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How true! [via PHD Comics]

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On the Chennai Super Kings site this was the latest: “Royals squeak through with last ball win“

And on the Royals’ site this was the latest: “IT’S WARNIE VS DHONI“

Incredible that, from the Royals. They win the IPL against all odds, and seem to bother little about, maybe, mentioning said win on their site. Someone find an editor for their site.

This was about 4 hours following the IPL final.

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End of lazy excuse for a post.

Oh, and thanks to Patrix for triggering this change.

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Now, from what I’ve read so far, he hasn’t been particularly fond of the IPL as such. So this article may come as little surprise. He takes the one incident — of Mallya’s mindless sacking of Charu Sharma — and uses it to preach doom and gloom for cricket.

Now I don’t want to go on a long rant on this again, because I’ve already done it. But I do have just one more thought to add to what’s already been said, and that is in response to this one remark from Magazine’s article:

It is said that poor Charu Sharma, who was trying his best to become a buffer between the players and the owner, had to face the music after every loss and was told to crack the whip and not be too soft on the players. The players themselves, new to this corporate governance, can do nothing but watch and absorb this new “ethos” either with amusement or accept their fate and seek solace in the fat paycheques they are getting.

Here’s my thought: can’t we, for a moment, consider that this — with all the money flying around — is indeed a business with the product being cricket; different teams represent competitors fighting to stamp their authority, as separate business entities. They all run their franchises in their own individual styles, thinking what they believe to be the right way to run their businesses. But they, just as the players, are new to this market segment. And, as with any other fledgling market, mistakes will be made along the way and business entities will learn from those mistakes, and slowly, as the market matures, you will have a more stable management style that won’t simply fire personnel on a whim.

The sports franchise model is new in India — I don’t consider the ESPN backed PHL as a franchise model — and you will have the odd moments of madness.

So just as we don’t agree with the reactionary nature of Mallya sacking Charu Sharma, we mustn’t ourselves jump to knee-jerk conclusions about how the corporate system is going to run (ruin?) cricket. So again, as I said earlier, let’s give it time.

For a start though, I’d have to agree with the closing lines of Magazine’s article, which is to leave cricket to the cricketers.

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The article has come on the back of the Charu Sharma sacking — which, admittedly, is a bird-brained move because the rot had seemingly set in from the day the auctions were held. But taking this instance as a premise to accuse the attitude of the owners for being results oriented is a little difficult to digest.

Let’s have a look at what he’s had to say:

As the game’s profile has risen, so have the stakes. And those high stakes don’t have any time for the “glorious uncertainties of cricket”. The bottomline does not respect honour in defeat. All that matters is results; the rest is for the writers and romantics. The big stakeholders are rarely given to sitting on their hands while their team’s fortunes dwindle, hoping providence intervenes; they act fast, often shooting the first person in sight, usually shooting first and asking questions later, but shooting. And publicly; they must not merely act, they must be seen to have acted.

About time, don’t you think? How many times have we — and not just we, the fans, but even journalists like the one quoted above — bemoaned the lack of professionalism affecting Indian cricket. What would you expect if you see paid professionals who are expected to show results — and, hence, an improvement in the quality of cricket? Firing personnel to get things moving, sending a message across to the dressing room and setting your house in order are just some of the things one can think of. And when a ruthless approach is taken — more often than not they are under good counsel — team politics and favoritism can be wiped out.

Now when this sense of accountability is being applied to a team, why the anger? Charu Sharma’s sacking may have been ill-advised, but a generalization based on this one incident is grossly unfair.

To make his point clear he cites the example of foreign ownership in football and the English Premier League:

Liverpool was bought by two Americans who were buddies at the time but now can’t bear to sit in the same room. Manchester United was bought by one American who turned the club from a profitable, cash-rich and debt-free listed company into a private enterprise, which though profitable on its own, owes US$1.5 billion to all creditors and has $1.2 billion in total borrowings. Chelsea’s owner, the second-richest man in Britain, has brought two league titles to the club and may bring a third but runs Stamford Bridge with as much glasnost as the Kremlin under Leonid Brezhnev.

Being a Manchester United fan and having had a more than passing interest on the happenings in football, in general, I think he hasn’t exactly nailed the idea of despotism he wanted to convey with the above analogy.

Liverpool are victims of infighting — not despotism; although their manager has been undermined when one of the owners went behind his back to talk to Jurgen Klinsmann about a possible contract with the club. But for a club like Liverpool that hasn’t won the English Premier League for about 18 years now, and are fighting to finish fourth despite spending big the owners can’t be blamed too badly for being concerned about success.

The Glazers who own Manchester United have plunged the club in debt, but have left matters related to football to David Gill (the Chief Executive) and manager Sir Alex Ferguson — again no despotism there.

The only case of despotism could have been Man City’s owner. Chelsea’s owner doesn’t really run the club as a business — he runs it like a sugar daddy without trivial concerns like breaking even and making profits.

That said, my point is this: football clubs in England and Spain are in the results business whether they are owned by billionaire owners or not. All clubs have strong fan bases that demand a certain level of success. Barcelona, for example, is not owned by an entity but by the 100,000 member fans that elect presidents to run their club — they are currently undergoing a major upheaval in key personnel that run their club, are most certainly going to ship Ronaldinho out of the club. No mad billionaire owners making rash decisions here. Not even sympathy for a former FIFA player of the year. Just a mix of common sense, results and a need to stem the rot.

Getting back to the IPL and the franchises, it is actually good for a fan to see proactive action being taken to improve results and, consequently, the quality of cricket on offer for the team one supports. How many years have we spent waiting for a world cup debacle for a change in personnel in the national team?

Market forces will allow players to give a hundred percent due to the stakes involved. How often do you get to see an Ashish Nehra dive full stretch at the straight boundary to save a certain four? Yes, the IPL and the pressure has made such wondrous sights possible. So let’s give it a chance, shall we?

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Now this was possible thanks to the TwitterRSS plugin by Dave Kellam [via Patrix]. It is a very simple plugin and easily integrates Twitter with Wordpress. However, it doesn’t have enough material to explain how to customize it, although it is really quite simple.

So I thought, I’d share what I did to customize the look of my twitter status. If you go to the Plugin Editor in your Wordpress admin panel, and open the twitterrss.php file, you will see a segment of code like this:

function get_twitterRSS() {
$rss_url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14297652.rss';
$username = "adityar";
$num_items = 1;
$before = "<br/><center><h4><a href='http://twitter.com/adityar'>Twitter Status:</a><strong>";
$after = "</strong></h4></center><hr />";
$hide_links = "true";
$hide_username = "false";


Now “$rss_url” is the URL of the RSS feed of your Twitter status. “$username” is your Twitter username, in my case, ‘adityar’. “$num_items” is the number of tweets you want to display at a time. I wanted to display only one at a time, so I set it to 1.

What you might be mainly interested in is the “$before” and “$after”. These are the variables that will hold your HTML tags. So if you want to display your Twitter message in bold, you would set $before = “<strong>” and $after=”</strong>”. This way you can format your twitter status the way you want it.

Remember to hit update and refresh your site to see the changes. Ideally the developer may want to have a GUI to save people the trouble of having to update the plugin file. But it still is a very simple and lightweight plugin, nonetheless.

Hope that helps.

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There has been a lot of talk going around about tribalism in the IPL. Questions like, “Will fans cheer for their home team when Symonds plays for them” and “Will they boo Sachin when he plays in the opposing team?” have been asked. Answers to these questions could, in some way, determine the loyalty quotient of the public, so to speak.

But while these are some fairly easy questions and can be answered upon watching three to four games, there are yet other questions, the answers to which, could go some way determining the extent of loyalty these fans have towards their adopted teams. A couple of them, off the top of my head, are: “Will fans travel to away games?” and “Will they feel conflicting emotions when a foreign player, who is a star of their franchise, comes and plays a match winning knock against India?” These questions would need more time and would really go some way to determining the extent of tribalism in Indian league cricket.

Prem Panicker has done a good round up in his post and Patrix has also raised the loyalty issue as sports in India have essentially been driven by nationalistic pride.

The British, and the Australian, press have generally scoffed at the chances of die-hard fan loyalty towards franchises in India. And it is possible to see where they are coming from — especially the English journalists. Club football is unparalleled in England when it comes to fan loyalty. “United, Kids, Wife” is the well known chant at Old Trafford (Manchester United) and they also have another that goes “United > England”.

Many fans of Manchester United, for example, criticize other fans who support their clubs but cheer England which has players they’ve usually grown to hate. In Spain such divisions are more apparent because of the cultural divisions in Spain itself. For example, in the province of Catalonia (Barcelona is its capital) people take tremendous pride in their team — they even have an anthem for that, and show a general apathy towards the national team. In European football, in general, club football has become the dominant force and hence in many places club loyalty takes precedence. While this could be a generalization, it is a reasonable enough claim in this context.

In India, however, things are rather interesting. Club/franchise based cricket has emerged now, more like an afterthought, with international cricket still maintaining it’s preeminence. So my admiration for Sachin Tendulkar, despite my support for the Chennai Super Kings, will remain. It would be interesting to see — assuming the IPL manages to sustain itself for a good number of years — the reaction of Indian fans towards the generation of cricketers that graduate from the franchises, into the national team. That is where true extent of conflicting emotions may arise.

But let’s get to the present. Is there a place for tribal loyalty towards teams in the IPL? That could be answered based on what unfolds over the next month or so. On the surface, a credible argument could be made about the diverse cultures that typify these cities. Chennai-ites, and Tamilians in general, would usually have a strong sense of bond for their city team despite the absence of big name Tamil players from their team roster — Dinesh Karthik is not there, and Balaji is in the squad but has been out of fans’ minds for quite some time now; only Badrinath the Tamil Nadu Ranji captain is a recognizable name. Mumbai and Kolkata, thanks to Sachin and Saurav, will get behind their team as evidenced by the support they had in their last two games.

More importantly, the franchise owners’ ability to identify the team with key personalities, music and choice of a certain theme that strikes a chord with the locals would be key to get fans to support their team and, hence, build some loyalty. So we could say that in a country with as much diversity as ours, it shouldn’t be too difficult to add a dash of parochialism to the nature of an Indian fan; if you still doubt that, the Rediff boards provide ample evidence.

However, all this will be severely tested over the next few weeks and will give us an idea of fan loyalty.

The IPL, unlike other league format sports, runs daily. The fans will be faced with a tournament relentless and long that would test the attention span of the modern urban youth. Will he still stay glued to the television as the tournament wears on? Will he come to the stadium to cheer his home team even if they are rooted at the bottom of the table and have no way of making the semi-finals? Will the length of the tournament be something to worry about; after all the 2007 World Cup was heavily criticized because of it’s length.

Or will fans adopt an Indian Idol like approach by picking a promising contestant (here, team) early on and subsequently moving on to another promising team the next season?

For the IPL to succeed, though, fan loyalty is crucial. And a successful IPL would also result in stronger fan ties with each season. They feed off each other. Hopefully, by June 1st, we could get some answers to these questions, although, even then, it will be interesting to see how fans express their loyalty towards their teams.

Which is why it was sad to see some of the naysayers jumping to such conclusions on fan loyalty even before the first six off Brendan McCullum’s bat. Yes, yes, I know, the irony of the cheer his innings received from the Bangalore crowd is not lost on me!

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A few hours to the IPL, I suppose. Pity I’ll be at work when the fireworks commence.

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