India Covid crisis: IPL’s opportunity to show some decency

Amid India’s Covid disaster, the IPL’s Six Counter keeps ticking over nightly. Cricket without a conscience provides some troubling optics.

Kudos to Pat Cummins for his $50,000 donation to help pay for vital oxygen

Yesterday about as many died from COVID in India as died in September 11. Officially anyway. The true number is likely far, far higher.

Yet on nightly instalments of the Indian Premier League, all that keeps ticking over is the Six Counter, while soaring music attends overhead shots of Ahmedabad’s gargantuan Narendra Modi Stadium — a monument to the malevolent demagogue whose incompetence has been central to this public health disaster.

The whole world came to a standstill for September 11. But through India, cricket goes on trundling, lubricated by money: the IPL provides about 30 per cent of global cricket revenues, and 60 per cent of Indian sports revenues. It is not curtailed lightly.

Like your cricket devoid of social and political dimensions? Then this carnival of cricket and capitalism, whose symbolism sharpens day-by-day, is not for you. The relativities are daunting. Thirty thousand Indians might have died of COVID since the league began but, amid general indifference, a million Indians perish from the cumulative effects of air pollution every year.

Some feel uneasy. Kane Richardson, recently a father, and Adam Zampa, recently a husband, are returning home from Royal Challengers Bangalore.

Others might follow from the 30 or so Australians — players, coaches, support staff, umpires — remaining. Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers’ Association have been working on giving them that option.

They are rather luckier in that respect than, for example, the luckless Baxters, Australian teachers marooned in Bangalore by the government’s recent caprices — and there are, here, some potentially troublesome optics.

David Warner and Kane Williamson on a flight between games in the Indian Premier League. Picture: Instagram

The most noteworthy response has come from Pat Cummins, who has pledged $US50,000 towards relief efforts — specifically the provision of vital oxygen, in perilously short supply.

The response has varied. Our expectations of athletes are often confused. When they do nothing but play sport, they are dumb and ignorant. When they do other than play sport, they are woke or virtue signalling.

The sum of Cummins’s donation seems reasonable, goodly but not ostentatious. It is half what England’s Ben Stokes contributed two years ago to an anti-child slavery charity in Jaipur, but it is also designed explicitly to be matched.

As Cummins put it in a considered statement: “I encourage fellow IPL players — and anyone else round the world who has been touched by India’s passion and generosity —] to contribute.”

It’s just a pity that on the (frankly bad) advice of Kolkata Knight Riders, Cummins paid the money to PM Cares, Modi’s own oh-no-not-even-slightly-political charity — better than donating to a Trump Super PAC, if not as much better as it might have been.

Anyway, kudos. Others, as this column argued on Saturday, should get their wallets out too, in the spirit of the English Premier League captains who last year banded together to donate to the National Health Service — it reinforces arguments for the league’s continuance.

Australian cricketer Andrew Tye arrives at Sydney International Airport after leaving the Indian Premier League. Picture: Jeremy Piper

For some are calling for the abandonment or postponement of the IPL. This is a reasonable position. Certain media outlets have already decided to shun the competition in protest.

In the abstract, it seems absurd: pampered cricketers minting it while two Indians succumb to COVID every minute look a bit like those first-class passengers on the Titanic who managed to find a lifeboat while the souls in steerage drowned.

The sight of Sourav Ganguly, president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, acting as brand ambassador for a line of face masks just goes to show that there’s a platinum lining in every COVID cloud.

But only a small proportion of the IPL’s cricketers belong in the firmament of superstars. The majority are Indian domestic players, poorly paid for their non-IPL deeds, their 2020-21 Ranji Trophy already cancelled.

India’s 800 first-class cricketers lead a hardscrabble existence. They are family breadwinners in a country in agony. They deserve consideration and support.

An interior view of Sher-e-Kashmir Indoor Stadium turned into a makeshift quarantine centre after a surge of Covid cases in Srinagar. Picture: Getty Images

Cancellation, meanwhile, would achieve precious little. There would still be a pandemic. There would simply be no cricket and less money, because the value would be lost rather than rematerialising elsewhere.

So despite it all, on balance, the case for IPL remains arguable. The cricket has been good. The bio-bubbles have remained secure.

But the IPL needs to make better use of its privileges. The sorry saga of the European Super League has made plain the cultural cost of conscienceless commerce. When sport appears simply to suit itself, fans have more and more ways of making their displeasure plain.

The 14th IPL will not, for once, be about the competition’s inexorable expansion.

Instead, it offers an opportunity to put down roots, show a little decency, and develop a bit of soul.

Twenty years after, September 11 has become part of the mythology of New York’s earthy resilience. By joining creatively and generously in the COVID fight, rather than merely offering a “distraction” from it, the IPL might yet emerge with reputation enhanced.