Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
The Indian Premier League (IPL) has got off to a great start.
The glitz, glamour and excitement which it promised are all there. Some of the best players in the world have rubbed shoulders with many promising ones. And the cricket has been good.
The question now is - will the euphoria last? The timings of the matches may well prove detrimental. The matches have been starting as late as 8pm local time. This means that matches finish at 11.30pm if the overs are bowled in time. This never happens.
Most matches finish well past midnight. This is acceptable during weekends. But many spectators are getting turned off by the late finishes. In the metropolitan cities, many of the spectators do not get home before 1.30am which means that going to work gets affected.
The IPL thinktank have to address this issue urgently or else they will begin to lose spectators very soon. At some point the spectators will decide that earning their daily bread is more important than watching cricket.
The television coverage in India also is substandard. One can understand that the IPL is all about big money but the amount of advertising in mind-boggling.
The worst is that the advertisements rob the viewers of some of the essential moments of the game. A replay can never be seen as an advertisement appears right in the middle of the screen! So instead of watching a run out in slow motion, the viewer is educated on the virtues of a certain brand of cables!
Once a batsman is out, there is no time wasted in switching to advertisements. So if a viewer wants to know the runs scored by the batsman, then he has to wait till the scorecard appears.
This may not happen till the end of the innings or till some editor forgets the advertisement spot.
It has also been alleged that a famous Bollywood star who owns one of the franchises moved a few lesser known cricketers into a sub-standard hotel to accommodate some of her guests in the five-star hotel where they were staying.
This is not done. It is the players who make the game, the stars are just added attraction. If such a thing happens to the bigger players there will be mass defections.
IPL bigwig Lalit Modi has admitted that there have been a few glitches at the start of the tournament. That is to be expected.
But they would do well to avoid unnecessary bad publicity like the shifting of players just to please an actress.
The IPL is all about entertainment. It should not end up like a bad Bollywood movie.
