Will IPL change Cricket?

With the advent of IPL,the menu for a Indian has expanded which pretty much is a quickie munch .In the 1970s and 1980s Test cricket was like Rice for Indians and I denote them as Indians since one may not know Who is the president of India but be rest assured that Sunil Gavaskar or a Kapil Dev was a Demi God and still is quite revered by lending their voices and expertise about the game to whet up the enthusiasm of the game of cricket even more.

With the introduction of coloured clothing and limited overs cricket during the revolutionary Kerry Packer Series ,Cricket was given a new dimension.Gone are the days when our earlier generations planned their holidays around Test cricket and took a whole weekend off and
lazily crawled off their bed to do early morning chores ..

50-50 cricket became popular with the crowds thronging on to stadiums which earlier remained void and the introduction of 50-50 cricket got the enthusiasm rolling in and it came in a time when Cricket badly needed a changeover.

Imagine the scenes of the 1992WC with Pakistan lifting the WC after defeating England in flashy green attire and the stadiums teeming with cricket lovers and the emotions of the Pakistan Cricket Team.A distant cry from Test Cricket ,the Limited overs game turned out to Bread and Butter for Indians with only the purists sticking to having Rice .

One Day Cricket due to its late introduction in the International Cricket Calender unfortunately saw Sunil Gavaskar scoring only One Hundred in a hundred matches which in Today’s era is way below standard specially Since Top players like Sachin ,Sourav have notched up over 50 hundreds between them.

However Viv Richards burst into the shorter version of the game when he was midway in his cricketing career thus not being able to fully utilize his enormous skills over a longer period of time..He is the fastest to reach 5000 runs in ODIs and that is just one of the many justifications to call him one of the most feared Batsmen and All time Greats of the Game.


The 5 day game to me was/is a boon as I always wanted/want to play Test cricket with my friends as it gave/still gives me more opportunity to bat and once my eyes are set in I did/do not gave /give my wicket very easily .But the beauty of Test cricket is that the sound of the ball making contact with the bat is so magnetic that I keep on defending and my Individual score rarely crosses 50 and when I am ruminating about getting a big score ,a silly point is drafted in and invariably I put my pad forward and the ball kisses the bat and flies off to silly point.

So a Team might dominate the first session of the day’s play but the domination could evaporate quickly since its doesn’t take too long for the pendulum to swing in favour of the opposition team.This unpredictability lends Test Cricket with a disntinct piquancy.


But it also doesn’t take too long for the taste buds to be out of order and in such cases a new dish needs to be tried which came in the form of ODI cricket .ODI Cricker proved to a major breakthrough since almost every International Sport has a World Cup with Countries vying for top honours and thus evoking massive international interest.

A World Cup played over 5 days was absolutely inconceivable as the tournament would take up ¼ of the year to declare the winners which is absurd.

A more feasible alternative had to be ODI cricket and the World Cup was inaugurated in 1975 and it proved to me a major success and set the platform for future World Cup tournaments which was to be held every four years .

If the likes of Don Bradman,Sunil Gavaskar,Gary Sobers,Kapil Dev are synonymous with Test Cricket then Sachin Tendulkars,Sourav Gangulys and the Wasim Akrams are equivalent to ODI cricket.


Now a new form of cricket has evolved which can truly globalise the game of cricket and as the People are running out of time although the Earth Still completes a revolution around the Sun in 24 hours ,20-20 is the way forward .

Is 20-20 cricket going to be the most popular form of the game by 2020 ?Let me know by gushing in your comments and do boomark my blog for regular updates on IPL and obviously my amateurish articles.