IPL must learn from horrible mistake

Australia, India, players and cricket have found themselves in a dark place as the IPL is postponed and post mortems proposed.

Indian cricket was keen to prove it could conduct the tournament for many reasons.

Indian cricket chief Sourav Ganguly told the local media they would have to wait for a “post mortem” to establish how the virus burst the IPL bubble.

Stumps were drawn on the tournament before one had to be conducted on any of the participants. Official numbers noted at least 60,000 Indians had died during the abbreviated event.

Ganguly reckoned that it would cost around $430m if the tournament were to be abandoned so the imperative to continue is and was significant in financial terms.

The cost to India and Indian cricket is financial and reputational. Players watched the number of infections begin to move faster in the weeks before the competition began, but were reassured by experience in the UAE late last year when the postponed 2020 tournament went off without too much trouble.

Organisers watched them too but rejected suggestions to move to the UAE.

If anybody is audacious and determined enough to pull something like this off in the middle of a pandemic it is Indian cricket. The Indians can move mountains and they can move them in a minute. The organisation is agile, wealthy and powerful. The IPL moves by private jet and is cleared to take off and land through strong political connections. Trouble at home ahead of the second series? No trouble, the whole shebang was moved to South Africa almost overnight.

The safest place in India was inside IPL 2021’s biosecurity bubbles, but nowhere and no one could ward off this insidious, impertinent plague. Not even the IPL. Hell, this week the virus climbed Everest and turned up above 5000 metres at base camp.

All the money and power in the world couldn’t keep the IPL safe.

Not all the reputational damage lies in the subcontinent.

Australia has handed back any ground it had gained in improving its image among Indians. Considered by some to be residually racist when dealing with India, or at the very least racially insensitive, the extraordinary decision to ban travel from India and threaten jail terms to any citizens returning from there has again cast Australia fair in a poor light.

Even Andrew Bolt, a columnist who appears to deal daily in racial insensitivity, denounced the government policy as racist. When that coal mine canary sings you know something is particularly noxious.

Australian cricketers too appear to have taken a reputational hit. The optics of their five star existence as the bodies piled up at crematoriums was not great, the sight of them flying in and out while 8000 other Australians wait patiently has stirred resentment in elements of the public.

There’s was a gilded biosecurity bubble.

The fact they have escaped and must serve out their stateless exile in the Maldives has further cranked the contemptuous and cranky mob who will not be pleased until cricketers are grounded like everybody else and placed on the minimum wage.

That passion might be better spent arguing the case for the less fortunate Australians — ask not why one group has got a plane but why has the other not got one — but that’s not the way the mob rolls.

Still, when you listen to the heartbreaking testimony of Indians to the Senate Select Committee on Friday it highlighted the inequality at hand.

It would be terrifying to be stuck in India right now and it is torture to be stuck here as parents, siblings and friends die there gasping for breath, pleading for medicines and oxygen.

Sunny, a Melbourne man, and his mother’s “11 months of misery” trying to get on one of the rare flights back to Australia. He told the Senate inquiry on Friday that 60-70 per cent of the neighbouring homes are Covid infected, in many homes the whole family is ill.

“We fear for our lives,” he said

“We stay holed in at the house and fear for our lives on a constant basis.

“We think it just a matter of time when we may get infected and get into serious trouble, considering the healthcare system here is overwhelmed and almost dysfunctional.

“People are dying on the streets because of lack of oxygen. The Australian government should not abandon us in this life-threatening situation.”

In Australia those with family in India live in a constant state of despair. Family should be together at times. The separation is crippling.

Michael Slater told The Australian during the week that the sight of bodies in the street was the last straw for him. An emotional man, his attacks on the Prime Minister have prompted a significant pile on. He may not have read the room or maybe he did and figured the room was wrong anyway.

The international headlines have hurt India. A proud country which had begun to flex its industrial and political muscle, it had almost completely shaken off the tawdry narrative about it being a third world country.

India will recover, but a proud people is sensitive to perceptions.

Two good friends, journalists Anand Vasu and Kuldip Lal, neither who are part of the thin skinned nationalist set, took issue with the semantics of reports in the Australian media this week. They cringed when they read the cricketers had fled/escaped on Thursday.

You could argue their point but should recognise their sensitivity.

Back to Ganguly’s post mortem.

Word from India was that Tuesday’s match between the Royal Challengers Bangalore and Kolkata Knight Riders would have proceeded had Virat Kohli not dismissed reassurances the two positives in KKR were isolated and should not affect the event.

The imperative to hold the event in India and then to roll it on despite the suffocating humanitarian tragedy were great.

The Indian government which has so mishandled the pandemic was keen to prove it was business as usual.

Indian cricket was keen to prove it could conduct the tournament for many reasons but the fact the ICC is supposed to hold the T20 World Cup there later this year was significant.

That won’t happen now.

“Nobody is coming back here mate,” one Australian told me when I asked if they’d be prepared to return for the completion of the tournament.

The decision to hold the tournament has proved a terrible mistake, but people will return, just as India will.

It is the most important cricket territory on the earth these days and while it’s reputation has been damaged it will recover quickly.

Cricket owes the Indian people a debt. In hindsight it has been insensitive. The donations made so far have not been enough. Virtue signalling gets a bad name from the tiresome people, but it is important that the game and those who profit from it — particularly those who profited from this year’s IPL — make a grand financial gesture to ease the suffering of this extraordinary country.