Health Warning (!!!)

IPL Derangement Syndrome

The acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the prospect, organisation, and even the very existence of the Indian Premier League.

Primary Sufferers:
Middle-aged, white, conservative sportswriters. (Particularly from England.)

Symptoms:
Uncontrollable tendency to attribute any ill in the cricket world to the advent of the IPL, and to contrast all positive events, regardless of relevance or causal connection, with the big, bad, scary IPL, run by those heathen money-grubbing trolls from the BCCI . (Arguments based on hyperbolic worst-case scenarios are not uncommon amongst sufferers.)

Recent Case Studies:

• Rob Steen's commentary of the first ODI between West Indies and Sri Lanka. How the guy manages to use the example of a last-ball thriller won with a six in order to make a point against Twenty20 is beyond me.
• Andrew Miller's retrospective of England's recent tour of New Zealand, which he considers a "throwback to a more peaceful era, before money got its grubby thumbs all over the game." (Yeah, you know, back in the good old days... when life was gentle, time ambled by, and a man could sit down under the parasol for a few hours, in peace, knocking back G-and-T's while watching some of them colonial chaps bat out a couple of sessions. A more "peaceful" era? Huh? Has Miller been covering the cricket beat in Basra, or something?)

Treatment:
Stick on assignment overseas, with a steady diet of Pakistan v. Bangladesh one-dayers played on lifeless pitches, in front of empty stadiums. That'll cure 'em.

Comments

[Samir Chopra]

Or perhaps more Bangladesh-Zim one-dayers.

[sportsfreak]

Lets watch the English attitude change now that their players are being offered $US20m for a one-off 20/20 v West Indies…

Mr. Stanford may be a wise man, but that seems a lot of money to pay the likes of Ian Bell for 3 hours entertainment…

[D.S. Henry]

Hear, hear S'freak. I'm sorry, but I can't have any sympathy for any board whose big, principled argument against a big cash-cow of a league is that they didn't think of it first.

And Samir, don't knock Ban-Zim series... they're just about the only guarantee of a competitive series we get in modern cricket.