Indian cricket faces a double disaster
• Cancelling the IPL would be numbing for the huge numbers who live off the tournament
As with everything involving cricket, the effects of the Covid-19 lockdown are greater in India than anywhere else, and possibly not just in the cricketplaying world.
By now the Indian Premier League (IPL) should have been well into its second week and the multibillion-dollar tournament’s huge financial footprints would have been seen and felt across the world’s most populous nation.
Instead, the stadiums remain empty and the millions of people who would have been filling them are trapped in small houses, if they are lucky, or even smaller flats, and not the sort with balconies.
The first cases of the virus have been detected in Mumbai’s vast slums in which pestilence could not find a richer breeding ground. The health consequences of a rampant outbreak are numbing but so, too, are the consequences of a downscaled or even cancelled IPL.
“There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who rely directly on the tournament for their annual income,” says Eric Simons, who was due to resume his successful coaching partnership with Stephen Fleming at the Chennai Super Kings.
“The eight or nine weeks of the tournament essentially provide their living. They survive from IPL to IPL.
“Our attention naturally focused on the airlines when they were grounded but for every 100 people who couldn’t fly there were thousands who also couldn’t work. The taxis, Ubers, hotels, restaurants and all the other businesses in the supply chain. With the IPL it is the same, the teams and the players are the tiniest tip of a huge pyramid,” Simons says.
The tournament’s broadcast revenue makes it comfortably the richest in the world and with money comes power.
There are concerns that if the billionaire team owners and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) decided that there is too much at stake for the tournament not to proceed in some fashion, they could claim virtually any window in the calendar they liked, even if it extended into and compromised the ICC’s T20 World Cup in Australia in October and November.
However, says Simons, that is not going to happen. “There has been a lot of speculation, much of it ill-informed or just untrue. We have been kept directly informed by the Super Kings owners about what discussions are taking place and what the options might be. They are certainly of the opinion that ways should be sought to play the tournament, and certainly not just for financial reasons,” he says.
“It may be difficult for South Africans to understand how much the IPL means to millions of Indians. If it was played it would give them an incentive to stay at home, something to look forward to and raise morale in desperate times. It would probably also break viewing records if it was played, which could generate more income which would, hopefully, trickle down to those who need it most.”
One suggestion is that the tournament could be played in just two cities easily accessible by road, such as Mumbai and Pune. Every squad member and management would need to be checked for the virus two weeks before the first match and then live, and travel, in a quarantined environment.
Overseas players could be flown to the country using privately chartered planes and transported straight to a lockeddown hotel.
Security measures would be employed on a presidential level usually seen during extreme antiterrorism operations.
Simons sees another potential benefit: “Like it or not, the reality is that many people are more likely to watch a sports team than a safety briefing by a doctor, certainly in India. The players could be used to relay the most important messages — they are not medical experts, but they have a social responsibility just like any public figure.”
The players would, no doubt, feel hugely compromised in many ways and some individual performances would suffer. Others would choose not to participate at all.
But if it came to a choice between isolating at home with a multigym and some dumbbells and doing so in a sanitised, quarantined hotel with the prospect of limited, outdoor training sessions and three matches a week in an empty stadium, most players would prefer the “risk”.
What about the bigger picture? The world’s population is under attack and thousands are dying and we’re talking about playing the IPL? But it is about the bigger picture. It is not just about Chennai Super Kings or the Mumbai Indians, it is about trying to kick-start whichever parts of the economy can be safely restarted.
Controlling and then tackling the virus costs money. It is not just families that run out of money. Presumably, governments do too, at some point.
Simons, meanwhile, has been working on T20 strategy and “playing a lot of guitar” as he waits for the call. Which may, or may not come.