MSL should make us ask: Who cares about cricket?

● Gold pads! Gold helmets! Purple everything else! It made sense, then, that I was in the gaudiest bar on Durban’s Florida Road to watch the inaugural game in the … what was it again? … ah yes: the Indian Premier League (IPL).

It was April 18 2008, almost 15 years after I had been startled by no less unstuffy a writer than Christopher Martin-Jenkins beginning an article on the apparition of players in coloured clothing in county cricket in no less stuffy a newspaper than the Daily Telegraph with, “Blue shirts at Lord’s!” It wasn’t the statement that struck me. It was the verblessness and, particularly, the punctuation. An exclamation mark!

From CMJ!

There I was all those years later, watching a purple and gold Brendon McCullum swash and buckle 158 off 73, an innings that was its own exclamation from start to finish, for something called Kolkata Knight Riders against something else called Royal Challengers Bangalore at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium.

And there I was 10 years after that, in May, at the very same venue, gobsmacked at the sheer scale of the electric Kool-aid acid test of kaleidoscopic choreographed cacophony that was my first IPL game watched up close and personal.

And here I am this weekend, one eye looking out of a window trying its best to let in all the light that might have squeezed through the soggy wad of autumnal fog over London, the other eye on the blaze of happy colour and joyful noise that has burst into SA’s summery sunshine.

The Mzansi Super League (MSL) is upon us, brothers and sisters of the broad church that is cricket. It’s come, as Dale Steyn and Albie Morkel have said in recent days and many others have thought for months, five years too late.

Every other two-bit bunch of suits on whichever far-flung patch of grass has been there, done that, and now the calendar is just about day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month clogged with T20s.

Also, the MSL is not what was originally advertised: SA’s answer to the IPL and the Big Bash League and all that. Instead, it’s the same old franchise T20 competition played by the same old teams rebranded with new names and different kit, and involving players you have never heard of unless you are the kind of cricket tragic who knows the Hung Hom JD Jaguars are the current champions of the Hong Kong T20 Blitz, having beaten the Galaxy Gladiators Lantau by six runs in the final. No, I haven’t made that up.

But do we celebrate the fact that, despite everything that has happened — there are allegations that some of the dealings to

It’s the same old competition played by the same old teams

make the MSL happen have been deeply dodgy, complete with bribes and kickbacks — those bumbling suits have actually got this thing off the ground? Or do we question whether events like these do anything for cricket beyond creating hype, while making money for people who couldn’t give a damn about the game?

If we’re going to ask questions like that, and we must, we must also ask which T20 tournaments are primarily anything except laundromats for dirty money and petri dishes in which to cultivate match fixing.

We also need to establish who, exactly, gives a damn about cricket. For professional players, coaches, umpires, scorers, administrators, and stadium, union and marketing staff, and even here in the press, cricket is a job before it’s anything else.

That leaves you, and if you’ve stuck with it through all the purpleness and passionate punctuation above, you clearly love the game.

Reader, you’re on your own.