the IPL has witnessed me transform from an innocent school kid to whatever I am right now. When the tournament commenced in 2008, no one really knew what to expect; the hype around the T20 format was real, for it had just overseen an enormously successful T20 World Cup, but there were doubts if cricket would ever be able to pull off a grand league where it could attract the best players in the world. I remember watching the first-ever game between the Knight Riders and the Royal Challengers at my grandparents’ place in Chennai and jumping all over the house after witnessing the Baz blitz.
Newspapers were the deal back then and I remember how my dad, who was in Coimbatore, used to call me up and rave about this lad called Swapnil Asnodkar, who he read about in a column in the Indian Express. My memories of the IPL 2008 are hazy, but I remember being absolutely gutted for missing Sohail Tanvir’s spell against CSK as it was that very night when I was making my way back from Chennai to Coimbatore to gear myself up for the 2008/09 academic year.
I also remember missing a lot of late-night games in the first edition as my grandparents switched off the television and forced me to sleep early, but come 2009, that wasn’t the case anymore; I found my grandfather sitting beside me and waiting for the game to finish before he switched off the TV. To be honest, Rohit Sharma’s onslaught against KKR in the final over is still right up there as one of my favourite cricketing memories of all time; up until that point, I’d never seen anything like that happen in the final over of a cricket game. With time, the influence of IPL in my life started growing more and more and by mid-2009, it had come to the point where IPL directly equated to summer.
And as I grew older and older, IPL became more than just entertainment to me. Raving about matches on social media and participating in ESPN Cricinfo’s fantasy game helped me create friendships and bonds, some of which are existent till date. 2010 was a terrible year to be residing in Tamil Nadu, for there were 9 hours of power-cut every single day (9 AM to 12 PM, 3 PM to 6 PM and 9 PM to 12 AM were the designated slots for my area) but I still ensured that I lived through the matches by listening to radio commentary on Hello FM. Powercuts during double-header days was a pain in the arse, especially during the summer heat, but the radio FM coupled with a few glasses of Tang had me sorted.
And yes, I supported Deccan Chargers and religiously hated on the Super Kings and Mumbai Indians, so I did not gain much ‘joy’ from the outcome of matches; but with time, I realized that it was not the outcome that mattered, but the sheer experience of living through the matches. I realized that if I hung in there without getting frustrated, every now and then, a Paul Valthaty-esque knock would arrive to make me forget my academic miseries. And truth be spoken, that is the only thing I banked on. The entirety of the 2010s were dominated by CSK and MI, so it was almost as if every year, I was desperately waiting for someone to come up with an individual piece of magic and beat either one of those two teams, so I could rave about it and mock my friends for the next few weeks.
Given CSK and MI ended up playing the final in 2019, very little changed over the course of a decade, but now I realize that I genuinely miss that feeling; I genuinely miss hoping against hope to see one of these two teams be beaten by an underdog. Of course, I would like to believe that I’m a bit more ‘mature’ now, but you’re lying if you say that you don’t like seeing certain teams lose, be it international cricket or the IPL.
As I said, the IPL oversaw different stages of my life, so somewhere between asking my friends in college, “Dei, score enna da,” to telling my colleagues to keep an eye on the toss and the starting XI, I grew up. I do feel that my affinity with the IPL has decreased with time - it probably peaked in 2010 and then peaked again in 2014 before hitting a downward spiral, and honestly, it’s because the teams I’ve been supporting have not done well - but in one way or another, it has remained an integral part of my life.
If in 2010, it worked as a getaway from my academics, then in 2018 and 2019, it moulded me into a better person and taught me work ethic, because the hectic nature of the tournament meant that me and several other co-workers went two full months without taking a single day off. And if given an opportunity, I would do it all over again.
So when I say I miss the IPL, these little intangibles are what I’m referring to. And I guess any ardent fan of the game in India can attest to the fact that the true beauty of the IPL does not lie in the cricket that’s played, but rather the hundreds of tiny, secondary components that alter an individual’s lifestyle so as to make the tournament a part of life itself. In the past twelve years, never once did I enter the month of May without hearing people call the IPL a ‘fixed league’ or without purists call it ‘entertainment’ and berate the tournament for diluting the value of the sport. But this year I have, and it feels weird. Towards the end of February, I was mentally preparing myself to get immersed in the IPL universe for two full months - given this was the first time I was going to cover the tournament as a writer - but now, I find myself within the confines of my home carrying out mundane tasks just so that I could witness the day end, only to do the same thing all over again the very next day.
Maybe there is hope, maybe we will get the tournament crammed into an August-September window, but these two months have made me realise the influence of IPL in my life and looking back, I’m grateful that the tournament came into existence. Hopefully this time next year, I will be writing a match report and not a notalgia-invoking article and hopefully they play the KKR-SRH match once again on Star Sports, for I missed the last 8 overs of the KKR chase reminiscing about the good ol’ days.