How it felt to love cricket more in the pre-IPL era

For the past 12 years, Indian summers have tended to be a lot hotter than what is shown, at the ground level.

The reason being the Indian Premier League (IPL), which would ensure evenings for a regular family, working normal hours on weekdays and having off days on weekends, were entertained completely.

The IPL has acted like a drug on hot Indian summers, which once consumed, tends to get addictive with the public. For two months or more, there is no end to all the thrills and spills which comes with it and the public never seem to be satisfied.

However, that isn’t the case in 2020, owing of course to the dreaded corona virus, which has its spikes tied around every activity in the world, thereby causing a lot of distress.

Now it is confirmed that the IPL will not happen shortly at least, it could be a good time to look back and see what it felt to live in the times of not having an IPL tournament in April and May.

One of the summers that still lives in my memory is the one in 2006. As a kid, looking to move from eighth to ninth standard, I was hooked to cricket, completely.

I remember that summer well because that was the first time I began to feel that cricket was beginning to take precedence over studies and also watching and listening to the commentary was starting to have an impact on the way I wrote in exams and spoke in classes.

So in the summer of 2006, England arrived to play India in three-Tests and seven ODIs.

With no IPL, there was the luxury those days to play long ODI series and extend bilateral competitions well into April.

The first Test match was at Nagpur and it began on a weekday and was to finish on the weekend.

And on the Monday following the completion of the fifth day, I had a unit Test exam.

It left me confused about whether to watch cricket or slog for exams and so as a mid-path, I decided I would study based on what was going on in the game.

As it turned out, I did enough studies to pass while India struggled and later when the batsmen attacked saw a good two hours of play on the final day and saw them save the game.

They won the next game at Mohali and took the lead in the series, but in the final match at Mumbai, owing first to Rahul Dravid making a bad call at the toss, followed by some bad bowling allowed England to strangle India and eventually draw the series.

So the Tests passed and I, somehow, divided my time between studying for my final exams and watching India play the ODI series that followed.

In a rare occurrence in Indian cricket, all seven matches were to be day-encounters and five of them were played on weekdays.

My final exams ended the day India played a game at Margao, where Yuvraj Singh scored a century and India won the match.

The abiding memory for me from that series was how my apartment friends and I would play each evening and particularly, how charged up I would be having watched the match the entire day and then go down and play with my friends.

I’ll never forget a dismissal from one of the matches when James Anderson got an Indian batsman with a slower ball and immediately in the evening, having seen how he held the fingers on the seam and released it, I practised it with a tennis ball and for a while, a few of my friends could not understand how the ball was deviating the way it was.

The passion derived from playing downstairs after having watched India play the entire day could never, ever be replicated from my side when later on during my college years, I would go to play in the morning after having seen an IPL match the previous night.

Perhaps it was the time-gap with IPL games happening in the evening and by the time the morning came the intensity had vanished. Perhaps I did not analyse a lot because of the fast-paced nature of the format.

Whatever it may have been, just the intensity to my game was not at the same level when I played the following day after watching an IPL match the previous night.

The other aspect that existed with no IPL in those days were the long conversations over phone analysing India’s performances.

I was a bit unfortunate that many of my school friends I studied with weren’t as hooked to cricket as I was, but I would strike a conversation with my brother from my father’s phone or with a friend I had met at tuitions or somewhere else.

The IPL never gave you that luxury because, with each passing season, the matches got longer and went well beyond the stipulated time and in the morning, all had to wake up and rush to work or for some other activity.

While the IPL has come into our lives in the last 12 years and it has changed a lot of things, it has also taken away many simple aspects that were a lot more prominent, previously.

Perhaps, once the lockdown phase is over it would be a good time to go down, get dirty in the mud and just enjoy cricket once again, like it was before IPL came into our lives.