As IPL evolves, it will need to upgrade its process of selecting players, writes Desh Gaurav Chopra Sekhri in the Indian Express. While it is in the enviable situation whereby the world’s best cricketers and overall talent pool, with very few exceptions, are usually available for selection, Sekhri writes, the process of player selection, retention, and transfer will have to develop to keep pace with the rapidly evolving (and escalating) pay scales and related requirements to ensure parity and equitable distribution.

Universally, the auction system is the one aspect of the IPL most feel requires immediate change. A system designed to select players on the basis of market forces, the auction is conceivably meant to determine players’ values, along the lines of a player draft as per the US leagues or any other professional sports league. Its implementation, however, leaves much to be desired, and this is due to the fact that draft systems or player trades/ loans evolve over time, and are not based entirely on individual parameters that revolve around money.

Brendon McCullum discusses all things IPL in a video interview with 3news.

2011 was a big season for Kolkata Knight Riders, who rebuilt their team from the ground up in order to change their fortunes on the field. They managed to finish in the top four for the first time, but were an over away from being in the top two, and lost to Mumbai in the first eliminator. There was also the controversy surrounding Gautam Gambhir’s shoulder injury. In an interview in the Telegraph, their coach, Dav Whatmore, looks back on the season and all the drama around it.

Please be honest... Was Gambhir fit to play the eliminator against the Mumbai Indians?
Did you see the way Gambhir ran out Rohit Sharma? I rest my case there... Gambhir would never prefer the franchise over country.

But Gambhir’s been hauled over the coals for playing all 15 matches despite a shoulder problem...
There are two types of injuries... One is trauma, when you get struck on your arm and a bone breaks or when you snap a hamstring while going for a run... You’ve then got to rest, there’s no option. The other type is an injury which develops slowly... Such injuries need to be managed... Some call them niggles and the issue is at what point does a player take a break in order to manage better.

Twenty20 cricket is often criticised as lacking in tactics and nuance. Writing on Yahoo, Joy Bhattacharyja, who is on the management team of Kolkata Knight Riders, uses a fictional situation based on real events to prove that there are, in fact, plenty of mini-battles being played out on the field even in the shortest version of the game.

Kallis has just been dismissed by Ishant for 26. KKR are 52 for 2 in 7.2 overs. As the next batsman walks out, the coach gives him his target -- to try and get 30 more in the next four overs without losing more than one wicket. Kallis also stops just short of the dugout to give the new batsman, Manoj Tiwary, a quick low-down on the pitch: "It's playing true, not stopping, so you can hit the ball on the up -- but Ishant is getting some bounce. Watch for the new slower ball he has; he holds it with a cross seam."

Meanwhile Sangakkara has recalled the brief in the team meeting on Tiwary. He is a ‘bolter' - he likes to dab the first couple of balls and quickly take a single. With that in mind, Sanga brings his best fielder, Duminy, back to point positioned slightly back of square, because that is where Tiwary likes to dab it.

Declining standards, expensive tickets and plummeting crowds but Chris Gayle still offers full value with bat in hand - Dileep Premachandran looks at five things we have learnt from the fourth season of the IPL. More from the Guardian.

Given that it started just days after India's World Cup win, the IPL was always in danger of falling victim to the morning-after feeling. Even players like Virat Kohli spoke of how weird it was to play against India team-mates in the opening week of the competition. Crowds struggled not only with feelings of satiation, but also with identity.

Has the IPL taken cricketainment too far? Writing on Firstpost.com, Abhilasha Khaitan thinks so, saying the mix of sport and entertainment has reached the point of ridiculousness.

Mr Modi may tut-tut-tweet about dipping IPL ratings, but the fall has little to do with the absence of his brilliance. One is, obviously, the overdose of cricket. I mean, we all have jobs to do, wages to earn. Two is, though I have no scientific research to back my theory, the increasingly ridiculous packaging of the tournament has much to do with viewer apathy. Who would waste time to hear Sidhu say this: “They have dug their own grave with their teeth and god gives the toothless nuts to chew on,” a comment he made after Kochi Tuskers lost against Delhi Daredevils. Funny, you think? I have seen housewives and children (the supposed target audience of such tomfoolery) switch to other channels when the tamasha brigade takes centre stage.

Dumbing down is so passé a content strategy that even Bollywood has taken note. When will the cricket broadcasters wake up to this change?

Iqbal Abdulla has been one of the finds of the 2011 IPL. Not only is he Kolkata Knight Riders’ leading wicket-taker, with 16 scalps, but he has also opened the bowling on a regular basis with startling success. In the Indian Express, Devendra Pandey traces Abdulla’s rise from IPL benchwarmer to star.

It isn’t just the ample figure in his wickets column that makes him Gambhir’s go-to man, just take a look at his season’s economy rate — 6.00. And despite his lack of variations, Abdulla has learnt the art of survival in the pro-batsman world by taking advice from the best in the business — his Kolkata team mates.

“Gambhir is the best player of spin, Yusuf Pathan is the best hitter in the world and Wasim Akram (bowling coach) is the original trickster. By just talking to them, you get to learn so much about the game,” he says.

Sachin Tendulkar's strike-rate of 109.40 is not good enough in the IPL, Ashish Magotra says on Firstpost.com, especially since he bats in the first four overs, when the field restrictions apply. The question is, he writes, is anyone bold enough to tell him to step up the pace?

We all know that if Tendulkar decides to go after the bowling, he still can be very devastating. But right now he seems to be thinking like a captain – he worries about the rest of the batting not firing. When instead, he needs to go back to the basics, think like a batsman and perhaps take a leaf out of Sehwag’s book with the ‘see ball, hit ball’ approach.

Former IMF chief and potential French president Dominique Staruss-Kahn, was charged with sexual assault in a New York hotel. C Uday Bhaskar in the Economic Times draws a parallel with the recent controversy surrounding the disclosures of an IPL cheerleader who commented on a blog about the post-match behaviour in the IPL saying that some players treat young women like 'a piece of meat'.

Cyber space is inundated with conspiracy theories and Kahn is being portrayed as having been set-up for sharing the humanist and ethical concerns of Jo Stiglitz and that the real target is control of the top job of the IMF.

Be that as it may, the labor of this comment is to draw attention to a less noticed but similar development that is doing the rounds on the IPL cricket social circuit which has deplorable connotations. I must hasten to add that this is not a comment on cricket, but about the insecure status of women in general in India and how certain societal attitudes and behavioral patterns are being tacitly endorsed in one part of glitzy India.

The IPL revolution has been driven by thrill-thirsty fans and not by what the game itself requires, Akshaya Mishra writes on Firstpost.com. The problem with that, he says, is it will reduce cricketers to products of an assembly line that caters only to the basic minimum of the fan need.

In the reductionist approach of the average fan, cricket is all about hitting the ball hard and high the sound of woodwork being dismantled. Greatness here is a quantity that comes in the denominations of fours and sixes. Everything else – the joys of unique skills, the cases individual courage, the test of character in great fightbacks, in all, the combination of abstracts that make sport so beautiful — turned irrelevant.

Apart from Shaun Marsh, and to a lesser extent Doug Bollinger, there haven't been any outstanding Australian performers in the IPL, Jesse Hogan points out in the Sydney Morning Herald.

David Hussey, Cameron White and Daniel Christian were bought for a combined total of $US3.4 million ($A3.19 million) per season - $US1.4 million for Hussey, $US1.1 million for White, $900,000 for Christian - and were among the 20 most expensive players at January's IPL auction. But all three performed well below expectations.

Glittering after-parties. Bollywood megastars. Warney. And a frank discussion about organic farming with Liz Hurley: New Zealand allrounder Jacob Oram who played for the Rajasthan Royal's in the IPL, discusses life the off-the-field life in the tournament with Mark Geenty in the Dominion Post.

"It's everywhere. You flick through the different TV channels and half of them will have some panel talking about the IPL. There's half a dozen pages in every paper, it's all about the IPL. They have an hour's buildup and an hour's review of every match," Oram said.

In the Daily Telegraph, the retiring Shane Warne looks back at his career; he names Daryl Cullinan his favourite batsman to bowl to, Navjot Sidhu among his least favourites to face, Ian Chappell the biggest influence on him as a cricketer, and jokes about why he hasn't been knighted yet.

It has to be Sachin, because of the seemingly effortless way he deals with the pressure of a billion people hanging on his every move. He never puts a toe out of line off the field, and never queries an umpire’s decision on it. We have been good friends for a while — even if it’s not so friendly when we are out in the middle — and one of the pleasures of playing in the IPL has been the chance to spend a little time with him. My final match, in Mumbai this evening, will in fact be against Sachin’s team, the Mumbai Indians.

In BBC Sport, Tom Fordyce talks about how anticlimactic Warne's farewell is and ponders on how he will be remembered.

In two decades of devilish tweak, extravagant celebrations and tabloid-filling good times, Warne had a hold over English batsmen and fans like few others before and none since.

Some have described him as a magician, conjuring the impossible from those twirling arms and wrists, foxing onlookers with sleight of hand and tricks of the finger but to a generation of player and fans in Blighty he was always more of a torturer - breaking hearts, plucking prize scalps and forever tightening the thumbscrews, his mere appearance at the end of that skip of a run-up enough to trigger waves of foreboding and fear.

James Lawton in the Independent writes it is time to orget the foibles and mistakes: Warne demands place alongside the game's other immortals.

Yet if any man has ever proved himself capable of meeting the demands, of not only surviving but never yielding the ability to intrigue and delight and amaze, it is surely the 41-year-old Victorian who as recently as last December was still inspiring the desperate Australian hope that he might walk back into the Test arena he left in 2007 and turn around a deepening Ashes debacle. All across Australia there were plaintive cries that he should come back, and this was so even when he flew away to London for the problematic wooing of Liz Hurley.

After it started with a bang, the IPL, in its fourth season now, is having difficulty sustaining its early momentum when it burst forth with a TV-friendly format, cheerleaders and big salaries writes Shilpa Jamkhandikar on reuters.co.uk.

A series of scandals has tarnished the league's image, teams are losing money as player costs escalate, TV ratings are down, and franchise owners are still figuring out how to make the most of their investments from a season lasting less than two months.

The ills of today's crass capitalism are far better than the gloomy days of cricket's past, says Ahmed Rizvi, writing in the National.

There may be some genuine concerns, but ... the IPL and any event like it should be welcomed. It is possibly the largest gathering of cricketers - the players, coaches and commentators - in a stress-free environment, an opportunity to socialise with former teammates and opponents, and earn a few dollars doing that.

Ask a Paul Valthaty or a Kamran Khan about the blessings of the IPL. Khan's father was a taxi driver in a small north Indian city and his mother rolled bidis (a form of cigarette) to supplement the income. Both of them died due to a lack of money for proper medical treatment, before Khan was spotted by the Rajasthan Royals director of coaching.

The first IPL had novelty and glitz on its side. The second had daring — for relocating to South Africa at a moment’s notice. The third, back in India, still had Lalit Modi to glamorise it. But excess is proving to be the keynote of IPL4 writes Scyld Berry in the Sunday Telegraph.

But while Pollard, and Chris Gayle, and Dwayne Bravo hit their ‘DLF maximums’ in front of vaguely interested crowds, West Indies play their Test series against Pakistan in bare, listless stadiums. Even if it is not what it was, at least the IPL can claim to be not half as desultory as much of Test cricket has been made by its administrators.

Shane Warne has finally called time on his professional cricket career with his annoucement that this would be his last year in the IPL. Writing in the Indian Express, Aditya Iyer says Warne’s second coming will always be remembered for the way in which he led Rajasthan Royals to an improbable championship in the tournament’s first year.

To become an overnight success, the IPL institution desperately needed a fairytale, an ashes to glory story. And Warne, a cricketer, poker pro, rock star, hair expert, newsmaker and an alleged sex offender -all rolled into one - gave it to them. The world will never know the path IPL would've charted had Warne's glorious brush with leadership not unfolded like a soap opera in the first season, but one thing is for sure - the world, and the IPL, is richer with the experience.

Chris Gayle has been batting in the IPL matches like someone who has just had a great weight lifted off his shoulders writes Suresh Menon on dreamcricket.com. The supply lines in West Indies cricket are drying up, those with experience, including Gayle are being told by the Board they have no role to play, so it is not difficult to see why the laidback Jamaican is happy to exhibit his wares to an audience screaming for sixes in his adopted home town.

For good or bad, Gayle is showing the way for players of the future. By declining an annual contract from the West Indies Cricket Board, he has kept himself free to play where and when he wants to. Every six, every century increases his market value in the T20 format which is pegged to the here and now. And if there is nothing else to occupy him, he could always announce his availability for Test cricket.

It may appear that the ongoing fourth edition of the IPL lacks the spark and intensity of prior seasons, writes sports attorney Desh Gaurav Chopra Sekhri in the Indian Express, but while it would be unfair to gauge the IPL with the same yardstick as one uses for what was a dream World Cup 2011 for every Indian, the past couple of weeks have witnessed developments that are worrying for the IPL’s long-term growth and viability.

Of immediate concern is the choice that cricketers are forced to make with regard to playing for their countries or for their career sustainability. In particular, the situation faced by two impact cricketers — Chris Gayle and his ongoing tussle with the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), and Lasith Malinga’s retirement from Test and his impending dispute with the Sri Lankan Cricket Board

In the upcoming ICC world cricket schedule for the next seven-eight years, bilateral series are likely to overlap each of the future editions of the IPL. Not only that, in four of the five upcoming seasons, the IPL will follow immediately after an ICC world event — thus leaving the IPL, again, susceptible to saturation and declining viewership/ revenue. What this will lead to is either uncertainty in choosing rosters for teams — IPL or national, or it could lead to warring factions of boards making fair or unfair demands of the ICC, BCCI and, even more unfortunate, the players.

Lasith Malinga has been far and away the best bowler in the 2011 IPL and while his action may not lend itself to imitation, there are still lessons to be learned from his methods, writes Indranil Basu in the Times of India.

For one, Malinga is adept at not pitching the ball in a good length area, which is between four to six metres from the stumps. His preferred length is between six to eight metres, and by mixing his deliveries, he ensures that none of the batsmen are able to read him easily.

By the time you have read Malinga, an over is already up. Then there are the variations. If a batsman is expecting Malinga to bowl one of the deadly yorkers, there could be a bouncer - either fastish or a markedly slower one - in store.

Richard Lord, writing in the Wall Street Journal, tells us why older players have become a such an important feature of the IPL.

It wasn't supposed to be like this — whizz-bang Twenty20 looks very much like a young man's game. But shorter game length and the IPL's seven-week season mean it's less physically demanding than other forms of the game...

Older players are attractive to IPL teams because the concentrated format makes every ball that much more important, and therefore makes a clear head, psychological strength and a mental database of information about similar situations correspondingly more important too. They're also useful in an unofficial coaching capacity, mentoring younger players. And, last but very far from least, they're attractive because they're famous.

Mike Haysman in his blog on supersport.com attempts to analyse the factors behind Gayle and Sehwag's ability to clinically execute and thrash an attack to smithereens that leaves everybody stunned.

Let's make one thing perfectly clear right at the off. Apart from both having 'an eye like a dead fish', they are gifted with extraordinary ability, hence the continued savagery they are able to employ. When they are in the character of a one-man wrecking machine, with strike rates often in excess of 200, they do it for a significant period of time. It isn't a lucky cameo teetering on extermination; it's a game breaking performance of duration aided by an uncluttered mind.

The IPL has given India’s domestic players the chance to strut their stuff on the big stage and several of them have been catapulted into the national side on the back of successful Twenty20 performances since 2008. But players need more than just the shine of the IPL on their resumes to succeed in international cricket, write Bharat Sundaresan and Karthik Krishnaswamy in the Indian Express.

Of the 19 cricketers who have made their ODI debuts for India since the first season of the IPL, 10 were picked largely on the basis of eye-catching displays in the aforementioned Twenty20 jamboree. Of those 10, only Yusuf Pathan and Ashwin were part of India's victorious World Cup squad. Apart from these two and Ravindra Jadeja -who has figured in 35 ODIs -the other seven have, between them, made only 21 appearances for the one-day side. For one reason or the other, not one player among Manpreet Singh Gony, Abhishek Nayar, Sudeep Tyagi, Ashok Dinda, Umesh Yadav, Naman Ojha and Saurabh Tiwary retained selectorial confidence for longer than five matches.

To be fair to the selectors, most of these players were only given opportunities as part of squad rotation in the months leading up to the World Cup. But the fact that so few made a persuasive case for more chances perhaps showed the disparity in quality between the IPL and international cricket. It also challenged the wisdom of picking players for 50-over games based on their T20 displays. Keeping in mind their mixed fortunes, it isn't clear how much emphasis the selectors will place on IPL performances this time around.

Faf du Plessis reveals some of the things that happen in the Chennai Super Kings dressing room on supersport.com. Doug Bollinger is a loud mouth and a prankster, while Scott Styris isn't too keen on 12th man duties, he says.

Due to the big squad, there’s usually about six guys sharing the 12th man duties and everyone is pretty good about it, except Scott Styris. We think he’s trying to be part of the management team, so he’ll catch balls and hit balls, while the rest of us are running around doing the dirty work. There’s a theory that he’s got his eye on a coaching job, so we’ve given him quite a bit of stick. In fact, myself and Tim Southee clapped the other day when he brought drinks on for the first time!

Have the Bollywood stars who gave the IPL its glamour in the first few seasons lost their appeal? Pradeep Magazine asks the question in the Hindustan Times

It is hard to say whether these men and women have lost their appeal or the star-struck Indians are more in love with the idea of glamour than glamour itself. Or, is it that once these ageing stars overexposed themselves, their aura too vanished? I wonder what agony the Badshah of Bollywood would have gone through on discovering that the Kolkata crowd had largely kept away from the Eden Gardens in their opening match.

In the Guardian, Mike Selvey analyses the flagging viewership of IPL 2011, and says India should have learned from England, who went overboard with the number of domestic Twenty20 matches in a season and thus made the novel concept humdrum.

The third ought to be the most worrying, though, and it comes back to the English experience. The marketing people call this "cricket fatigue", which in essence means that a quarter to a fifth of those who followed IPL last year have had enough of it. Few games have caught the imagination.

From being a net bowler for the Kochi Tuskers Kerala franchise to picking up the Man-of-the-Match award in his debut IPL game against the Delhi Daredevils, which included the wickets of Virender Sehwag and Y Venugopal Rao, Kochi paceman Prasanth Parameswaran has taken his first steps towards national recognition. Nihal Koshie in the Indian Express tracks Parameswaran's journey.

The excitement in Parameswaran's voice is hard to miss when he speaks about the day he got spotted by Lawson. "I wanted to impress people be cause all the big players were around. But frankly, initially, I didn't expect to be picked. I knew that coach Lawson was happy with the way I bowled in the nets. But getting a contract with Kochi Tuskers Kerala was unexpected," Parameswaran added.

An editorial in the Indian Express analyses Sourav Ganguly's inclusion the IPL and states that the one thing we can all learn from his return is: never write Ganguly off.

When Ganguly was cold-shouldered by all the IPL teams in the auction for the fourth season, it was believed that, pushing 40, he was staring at the end of his playing career, that his days as captain and cricketer were finally over. But then Ganguly, the master of reinvention, never seems to see that door marked exit.

The IPL is fast turning into a Frankenstein, says Suresh Menon, writing in DNA. The BCCI, he says, cannot abdicate its responsibility in restoring sanity to world cricket.

Should the BCCI be concerned so much about world cricket when its brief is Indian cricket? So long as Indian cricket is served, why worry? Countries construct their diplomacy and economic policies on the foundation of self-interest, so why should sport be different?

As the world champions, the No. 1 Test-playing country, and with the power and influence that comes with having the richest cricket board in the world with the potential to make themselves and everybody else richer, the BCCI must give up their narrow-minded domestic concerns and focus on cricket the world game. Whatever the compulsions of political entities in the United Nations, sport must follow the beat of a different drum. For that is the reason for its existence — it is artificial and should strive to be idealistic.

The Old Batsman takes a look at a recent IPL game and wonders whether 'playing yourself in' is as important as people once assumed.

At the end of the sixth over in their game against Rajasthan yesterday, Kings XI were 77-1. It would be easy to pass this off as symptomatic of one of the many warping forces T20 is applying in its first era. Yet it hints at something more fundamental. In distilling the game down to an extreme form, conventional wisdoms will be challenged.

What's wrong with cricketers earning large sums of money, Dileep Premachandran asks in the Sunday Guardian. Rather than blaming players for being greedy, he says, it is the administrators who should be asked why they don't pay cricketers from countries other than India, Australia and England more for playing international cricket, and why they don't create a window for the IPL.

Instead of lining up the soft targets, the players, let's ask some serious questions of the administrators. When you can't pay an international cricketer a fair wage – those that aren't Indian, English or Australian often take home in a season what one of our talentless ham-actors gets for a show – why do you come between them and IPL riches? When more than 95 percent of international cricketers express an interest in being part of the league, why the reluctance to create a window for it?

In the country versus club debate, which is the inevitable consequence of the way IPL is structured, we fail to address one simple fact: Who is responsible for creating a situation where players get pitted against their respective boards which is detrimental to international cricket? asks Pradeep Magazine in the Hindustan Times.

Can one visualise a situation where a national team goes to play a series in another country with the core of their team missing for practice games? Imagine India embarking for the tour of England with their main players, including their captain, still playing in a league tournament in some other country? Will the Indian public and the hyper jingoistic media allow that to happen?

Aakash Chopra says the player must not be put in a position where they need to make a hard choice between playing for the country and a life-changing, lucrative IPL offer.

In the Indian Express, Aditya Iyer says, "In a system where business tycoons and Bollywood starlets with deep pockets are parading as team owners, the birth of Real Madrid equivalents in IPL's franchise structure was inevitable. But Dream Teams are not necessarily player friendly."

Plucking nervously at those bleached locks that came to the forefront only last season, Saurabh Tiwary tapped his feet restlessly in the Bangalore Royal Chal lengers's dug out. Seventeen overs had passed, and the boy who had made the headlines both for his formidable top-order batting, and for being state-mate MS Dhoni's lookalike, hadn't yet made his way out to the middle. Playing against his former team - the Mumbai Indians - at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, Tiwary looked earnestly towards the men draped in the blue jerseys. He had taken the previous edition of the Indian Premier League by storm for them, smashing as many as 419 runs in his debut season while batting at No.3. Now, padding up in the lower middle order for his new franchise in red and gold, the grass seemed greener under the other fibre-glass shed. By the end of the evening though, Rohit Sharma would prove to him that it wasn't.

One of the primary objectives of the India Premier League was to to unearth Indian talent and bring relatively hidden skills to the fore in front of a global audience courtesy satellite television. Finally, as R Kaushik writes in the Deccan Herald, in its fourth season, the league seems to be realising that goal.

The Yusuf Pathans and Ravindra Jadejas used the IPL as the stepping stone to India caps. If a few more can follow suit, then the IPL can rightfully take credit for being an assembly line, and not merely for bestowing ‘unreasonable’ gifts on the not-so-gifted.

A 63-ball 120 from Paul Valthaty not only helped Kings XI Punjab beat Chennai Super Kings on Wednesday, it also catapulted Valthaty into the limelight. Devendra Pandey in the Indian Express looks at how the "big day" finally arrived in Valthaty's life and how he overcame the partial loss of vision in his eye to fulfill his cricketing ambitions.

However, it was hard not to get depressed as Paul career went into decline even as his peers in the Mumbai circuit climbed to higher ho nours. A solitary ODI in 2006 and a handful of T20 matches were all he managed in domestic cricket — till today’s match. A technically perfect knock, it got him both the Man of the Match award and this season’s top run-getters’ Orange Cap.

What will the fourth season of the IPL bring, asks Andy Wilson in the Guardian. The anticipation is likely to be on an all-time high, now that every game will include a clutch of World Cup winners, but will the cricket live up to the hype?

Twenty20 is OK as far as it goes, but I wonder whether the IPL might suffer slightly this time around as those millions of Indian fans who were so absorbed by the twists and turns of 50-over cricket during their heroes' World Cup triumphs feel a bit short-changed by the comparatively relentless crash-bang-wallop of 70-odd 20-over matches.

Vijay Lokapally, writing in the Hindu, says while the IPL could be a throwback to days gone by for some - the time when a certain Australian legspinner left batsmen embarrassingly helpless, for example - it also signifies a huge transformation in the character of the game.

The game has undergone a huge transformation from the time when bowlers would applaud the batsmen on being hit for a four or six. These days they glare or mouth profanities as an aggressive advertisement for aggressive cricket. And the IPL signifies this transformation ... In IPL, there is money, and then there is cricket.

The missing piece - and a sizeable one at that - in this year's IPL is Lalit Modi, says Dileep Premachandran, writing in the National. In his absence, says Premachandran, the BCCI has to find another individual, or two, with the foresight to keep the show going.

For many people, Modi was the IPL, with his steel-grey-and-beige suits and pink ties, popping up at every other game as he travelled the country in a private jet. Much as other officials loathed him, they could not do without the dynamism or the strength of will that created a financial behemoth from a pipe dream. Rules were broken and corners cut, but Modi invariably got what he wanted. And in most cases, what he wanted was what served the IPL best.

It's almost been an entire week since the World Cup ended, and Chuck Culpepper of the National can hardly stand the 'horrid, wretched cricket-lessness of it all'. But the circus will rev back into action when the IPL begins on Friday. Here's his tongue-in-cheek look at how things have unfolded in the 141 interminable hours between the two events.

The Wankhede area seems back to normal. The sun sets beautifully just half a block over on Marine Drive. Delivery lorries come and go at the stadium. World Cup signs remain pasted on the gates, instructing about proper credentials. Two Indian passers-by ask if Sachin is in. A security guard tells you basically to get lost and notes the Indians' first home match will occur on April 15.

A World Cup closes down, and a league revs right up, hungry sponsors at the ready. Really? Really amazing.

Samanth Subramanian, writing for the Caravan, looks at Lalit Modi – the man in the Armani suit with golden toilet fittings in his private plane, who could go four days without sleep when need be. He discusses his quirks, business acumen, irrepressible energy levels, steep fall from grace and conceivable disentanglement from the legal issues currently stacked against him.

Modi would sit, either in his own box or in the box of the home team, and mug for the Modicam, the camera deputed to follow him around in each game. He would chant team slogans and sing team songs, the metal rims of his spectacles glinting in the spotlights … But through all these lusty exhibitions of fandom, Modi would be acutely alert to the demands of his positions as IPL commissioner … his eyes always cocked for something going wrong — for an unwanted guest in an exclusive box, or for a brand not getting quite as much play as it had paid for.

If the IPL’s story is unusual, the story of its architect is positively bizarre. With a string of business failures, a personality with all the tenderness of a battering ram, and a host of foes, Modi shouldn’t have been able to build anything nearly as successful as the IPL. Somehow, and very rapidly, he did — and then, just as rapidly, just when he was perched atop the world, he lost it all.

The IPL governing council conveniently decides that its wrongdoings are, in fact, not wrongdoings, writes Suresh Menon on www.dreamcricket.com. He says that the council follows a different code of conduct for players, and this is evident in the way it has dealt with Ravindra Jadeja, and now Manish Pandey.

Had Pandey played for India, he would have been entitled to greed, to a higher price and a nationally televised salary scheme. His IPL record, his first-class record and his status as the first Indian to score a century in the IPL count for nothing.

Like cholesterol, can there be good greed and bad greed?

The Governing Council, so eager to put the younger place in their place, might like to investigate just how easily their rules allowed the richer teams to break the ceiling on payment for their star players.

GS Vivek in the Indian Express writes that Delhi Daredevils curiously refrained from aggressively bidding for home players in the auction. The only two things seem to suggest that the Daredevils are indeed a national capital-based IPL team: the prefix ‘Delhi’ and Virender Sehwag.

The local flavour is set to reduce further with Sehwag, who was retained, unlikely take the captaincy back after stepping down last season. In such a scenario, their most expensive buy, Irfan Pathan, may be asked to lead the side. While the Daredevils management remains tight-lipped over captaincy, it brushes aside the issue of fewer local players in the team.

The IPL has changed the rules of sport, writes Santosh Desai in the Times of India. It is time to acknowledge that something extremely significant is happening in India. Perhaps it is time to look at the IPL not merely as the future of cricket but to ask if it points to the future of sport itself.

The battle between these two competing visions of the future of sport is being played out right here in India. If the IPL succeeds in its present form, it will challenge not just other formats of cricket, but the very idea of sport. Consider it, for what it is worth, as India's gift to the world.

In the same newspaper, Samidha Sharma looks at the marketing battle that is set to unfold during what is being touted as the biggest cricketing season of all time.

Rohit Mahajan in the Outlook magazine writes that in the IPL auction, rules faded before the Greenback.

Obviously, those who have become millionaires overnight are not complaining. Take Tiwary, for instance. He’s relaxed, says his goal is to play well—and play for India. Does he need protection from the deleterious effects of big money? His manager, Nishant Dayal, says, “It’s not about money—it’s about how much he was wanted by teams. My role is to make sure that he keeps his eye on his goal, of playing for India for a long time.” For one Tiwary, there are dozen others, unknown and unsung, who are complaining of having got a raw deal, of having been reduced to becoming the bonded labour of the IPL bazaar

"IPL likes to present itself as cricket's version of the EPL. It is a dangerous delusion," writes Peter Roebuck in the Hindu. "All soccer matches last 90 minutes. The EPL is the real thing. IPL is an entertainment posing as a game. It does not create life. It feeds and will ultimately devour."

India's hopes of winning the forthcoming World Cup have been badly damaged by the latest IPL auction. Of course the two are connected. Morale is critical in any team. Moreover a community with a compromised culture cannot expect to conquer. The sight of respected men huddled alongside fripperies and jewels whilst bidding for players did little to advance Indian cricket's reputation. Perhaps they were unaware of the grotesque picture they painted to those watching. These were not cricketing folk. These were bees in a honey-pot.

The IPL 4 auction saw corporate egos, passion and a little bit of lunacy. Siddharth Mallya and Ness Wadia almost got into a fight. But you could also sense an inarguable logic at play: team owners just can’t afford to be sentimental about ex-greats, writes Ayaz Memon in the Indian Express.

In the Hindustan Times, Sharda Ugra compares the NFL draft to the IPL auction.

The most commonsensical and yet charming rule behind the NFL’s draft structure is this: the weakest team gets the first choice of player. Never once during the draft, which now lasts seven rounds and two days, is players’ salary discussed. The numbers that are beaten around the experts table concern a player’s records in college football, height, weight, game yardage. They play some TV footage from his collegiate games. The draft is where the NFL picks the most promising rookies and turns them into professional football players. (Its Indian Premier League variant would be teams picking from a mass of the ‘uncapped’ first-class and junior players, who in reality are now left trying to strike ‘perks’-laden deals with the franchises.)

Mukul Kesavan gave Twenty20 cricket a second chance by going to watch the South Africa-India match at the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban. He describes his experience in the Telegraph.

The cricket was forgettable. It didn’t help the cause of the format that Suresh Raina got 41, the second-highest score after Rohit Sharma’s 53. Raina had just been dropped from the Test team after the first Test of the South African tour because his embarrassing inability to play fast, short-pitched bowling had been cruelly exposed. Watching him star in India’s innings was a textbook demonstration of how the T20 format defangs fast bowlers and rewards second-rate batsmen. But, I reminded myself, perhaps it was wrong to use Test cricket as a yardstick; perhaps T20 needed a different skill-set.

And briefly, the match did come alive as a cricketing contest when South Africa’s Van Wyk and de Villiers put on more than 50 runs in quick time, and seemed to put their team in a position to overhaul India’s 168 run total. In the end, India won comfortably, but as the evening wore on, it became increasingly clear that the match and its result were of no consequence because the point of the evening was the Bollywood show that followed the cricket.

Jug Suraiya blogs in the Times of India that the country is utterly hooked on the IPL, and has a light-hearted take on the advantages of not being obsessed by the tournament.

If IPL has enslaved us - and there's no if about it, it has - there have never been slaves happier in their bondage. Onion prices? Inflation? Total logjam in Parliament? Pakistani terror? Saffron terror? Chinese incursions into Ladakh? We swat them away like the pesky machchars (mosquitos) that they are. Don't worry, be happy, IPL's here.

Shailaja Bajpai writes in the Indian Express that the most striking part of the IPL auction telecast was how bad it was. As it was, at no stage did we get the big picture. It was like watching a cricket match between teams you had never heard of and that too without a scorecard.

A good telecast would have done the following: clearly identified team owners at each table instead of making us squint to read the ID cards on the table; given us the names of the bidders with the amount being bid, the winning bid, the team composition after a successful bid, and told us how much money a team was left with to spend and who was left in the kitty

Suresh Menon writes on Dreamcricket.com that not much has changed about the IPL despite the ouster of Lalit Modi. The much-promised transparency was not evident, salaries of retained players remain a mystery and the feeling that rules are being made on the run persists, he says.

The message from the franchisees was clear: sport is not about sentiment. It is business. It is about the bottom line. It is about results. Corporate India dealt with cricketers in a matter-of-fact manner, reducing the great names in the game to their bowling averages or strike rates. Getting a young team together or a bargain or a cheap buy was more important than anything else.

It was a lesson for the cricket board which often lets emotion cloud its judgement, and is happy to rely on past glory when the current form is not so good.

When Anil Kumble announced he would not play in the fourth edition of the IPL, it seemed like he had made a bold statement to shun any conflict of interest that may arise from him being a Board official and still being involved with an IPL team, Kunal Pradhan says in theMumbai Mirror. That’s why it was so disappointing that he turned up at the Royal Challengers Bangalore’s table at the auction.

Granted that Kumble, who is also chairman of the National Cricket Academy, doesn’t have a direct conflict to the extent some of the others mentioned above do. He doesn’t pick players for the Indian team like Srikkanth; he doesn’t directly control funds for the IPL like Srinivasan; and he’s not in a position to do blatant favours for his friends like Modi was. But by aligning himself to the Bangalore IPL team, Kumble, the official, lost an opportunity to do something expected from him the right thing.

Niranjan Rajadhyaksha and Ravi Krishnan analyse the IPL auction from an economic and strategic standpoint in Mint. They observe franchises have shifted from looking for marquee players, like they did in the first IPL auction three years ago, to building a balanced portfolio of players.

There was a clear preference for a more balanced portfolio this year. A strong second rung is always needed in case of injuries or bad form from the stars. So while the bidding for the stars always attracts the most media attention, the strategic actions taken to build the entire team is not always adequately appreciated. IPL team owners have clearly shifted their preference from highly skewed to more balanced player portfolios. These strategic dilemmas are a bit similar to what a mutual fund manager grapples with when designing his equity portfolio.

G Sampath, in his blog in Daily News and Analysis, says the player retention option gave Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings an unfair advantage over other IPL teams, particularly the two new ones.

Just look at the facts and figures: MI retained Tendulkar, Harbhajan, Pollard and Malinga for $4.5 mn, while Kolkata Knight Riders had to shell out exactly the same amount, $4.5 mn, for just two players: Gambhir and Yusuf Pathan. If all the players had been thrown into the auction pool, as ideally should have been done, how much do you think MI would have had to shell out for Sachin, Pollard, Bhajji and Malinga? Or CSK for Dhoni, Raina, Vijay and Albie Morkel?

N Srinivasan, who is a member of the IPL governing council and also a co-owner of the Chennai Super Kings’, presence at the 2011 IPL auction had several other team owners aggravated because they saw a conflict of interest between Srinivasan’s role in planning the auction and his presence at it as a team owner, Prem Panicker says in his blog.

The buzz is that franchise owners were seriously miffed over Srinivasan sitting in on the auction while it was in progress. Friends in some of the franchises pointed out, through SMS and calls, that this was just one hat too many, one conflict of interest too much to stomach. First, they point out, he almost single-handedly rammed in the player retention clause when, besides CSK and Mumbai, all other franchises were against it. ‘If the IPL is democratically run, how come decisions are taken just because it suits one or two franchises?’ one person closely connected with an under-rated franchise asked on phone. Further, Srinivasan set the norms for the auction, decided which player would go in which category, and when each name would come up for auction — which is just dandy since, as a team-owner, he could in advance plan the CSK strategy, then tailor the auction process to suit his team.

The dust may be settling on the IPL auction, but debate surrounding Sourav Ganguly's exclusion from the gravy train continues. Avijit Ghosh, of the Times of India, writes that, while Ganguly's case is different from the other older players, the Kolkata franchise probably believes that "what Sourav brings on the table is less compared to what the team gains by his absence". He also warns us against writing Ganguly off.

To go back to Sourav, I still believe he would have had a productive IPL 4. There’s no way to prove this but if you have followed his career closely, you would understand why I say so. You see the scene is again set for him. Sourav thrives on a challenge. He is a fighter who loves to prove people wrong. That’s the man, his essence. One doesn’t know if at 38, he still has the energy to prove himself once again. But, perhaps the unkind outcome of the bidding would have rekindled that fire. The rejection and the humiliation was just the spark he needed. With Sourav Ganguly, you never know.

In an interview with Mihir Bose of the London Evening Standard, Lalit Modi hits out against his detractors and the sceptics of the IPL, which used to be his feifdom.

"You may call it [my style] buccaneering or 19th century but we thought outside the box. Please do not compare me to the English Premier League or to any other league. We are unique. I can sit here and say there's no other league like that in the world, every member actually makes money. How many teams in the English Premier League make money? Look at the balance sheets, practically all of them are in debt."

An editorial in the Mint says the BCCI's expulsion of Rajasthan Royals and Kings XI Punjab from the IPL will result in investors withdrawing by way of sponsorship and spectator scepticism.

Already various sponsors affiliated to the two teams, the Kings XI Punjab and Rajasthan Royals, will have to rethink their participation in the lucrative league, given the fact that the two teams’ celebrity connections made them that much more visible among others, bar the Kolkata Knight Riders.

With the number of teams reduced, so would be the number of matches, which were anyway down from 94—as initially proposed—to 74 for the 10-team league, which is now again down to eight. In which case Sony’s broadcast sponsorship deal will have to be re-evaluated.

The DNA editorial says, "With the league already down to eight teams, there may be a need to invite more investors in the future. If the behaviour of the board veers towards bullying rather than partnering, then attracting big investors, who also come with huge egos and strong opinions, will be very difficult."

And this is from the Times of India: "Scrapping the Rajasthan and Punjab franchises is a drastic move, and one bound to have a ripple effect through the IPL as a whole. But it must be seen in the context of the allegations of improper ownership and shareholding patterns. If the IPL is to have an international profile alongside the likes of the Premier League, such irregularities cannot be allowed. What can be done, however, is to minimise the uncertainty such an overhaul is bringing about. And there, the BCCI is falling short."

Lalit Modi has been conspicuously absent from the BCCI’s disciplinary proceedings against him. There is talk of holidays in Italy and rumours of mob threats keeping him from returning to India. In Outlook magazine, Rohit Mahajan maps Modi’s movements since his suspension from the IPL, and tries to figure just what the man is up to.

Modi’s current coordinates on this glittering itinerary of leisure is in Bali, for another holiday in a rented house. This will be followed by Bangkok, where his father, K.K. Modi, will celebrate his 70th birthday later this month. And then to perhaps another party, which prompts a BCCI official to chuckle: “He calls himself a businessman? He certainly holidays like no other businessman in history. Reminds me of how he dropped everything and camped in Rajasthan for years to get into cricket administration!”

The feeling in the board is that if Modi had any belief in winning his fight to keep control over the IPL, he’d have offered a bitter, tooth-and-nail fight. “This is the only venture he’s been successful in life, after countless failures in business, and he’d hate to give it up,” says a BCCI official. “However, the fact that he’s staying out of India instead of fighting it out suggests he’s aware of the futility of it all. Instead, he’s just arguing that the BCCI committee is biased, and wants its members to recuse themselves.”

Gaurav Kalra, writing for the IBN Live website, proposes a radical alternative to the 94-game rigmarole that IPL 2011 is currently proposed to be. With franchises unlikely to keep the national cause in mind and guard against burn-out, he suggests that the way forward is in regionally segregating the teams into two leagues.

Divide the league into 2 groups of 2 regions each. North and South. North features Delhi, Punjab, Jaipur, Kolkata and Mumbai. South features Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Kochi and Pune. Teams play the others in their group home and away. The top two make it to the semis from each group.

While the number of games are reduced to 48 or so, it provides the opportunity to schedule more games to be fit into prime-time TV schedules. It reduces the number of games each player has to play to 11 each. And it considerably reduces travel between venues. Otherwise imagine Kings XI Punjab playing Kochi in Chandigarh. A day to travel to the venue and another day to travel back. All this to play a 3-hour match. Doesn't add up.

In his column for Yahoo India, Amit Varma tees off on the tendency of sports journalists in India to ignore the facts while spinning stories out of whole cloth.

The most crass illustration of this came a few years ago, during an India-Pakistan series, when a news channel started finding the Match ka Mujrim ('Villain of the Match') in a post-match analysis show. Cricketers aren't Mujrims, and on most days, even when matches are lost heavily, there may not be any blame to be assigned. In sport, shit happens. But no, it's more fun, allegedly more engaging, and what's more, far easier for a lazy thinker, to affix blame, paint the events of the day in black and white, and move on.

Last year, when India crashed out of the second T20 Cricket World Cup, there were the usual calls for our captain MS Dhoni's head. When there was no story to be had, the media made it up, such as when, as Anand Vasu reported, "Dhoni's effigy was burnt in his hometown Ranchi, ... apparently it was 'arranged' by two channels." The footage was good -- so what if the burning was staged?

A fall-out of India's early exit from the World Twenty20 is the negative publicity of the IPL parties. MS Dhoni's comments about the parties taking a toll on the players' body is true, particularly for high-profile players like him who were top draws in every gathering, and perhaps had no option but to attend. One player, on the condition of anonymity, spoke to Heena Zuni Pandit of the Hindustan Times for a first-person account of a typical party night, and the demands that come along with it.

So you tell yourself, 'I'll go down for an hour', only, it's never an hour. Before you know it, it's 4am and you're heading back to your room, hurrying to pack up and head to another city, another game, another sponsor's commitment (which are endless), another shoot possibly and yes, another party. The problem is that you can never switch off mentally. Not on the field, not during the hours spent in airports when fans and the airport staff want an autograph, photograph or just a chat and not in the parties, where you'll be introduced to important people who will listen to you and perhaps, be important contacts who will make money for you.

The IPL gave the foreign players a chance to exploit the weaknesses in the Indian batsmen. Over six weeks, notes were being swapped and the results were out in the open in the West Indies. Sharda Ugra has more in Back Page Lead.

Like Rohit Sharma, the right-hander Ian Chappell once said could take over after Tendulkar. His rivals think of him as “talented but compulsive.” So give him the short stuff and he can be lulled into a flashy stroke. Sharma then, the verdict is, can face the short ball, but can’t resist it. The most common idea put out by the foreign players, regardless of the Indian tyro being discussed was, “Push them back, make them play”. This one’s a story of two halves.

Jim Yardley in the New York Times gives an outsider's perspective of the IPL mess and tries to piece together opinions from reputed observers to understand what it means for cricket and India.

Dhiraj Nayyar, a senior editor at The Financial Express, said the cricket scandal was best understood in the context of India’s economic evolution. When India’s stock exchange took off in the late 1980s and early 1990s, scandals erupted over market manipulation until regulatory structures were strengthened. Today, the same absence of transparency and regulation exists in cricket.

“The IPL is a curious creature that combines the best and worst of Indian capitalism - fabulous enterprise and outcomes on the one side, riddled with cronyism, patronage and power politics on the other,” Mr. Nayyar wrote recently. “In many ways the IPL is a confirmation of what India really is: an emerging economy.”

Lalit Modi is a real visionary for being able to imagine a future so far removed from the reality that existed then. The flip side of the ability to see a future that nobody else could and one which most other people challenged, is that one begins to have inexhaustible belief in one's ability to bend it infinitely according to one's desire, writes Santosh Desai in the Times of India blog.

What is most noteworthy about the Shashi Tharoor saga is that a personal spat like that triggered the unraveling of the IPL empire. The fact that Lalit Modi was unable to foresee the consequences of his almost-petulant chirp on Twitter points to the clouding of reality that accompanied the IPL-induced euphoria. Looking back, it would seem like a colossal over-reaction to what could have been sorted out behind closed doors by making a few accommodations. But like all good morality sagas, in the end there must come a downfall. Only then does it make a really good story.

Writing in the Guardian, Mike Marqusee joins the chorus of writers who have pointed out the ramifications of the IPL mess.

Despite the recent revelations, there's little indication things will change. All those vying for power in Indian cricket share the same assumptions and the same methods and not a few of the same cronies. Modi's successor Chirayu Amin – chairman of pharmaceutical giant Alembic and former president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry – promises a more disciplined and cautious approach but his model for cricket's future is no different from Modi's.

In selling the franchises, the BCCI was licensing exclusive groups of investors to exploit the common cricket market for private profit. That was problematic from the outset. Under private ownership, management is less hedged in by non-commercial concerns, such as ensuring wider access to facilities; they have neither a mandate for, nor an interest in, promoting the welfare of the game as a whole.

Cricket offers several examples of top officials who hold more than one powerful post, even if it poses as a conflict of interest, as AC Muthiah is alleging against N Srinivasan, the BCCI secretary. Of course the conflict is not without its benefits. Taylor, Gavaskar, Shastri, Bhogle and the rest count amongst the best thinkers in the game. They have a wide range of skills and play their parts in advancing the interests of the game. That is the reason so many people want to employ them, writes Peter Roebuck in the Hindu.

Accordingly it may seem churlish to suggest they cannot have it both ways. Sincerity, though, is not the issue. Every estate has its part to play. As has amply been proved in India over the last few weeks, the media is the watchdog. All the more reason to insist that it is free to bark whenever it sees fit.

Suresh Menon writes in dreamcricket.com that the IPL mess has proven that while the players and the game are bound by laws, there are no checks and balances in place for officialdom, until things begin to go wrong. At which point everyone looks for a scapegoat.

Rules apply to the players (‘Thou shalt not try to better your lot’ as in the case of Ravindra Jadeja), laws to the game (leg before, size of the bat etc), but neither rules nor laws nor regulations seem to apply to officialdom. Till things go wrong, that is, and then everybody looks for a scapegoat who can absorb everybody’s sins. This is not merely the story of the IPL or indeed of the cricket board; it is the story of Indian sport.

Ultimately, in India, all questions of import are settled politically. Business quarrels, even those involving siblings find political parties line up behind an individual. Like in the case of the Ambanis. Likewise with the media houses which often invite politicians to settle disputes. This is reminiscent of the Cold War days when any international dispute segued into a US versus Soviet Union clash.

Sukanta Chaudhuri, writing in the Telegraph, criticises the IPL for the apparent purposelessness of the wealth generated by the league and adds that the latest controversy has obscured much of what should be dominating the national consciousness.

The real good that wealth does is to create more wealth and extend it (however unevenly) to more and more people. The ‘percolation model’ of enrichment is morally repugnant, but it is the model that seems to work most consistently among imperfect human beings. The most depressing feature of the IPL affair is not the money involved, nor the alleged wrongdoing, but the utterly sterile use of that money. It has generated no employment, created no national assets, had no triggering effect on the economy.

The IPL and its lucrative returns have had a negative impact on kids, says Makarand Waingankar in the Hindu. While Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid chose the hard road to success, working on the basics of the game to survive for a long run in international cricket, the success formula for many kids remains the Twenty20 route.

There are two ways of looking at the problem. Either shut all the coaching courses at the NCA or ban T20 for teenagers. A teenager participating in T20 shouldn't be considered for the State if at all the BCCI is serious about the problem.

It took years of systematic hard work for the Tendulkars, Dravids, Gangulys, Kumbles and others to reach the top and maintain the level of consistency at the international level for more than a decade. It's because they worked on the basics of the game they could sustain the pressure and perform. That is their success formula. But sadly, neither the coaches nor the teenagers are able to understand this.

Kevin McCallum, on the IOL website, Lalit Modi's marketing skills which worked wonders for the IPL were used almost as much for self promotion.

It took three years for the cracks to begin appearing, for people to begin seeing through the spectacle and to the foundations. Say what you like about Modi, he certainly did a hell of a job marketing the hell out of the IPL. He also did an even better job marketing the hell out of himself.

When the IPL came to South Africa television production people smiled sheepishly when I asked them about the camera that had to be on Modi all the time. It was non-negotiable. Modi insisted. And so we have been treated to shots of Modi on his cellphone, Modi signing autographs, Modi next to (insert rich/famous person here).

IPL is a fantasy free-for-all. But the villains must be run out this time, writes Rahul Bhattacharya in the Outlook.

For the sport to remain uncorrupted in these circumstances, it is imperative that the top is clean. Which is why this time around, I hope there is a way to actually bring criminal prosecutions. A national sport is a precious thing. It is one of the ways a community sees itself and understands itself. The reflection at the moment is not very pretty, and India’s genius is to change nothing but the mirror.

Also in the Outlook, Rohit Mahajan describes what an IPL Night party is like.

At one end of the hall lies a private zone, ringed by low tables and protected by 12 bouncers; you can go in only by invitation. There’s also a temporary ramp. Suddenly, there’s an announcement, and a fashion show is under way. People rush towards the ramp, raise their mobiles to make recordings. It lasts some 15 minutes—but the clothes aren’t the cynosure of eyes, the lounging cricketers are. Then there’s some jiving. David Warner of Delhi, just knocked out of the IPL, is escorting three white women. Gradually, the forbidden zone fills up with pretty girls: good looks seem to have opened the doors for them.

In the Hindustan Times, Pradeep Magazine urges the former cricketers on the IPL's governing council - MAK Pataudi, Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri - to help put cricket first in the next season of the league.

IPL is a brand which is here to stay and is still threatening the two other formats of cricket, especially Tests. The corporate takeover of cricket as a property may have got delayed by this scandal but the threat still remains. It is here that messrs Gavaskar/Shastri/Pataudi can act as visionaries in trying to find a middle ground which would safeguard the interests of the sport, its various stake-holders and even the new fan base created by this glitzy new event.

Shane Warne has made the IPL one of two hunting grounds after international retirement, and on his personal website he's outlined what he thinks is the best way forward heading into the league's fourth season. The basis for major decisions should be total transparency and no favouritism to any franchises, believes Warne, for this will ensure all franchises will be on an even level in 2011.

	Master of all he surveys ... once upon a time © BCB

The IPL commissioner’s friends and family got it all—no questions asked, write Rohit Mahajan and Arindam Mukherjee in this week's lead story of Outlook. Ultimately, what has proved to be Modi's undoing is his hubris, that of a man spoilt by his riches, who has known only to have his own way in life.

Though Lalit and Vasundhararaje had known each other for several years—he was seen accompanying her to a Union minister to seek clearance for a factory near Gwalior in the early 1990s—his star shone brighter than ever because she was now chief minister. Such was his clout, Lalit acquired the sobriquet of the ‘Super Chief Minister’. His arrogance was the talk of the town; his opulent suite at the luxury Rambagh Palace hotel almost the centre of government, as officials were summoned to receive orders.

In the Times of India, Harsh Goenka provides a comprehensive analysis that traces the IPL's problems to its fundamental flaw - massively inflated financial valuations.

The financial valuation range based on these lies somewhere between $83 million and $133 million (Rs 370 crore and Rs 600 crore), a far cry from the $370 million (Rs 1,665 crore) bid the Pune team finally attracted. However, I do have use with this number. It can be argued that there is significant value appreciation to the parent’s brand. But whichever way you look at it, apart from UB group no other corporate owner is extracting significant branding. Reliance is not the face of Mumbai Indians.

In the Telegraph, Mukul Kesavan writes that he has little hope that the IPL will clean up its act and enumerates arguments to support his contention that the tournament, which is too firmly steeped in commercialisation, is beyond redemption.

But once you define Twenty20 cricket and the IPL as a form of showbiz — the cheerleaders, the gold-trim uniforms, the filmstar owners, the mid-over commercials, the commercial crassness of the strategic time-out, the stadiums wall-papered with advertising — its main justification becomes the money that makes it a gilded marvel. When the buzz about a game becomes its success in monetizing everything from post-match parties (where guests pay 40,000 rupees a pop to mingle with tired players) to sponsored sixes, what you’re seeing is cricket’s transformation from one sort of heavenly body into another: from a sun that burns with its own fire to a planet that preens in the reflected glory of money.

David Bond, on the other hand, has hope that the organisers will eventually clean up the mess. He writes in bbc.co.uk that while IPL-gate is far from over, the tournament is here to stay.

In the Times, Mike Atherton writes that as Lalit Modi prepares his defence against the myriad allegations, it is time for the IPL to assume a more mature form, stripped of its blatant commercialisation, and over-the-top excesses.

I have always been deeply ambivalent about the IPL: the gross commercialisation, the greed, the pandering to celebrities and the salesmanship of some older players who should know better have done little to enrich the game. Against that, it is important to recognise the good things: the competitive, sometimes compelling, nature of the cricket, the new audience brought to the game, the promotion of younger Indian players and the wealth created for them.

Nasser Hussain writes in the Daily Mail that the main lesson learnt from the IPL fiasco is that no tournament should attempt to become bigger than the game itself.

Let us hope a full inquiry into the allegations surrounding Modi acts as a cleansing exercise not just for the IPL but for the dangers of corruption in Twenty20 cricket throughout the world. Cricket cannot allow itself to be tainted in this way.

The IPL is facing pressure to come clean from several quarters, and the latest group to join the bandwagon is the advertisers who pump in a major portion of the revenue. The Indian Express has the details.

Wall Street Journal's Sadanand Dhume writes that the IPL mess typifies everything that is right and wrong about India.

In a country with a weak legal system, venal political class and hidebound bureaucracy, some of this corner-cutting is expected. India ranks 133rd out of 183 countries in the ease of doing business according to the World Bank's and International Finance Corporation's 2010 Doing Business Report. But the danger, for Indian cricket in particular and for India more broadly, is that such scandals erode faith in market-opening reforms by creating the impression that they benefit only a few. The government appears serious about cleaning up the IPL, but in the long term, the real challenge it faces is to put in place systems that encourage entrepreneurship and innovation, but not at the cost of transparency and the law. India shouldn't have to choose between Mr. Modi the visionary and Mr. Modi the crony capitalist.

In the Wisden Cricketer, Lawrence Booth says that it wouldn't hurt if the tournament downsized a little, reducing it to a month and the ICC ensuring that no international cricket is scheduled at that time.

The commentators, too, can do their part. The degree of brown-nosing, the shamelessness of product placement and the contrived excitement have all been distasteful and demeaning. Jeremy Coney retained his poet’s quirkiness; Mike Haysman never lost sight of the need for serious analysis; Harsha Bhogle did his best to rise above cliché. But otherwise the sense was of grown men fighting to be heard in the cramped confines of Modi’s back pocket. It wasn’t big and it certainly wasn’t clever.

Blogging for the Times, Patrick Kidd wonders if Lalit Modi is the first sports administrator to be sacked for shooting his mouth off by text message.

Last year, Ravi Shastri likened Modi to Moses. This hyperbolic beatification was mocked at the time, but perhaps it seems more relevant today. Despite common belief, Moses did not lead the Hebrews all the way to the Promised Land. He merely led them out of their Egyptian (50-over) bondage, but he died before they completed their route across the wilderness.

Anand Vasu writes in Hindustan Times, that Lalit Modi's ouster is a classic case of getting a taste of one's own medicine.

Once in the BCCI, Modi led the witch-hunt against Jagmohan Dalmiya, and having had him suspended, champi- oned the need to press crimi- nal charges and have the police go after the former ICC chief. Why, Modi famously threatened to “lock up Dalmiya and throw away the keys". Such bravado would have been empty had it not had the backing of a heavy-weight like Sharad Pawar. A seasoned politician and no stranger to fingers being pointed, perhaps Pawar might have cautioned Modi that what goes around comes around, but either he never did, or it fell on deaf ears.

Suhel Seth writes in the Economic Times that while it is easy to brand Modi as the fall guy, the blame for the IPL fiasco rests with everyone associated with the brand.

Respectable brands, be it Hero Honda or Citibank, were part of the IPL. They have been supporting the IPL since its inception. Who, if anyone at all, is going to be accountable to them and the monies they’ve invested in building this property? While a lot of us may say that the IPL in its present avatar was Lalit Modi’s brainchild, the truth of the matter is everyone else other than Lalit Modi nourished the baby. It was powered by the belief and the monies of a Hero Honda or for that matter a Citibank. It came to fruition because a Mukesh Ambani or a Vijay Mallya believed in the brand proposition and its eventual worth.

Simon Hughes writes in Telegraph that irrespective of the ontroversies, the IPL was a tremendous success on-field.

The melodrama of the matches, fortunes lurching one way then the other, has often mirrored the plot of a Bollywood movie. That is the IPL's winning formula – every match has the real sense of an event – and there is nothing else in the sub-continent to compete with it. It delivers what the burgeoning Indian middle-class crave – western-style entertainment. For that simple reason the IPL will continue to thrive, in spite of all the off-field machinations.

Lalit Modi's ouster is only the first step towards cleaning up the IPL. Ayaz Memon writes in Hindustan Times that the Governing Council meeting holds the key to ensuring that public trust is restored in the system.

It is absurd to let the IPL collapse because of managerial impropriety, as nihilists and the lynch-mob would suggest. The biggest casualty in this sordid drama is not who will lose out to whom in national politics, financial deals or the ego battles between pompous cricket officials but public trust. The cricket lovers of India are the biggest stakeholders in the game in India, and they are anguished.

The power struggle for control of the fastest growing sports property in the world may end in a whimper or reach a higher octave today, depending on the resolve and arsenal either side possesses. But that is not now germane to the issue. It's public trust. To restore this, it is imperative that the act of cleansing is demonstrative, not merely symbolic.

Desh Gaurav Chopra Sekhri writes in the Indian Express that IPL is not the first sports league to suffer this kind of a crisis. He draws parallels from other sports like baseball and football to chalk the way forward.

Once the BCCI and the IPL 's governing council share their vision with the public as to the way forward, then one can discuss options such as a player's association, collective bargaining, or even an in dependent regulatory body or committee - the Satyam model has been recommended. Another option is a corporate structure like football's English Premier League, where the team owners are shareholders. The CEO and other key management personnel are appointed, and accountable to the public, with the aim of trying to ensure that they are independent and have no apparent conflict of interest that could taint their decision making.

In Deccan Herald, MJ Akbar explains how the scriptwriters of the IPL stretched rules and imagination so much that they forgot to give a happy ending to their fairytale.

The damage in cash terms can be calculated, but who will do the accounting of the damage to IPL’s credibility? There is cynical response: why should a circus need any credibility? Who believes a Hindi movie to be the essence of truth, and if it is the essence of truth, who watches it? But Cabinet ministers do not use their power to preside over the Hindi movie industry, or divert Air India aircraft to pick up cast and crew. The story has reached where it has because the credibility of the Union government is also at stake. Try being cynical about this.

In BBC, Southik Biswas says the latest crisis should mark the beginning of a serious effort to clean up the game in India.

Indians have become inured to - even callous about - corruption, so there is a real possibility that Mr Modi will be made the fall guy, and there will be no meaningful, demonstrable change in the running of the cricket. At the same time India is largely a reactive society - only crises and scandals sometimes lead to real reforms. IPL-Gate - as many networks are describing the row - could then actually end up cleansing and reforming the cricket board, and the game could actually emerge stronger. It is time to restore the dignity of Indian cricketers and their fans.

The IPL final is today and in his final installment of his column in the Hindustan Times, Soumya Bhattacharya says he can't wait for the circus to end.

I'd pay for the privilege of not having to listen to Ravi Shastri or Danny Morrison or many of that lot. The terrific thing is that I shall have that privilege without having had to pay. Very often, I tend to watch Tests or ODIs with the TV throttled into silence. Like the marketing jargon that masquerades as English (`feedback'; `on the same page'; `aligned'), Indian cricket commentary clichés are so clichéd - and so rampant - that they have corrupted the language.

In the Indian Express, Aditya Iyer lists out the snippets and comic capers of IPL 3, including Dhoni's innocent gaffe about being welcomed in Chennai, and Yuvraj's meeting with the Dalai Lama.

The controversy involving the BCCI and the IPL dominates the media and public attention because this issue is not about the political interests of the Congress or the BJP, or about IPL commissioner Lalit Modi or former minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor, writes Arun Nehru in Asian Age. This concerns all of us as huge money is involved in the game and all government high-ups are involved.

We have seen the havoc created by offshore accounts in the US, UK and other European countries and we are all aware of the “special” financial agreements available in Dubai. We face a serious internal security threat on several fronts and a detailed investigation with the co-operation of the government in other countries is necessary to unveil the accounts in tax havens. Hopefully, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government will try to ensure that there is minimal discomfort to those who are not involved directly.

Lalit Modi's phenomenal success in conceptualising and executing the IPL has shown off his business acumen in the field of cricket. But outside of cricket, his other business ventures haven't been so successful, which involved court cases with ESPN and a proposed lifestyle channel which never took of. Archana Shukla has more in the New Indian Express.

In the same paper, Apruva writes on Modi's brush with politics and politicians, one that hasn't escaped controversy, including court cases and allegations of corruption. It all began with a slap in the face...

It was five years ago, soon after Modi became president of the Rajasthan Cricket Association. Modi had managed to accompany Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on his visit to the Ranthambore National Park and drove his car behind the PM’s motorcade. But a senior police officer, who didn’t recognise the cricket official, stopped Modi, asked him why he was “following” the convoy and then slapped him for getting too argumentative. Though that officer escaped Modi’s now-famed wrath, perhaps this incident sparked Modi’s disdain for government officers and bureaucrats.

In the same paper, Joby Joseph writes on Modi's background and a brief history of his foray into cricket.

Much before he finished school, Modi was keen to go to the US for higher studies. To realise this dream, he skipped his school-leaving examination in India, making him no longer eligible for admission in any of the Indian colleges. Lalit hated life in boarding schools in Shimla and Nainital. With no other option, Modi’s parents agreed to send him to America. To his credit, he performed well in SAT, or the Scholastic Aptitude Test, essential for admission to American colleges.

In the Herald on Sunday, Andrew Alderson has a long interview with Shane Bond about the New Zealand fast bowler's experience in the IPL, where his team the Kolkata Knight Riders missed out on a semi-final slot on net run-rate.

"Hundreds also paid to come and they were filmed for a show called IPL nights which was shown the next day on MTV.

"So you'd have a quiet beer and walk out only to face enormous crowds in the lobby. Then you'd turn on the telly in your room and the news channels would be talking about the game.

"In the end, you get used to people taking your photo and asking for signatures at breakfast and lunch. Everyone wants a piece of you all the time, but you realise how passionate Indians are about their cricket. It's a real eye-opener."

	The crisis in BCCI and IPL is something we are familiar with in the corporate world. © BCB

Politics has not just got mixed up with cricket, it is now threatening to overwhelm and damage it, writes Shekhar Gupta in the Indian Express. It would be tragic if just because of the shenanigans of a chosen few who have operated for six years as if they “own” the game, IPL itself were to acquire a bad name.

Armies of taxmen are now raiding anybody with anything to do with cricket as if they have busted the underground network of Dawood Ibrahim or discovered the headquarters of Lashkar-e-Toiba. There are weird demands to ban IPL, nationalise BCCI. Even usually sensible people are saying BCCI should be made a statutory but “autonomous” body. All of this is dangerous for India’s cricket and must stop. Indian cricket has never been in better shape. IPL is the finest new Indian brand of global value.

The weekly newsmagazine India Today analyses the IPL scandal, from the exit of Shashi Tharoor to the attempts to oust Lalit Modi.

In the Hindustan Times, Pradeep Magazine writes that the BCCI must put its foot down.

To show their positive intent, the first thing that Manohar should do is to restore the amended clause in the Board's constitution which barred a member from being part of any group which has business deal- ings with it. Not only has Modi to go, even Srinivasan should be told to choose between being a fran- chisee or a Board member.

Anand Vasu, in his blog for the same newspaper, says that if we all enjoyed the IPL, which certainly seemed the case, we should at least give Modi the opportunity to defend himself, or resign. What’s that phrase about giving the devil his due?

Surjit S Bhalla, in Business Standard, asks why Indian politicians are so bothered about promoting cricket in India when they, by their own admission, are overburdened with work and especially work that is in the service of the nation.

The Indian Express has a long profile of Lalit Modi, outlining his rise to becoming one of the most powerful men in cricket.

In the Wisden Cricketer, Sharda Ugra provides insight into how Lalit Modi operates, and how went about creating the Indian Premier League.

As the IPL gathered strength, Modi hit top form as businessman and powerbroker. A CEO of a national cricket board said dealing with Modi was like being in discussion with George Bush: “Either you are with him or you are against him.” The IPL is not cricket’s Afghanistan or Iraq, so everyone is with him. On the record, that is.

The closest anyone in office has come to speaking coolly is when the BCCI president, Shashank Manohar, said: “Mr Modi is a very good marketing person. In one line I’ve described him and that’s all I would like to say.” Cricket Australia’s CEO, James Sutherland, who held meetings to discuss the IPL with Modi in its early stages, said: “To grow in a cluttered entertainment market, cricket must provide a compelling proposition to its fans. Lalit has a remarkably clear view of this relationship between the sport and the public.”

IPL India is in shock, writes Sharda Urga on her blog in India Today, and that includes not just everyone with a stake in the event itself, but everyone who believed that the IPL was living proof of new India’s entrepreneurial muscle.

The official IPL power structure was blinded by the light. On Thursday evening, former India captain Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, a member of the IPL Governing Council whom Modi is battling against, confessed to the council’s errors on Indian televison saying, “As long as the product looked good, I was happy with it”. Those part of this “good” product – cricketers and commentariat - offered nothing other than devotional diarrhoea because it was part of their contract and their cheques did not bounce.

Having seen Kieron Pollard and Saurabh Tiwary play Dale Steyn in the IPL, Soumya Bhattacharya would really like to see them face him in a game of cricket. He writes in the Hindustan Times:

It's all very well for some of us to say that bowling in T20 deserves a different set of skills and a yorker at 145kmph is a yorker at 145kmph and that's that, but, come, come, we shouldn't delude our- selves. We are all adults, aren't we? Or so we like to believe.

In Sportstar, Kunal Diwan looks at the role of the finisher in the IPL. Seeing an innings through to a flourishing conclusion is a skill as specialised as bowling at the death. Finishers, thus, have their own sweet place in Twenty20 cricket, where three good overs — or three bad ones — can heavily influence the outcome of a match, he writes.

With the condensation of the game blurring lines between roles and elevating shorter spans of play to the status of an increased, more determinant proportion of the match, the importance of a player who provides the critical thrust in a few, potentially game-changing overs cannot be overstated. Then again, the art of finishing an innings — whether batting first or in pursuit — is exemplified by those who are perpetually aware of the bearing of their chunk of runs in the grand scheme of team interest. Awareness, however, is one thing. Its translation into reality is quite another, since the best interests of the finisher are perforce in conflict with those of the bowlers, the fieldsmen and the opposing captain.

In the same magazine, Raakesh Natraj looks at the rise of R Ashwin during IPL 2010.

Kadambari Murali Wade pieces together the power and political angles of the IPL jigsaw in Hindustan Times.

While the IPL is mired in off-field controversy, the brand itself has been tremendously successful. An editorial in the Indian Express asks the Indian government to deal with the mess the same way it handled the corporate fraud at Satyam - punish the offenders, but save the brand and its stakeholders.

Consider the interests of stakeholders other than the bosses of IPL. Consumers in India, and indeed abroad, are enjoying the cricket and the larger entertainment package being offered. Advertisers seem to find it worthwhile to pump in money where there is such a large audience. Broadcasters and franchise owners, and leave aside the murk for just a moment, must also see plenty of potential for profit to have invested so much money in the IPL. And the cricketers involved in actually dishing out the action are all better off (at least financially) from their participation in the league. Purists may worry about the fate of the game as they once knew it, but that is another debate.

With the Kochi-franchise controversy backfiring on Lalit Modi, Bachi Karkaria wonders in the Times of India whether the under-fire IPL chief is regretting his move to go after Shashi Tharoor.

The IPL is a nepotism scam as well. For now, only the Modi clan and cronies seem to have the juiciest plums, but who knows how many more family trees will tumble as the government, the BCCI and the media dig up the pitch. The biter has been bitten harder. Is Lalit Modi wishing that he had let sleeping Shashis lie – even through their teeth?

Jug Suraiya writes in the Times of India that the best way to clear up the IPL muddle is for fans to boycott the event, leading to a fall in TRPs and the money generated by the league.

Bans, in any context, are not part of the solution but only a compounding part of the problem. So who's to solve this problem? Greed is the key both to the problem and the solution. The IPL scam took place because of the humungous money involved. Who generates all that boodle? No, not the players, superb performers though they are. It's the Indian fans, more than willing to put their purse where their passion is, who've made cricket, particularly T20 and IPL, the money-spinner that it is. What would happen if these fans - if you - as a mark of protest to what is being done to the game were to switch off their TV sets, or switch channels to the news, or a soap, when a match was being played? Ratings would drop, the money would dry up. Greed would meet its comeuppance.

And on rediff.com, Sheela Bhatt deconstructs the murky goings-on in the Indian Premier League. Also check out this hilarious cartoon involving the now-defunct Indian Cricket League.

Dileep Premachandran writes in the Guardian that for most of the season the headlines were hogged by quality players like Sachin Tendulkar, Jacques Kallis and Anil Kumble but the bottom fell out of the IPL after one tweet from Lalit Modi. He wonders how long it will take to recover from the scandals of the past week.

The controversy surrounding the Kochi IPL franchise raises a number of uneasy questions for Ashok Malik, who poses some of them in Hindustan Times.

Was similar 'guidance' offered to bidders when the eight original franchises were sold in 2008? Is Kochi the only franchise with multiple proxy ownership suspicions - another person is supposed to be standing in for a Mumbai-based former cricketer - or does this cosy matrix extend to other teams? In handing out jobs and contracts at the IPL, did Modi invite tenders, issue job ads or did he just do as he pleased? In 'guiding' bidders and, initially, attempting to fix parameters so that only two bids were valid for - coincidentally - two franchises, was he acting on behalf of two powerful ministers who were themselves 'mentoring' teams?

Rohit Mahajan gets behind the scenes in Outlook's cover story to understand all the angles and potential off-shoots of the Kochi controversy.

Playing the unfamiliar role of a whistleblower, Modi was possibly unaware of its first consequence: immediate, intense scrutiny of the alarm-raiser himself. Unfortunately for Modi, his private dealings and operations as IPL commissioner don’t present a very flattering picture. His family’s ties with the IPL present a conflict of interest with his incumbency.

Be it controversies or auctions, the IPL is not entirely about on-field action. Richa Bhatia, in the Indian Express, looks at what happens in one of the tournament's biggest off-field activities - the after-match parties.

Delhi Daredevils teetered before Kings XI Punjab in the heat and dust of Ferozeshah Kotla, but you wouldn't know it at the ITC Maurya at the Capital -where the cricketers were put up and where they could, conveniently, party with the Others. The arrival desk outside the party zone was manned by bouncers in black suits, warding off the swarming crowd. Behind the desk, event management executives ticked off names on three lists - host IPL, designer's guests and fans. The fans were those who had bought Club Lounge passes for Rs 35,000 - for a match and this much more. (Or else, the match-alone ticket comes for Rs. 300 - 6,500.) Fans, festooned on the wrist with a green ribbon with "Match Number 44" (the Daredevils-Kings XI) inscribed, were ushered into a long IPL Night.

Lalit Modi's Midas' touch has helped him to make money for, and rise high within the BCCI, but Sharda Ugra, writing in backpagelead.com.au, believes the latest controversy has put the ball firmly in his higher authority's court.

Cranking up the ante may be an IPL staple, but what’s happening these days could make Don King swoon. The ‘world’s hottest sports league’ (Forbes feels so) is in boilover mode. Lalit Modi, the man considered cricket’s shiniest trophy is now the ornament whose plating is starting to chip. Not on television though because that is both his and the IPL’s kingdom. Modi still shows up in our air space, trailed by plumes of coloured smoke and words saying that his latest enemy-in-chief had an agenda which “will be taken down.” Oo, Dirty Harry, eat your heart out.

Cricket is no longer the innocent game it was at the time of C L R James, and while the IPL is not entirely to blame, it has taken the excesses to massive proportions according to Rajeev Deshpande in the Times of India Crest.

A long time ago, in an unimaginably more innocent era, C L R James famously wrote, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’’ He certainly nailed that one, but he may never have in his wildest dreams — or nightmares — foreseen the crazy evolution of his beloved sport. Like the men who play it, cricket is no longer clad in pristine white. Instead, it’s draped in psychedelic, garish hues, accessorised by beautiful women with tawdry pasts, moneybags whose bulging bank accounts seem to go hand-in-glove with a bankruptcy of scruples, dark whispers of underworld funds and ubiquitous fixers engaged in a frenzied climb up the greasy social pole.

While Lalit Modi and Shashi Tharoor have been at the centre of the latest storm, the real game-changer according to Sumit Mukherjee, is Shashank Manohar. He explains, in the same paper.

The contrast between Manohar and the urbane, US-educated Modi couldn’t have been any greater if a scriptwriter had set out to create them. Manohar doesn't carry a cell phone or a watch, didn't have a passport until 2007, and had never travelled abroad till he flew to Dubai to attend the ICC meeting in 2008. Also, unlike the smooth-talking, naturally exuberant Modi, Manohar is a man of few words. But when he does speak, he usually makes an impact. He certainly did so when the bids were first tabled for the two new IPL teams on March 7. Only two bidders qualified, leading to a stream of complaints that the draconian norms had been deliberately ‘fixed’ to ensure that only favoured parties could participate in the auction.

In the midst of the murkiness, P Sainath in the Hindu steps back to question why the cash-rich league is penalising the public while it enjoys unfair tax concessions and security subsidies.

A whole raft of concealed freebies from public resources to the BCCI-IPL is also not discussed. We have no picture of their full scope. No questions either on why a public sector company should be billing itself as the “sponsor” of a team owned by the fourth richest man in the planet. No questions asked about issues ranging from super-cheap land leases and stadia rentals and low-cost stadia security. We don't even know what the total bill to the public is: just that it is probably in tens of crores.

Pradeep Magazine writes in Hindustan Times that now is the time to intervene and clean up the mess.

Before knives are thrown at me, let me make it clear that I am not accusing anyone. Let me quote what Paul Condon, the director of ICC’s anti-corruption unit, had to say in 2008: “The IPL brings with it the biggest threat in terms of corruption in the game since the days of cricket in Sharjah.” Today when we are being made aware that there could be dubious funding involved in the IPL, shouldn’t we take this statement seriously?

Unfortunately, the IPL, for all its phenomenal success in becoming a global brand in barely three years, has lacked a certain transparency in its functioning. Do we, for example, have full disclosures of all the stakeholders of the IPL teams, including ‘related parties’ and ‘associate businesses’? asks Rajdeep Sardesai in the Hindustan Times.

These are questions that haven’t been fully answered because the IPL has been run like a tightly-knit Boys Club, a clique of the rich and famous who appear to have mutually decided the rules of engagement with Modi and Mammon as the presiding deities. IPL Kochi, let’s be honest, tried to gatecrash into the party. The owners weren’t business barons (or at least none we’d heard of), nor were they film stars. The only recognisable ‘face’ they possessed was a high-profile minister with an unquestioned passion for cricket.

The editorial in the Hindu is also about the controversy engulfing the IPL.

The Indian Premier League is an ingeniously conceived and spectacularly executed show. It features genuine sporting skills along with elements of the burlesque. Now into its third edition, it has acquired not just a mass following but also new cohorts of fans among those who did not know they would love cricket lite. But success has brought a stiff price: serious questions about the league's integrity and internal governance.

Shekhar Gupta adopts an "I told you so" tone in his column in the Indian Express reiterating the concerns he had raised when the IPL was shifted to 2009. He is thankful to the two power brokers - Shashi Tharoor and Lalit Modi - who have turned on each other to bring the issues surrounding the IPL to the fore.

Tharoor can now deny till he goes red in the face the insinuation from the other end that he allegedly advised them that the only way he could help block the visa was if someone filed a police complaint against her. But if he, instead, sent Modi a curt note as a minister as “propah” as his accent should have done, saying that such requests are not entertained by the minister’s office and can you please go to hell, it has not been shared with us.

In order to avoid future spats like Twittergate, an editorial in the Indian Express says the IPL can emulate the model followed by soccer's English Premier League.

There shouldn’t be an iron curtain when it comes to information on team and league ownership in professional sports leagues. Indeed, the IPL is one of the only global sports leagues about which so little is known when it comes to the stakeholders. Until now this was not really an issue; but transparency in ownership is a must, as is accountability of the league and confidence in its conforming with legal and ethical considerations.

Another editorial in the same paper says Modi’s weekend-ful of tweets has exposed the power struggle within the BCCI and confirmed suspicions about the arbitrariness and, worse, personal interests that dictate the conduct of Indian cricket. And given the context, the imposition of transparency on the sport must begin at the IPL.

A Hindustan Times editorial says that given the financial potential of the IPL, it cannot get by without being transparent.

If the IPL gets free press from the public auction for players, it cannot justifiably deny a similar interest in the less public auction for clubs. Messrs Modi and the grey eminences in the Board of Control for Cricket in India need to work this out. Till then, a via media is for the owners to take their clubs public. This serves the purpose of getting a proper fix on how much each club, and hence the IPL franchise, is worth.

The Indian players in the IPL have not played to expectations consistently enough, though there are exceptions like Robin Uthappa, writes Makarand Waingankar in the Hindu. There has been a suggestion from some of the foreigners in the IPL that the number of overseas players be raised to five.

To raise the level of the matches in the IPL, they could consider five foreigners for 50 per cent of the matches. This will definitely enhance the skill level and help the teams work on their strategies better. If a team is adding a foreign player it should inform the IPL Committee 24 hours before the match. That would make the match interesting. At the moment it is clear who the four foreign players are because no team carries all the 10 foreigners with it.

IPL teams have largely benefitted from Indian leaders with Shane Warne being the notable exception, says R Kaushik in the Deccan Herald.

Kumble isn’t as subtle as Warne. His aggression is naked, he sets high standards for himself and his team-mates, and isn’t afraid to turn on the heat in public, never mind if the recipient is a greenhorn or a former international skipper. His commitment is a hundred percent every single minute, and he won’t ask anything of his mates that he himself wouldn’t do. He believes in doing the hard yards himself – such as taking the new-ball against the likes of Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden in crucial games – and benefits from the respect and admiration of his peers and opponents alike.

Debesh Banerjee and G S Vivek explore in the Indian Express how the IPL's sponsored after-match parties, at which "the unwritten rule is that top stars need to make an appearance", are adding to players' exhaustion.

A top player speaks about the effect on their body clock. “We return to the hotel from the match around midnight and get ready for the party. Most of these parties go on till the wee hours. When the players get up around afternoon, it’s time to catch a flight to the next destination,” he says. “There are days when the game is over in three hours while the party goes on for six hours. Off-the-field fatigue is more than the tiredness on field.”

Ramachandra Guha questions the choice of Pune and Kochi for the two new franchises in the IPL, arguing in the Kolkata-based Telegraph that neither city has a cricketing reason to get a spot in the Twenty20 tournament. He also asks why the three large north Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh have no franchise in the IPL.

... this tournament both reflects and further intensifies a deep divide between the India of wealth and entitlement and the India — or Bharat — of poverty and disenfranchisement. Writing about the dangerous growth of inequality in India, the economist, Amartya Sen, warned some years ago that if present trends continued, half of India would look like the American state of California, the other half like sub-Saharan Africa. Since he made this comment, California has been beset with an acute — and apparently irreversible — fiscal crisis. Perhaps we might then substitute the state of Massachusetts for it. But the point remains; there are indeed two Indias, the one which is awarded IPL franchises, and the other which is not.

The sheer presence of the IPL is such that it demands to be watched. Private money has poured into the tournament, uncaring of the financial crisis that has coincided neatly with the IPL's lifetime. But the tournament is also a symbol of capitalism gone horrifically wrong, writes Samanth Subramanian in Huffington Post.

The IPL pursues revenues at the expense of other valuable resources: Test cricket, but also domestic cricket, the inevitable breeding grounds for young talent. In its grubbing for money, in fact, the IPL is dismissive of anything old-fashioned, anything aesthetic; even the four seconds between one ball and the next, held sacrosanct through more than a century of cricket, have been sold for inconsequential advertisements. Meanwhile, owners buy teams for staggering quantities of money and with the fuzziest possibilities of recovering their investment; they desire only to dice up the risk and sell it in parts to sponsors and other companies, a practice that should surely sound familiar to us today.

While Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist mat have led their sides to the title, Subhash Rajta feels that, in general, foreign captains have struggled in the IPL. At a point when the bottom three teams in the league table are the ones being led by overseas captains, he digs deeper in the Hindustan Times.

Pietersen points out a pattern that could help solve the riddle. “The successful foreign captains - Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist - are retired internationals. The current foreign internationals leading the sides have struggled. It’s tough for them to lead,” he said. The Royal Challengers player draws upon his experience to elaborate. “I found captaincy very tough last year. I didn’t even know the names of quite a few local players and couldn’t understand them much. It affected my batting as well and I think Sangakkara is facing the same problem,” said Pietersen.

The expectations of ITV - the broadcaster for the IPL in the UK - were not great when it was offered the rights, but halfway into the tournament, the viewing figures for the channel have been described as "unheard of", says Robin Scott-Elliot in the Independent. The booming UK audience is a measure of the success of the league, but the coverage may not be to everyone's taste, he adds.

In return ITV 4 has garnered an audience that has frequently been more than 10 times its average afternoon viewing figures and often treble the size of its peak-time average. It's money well spent.

The last two Sundays have earned peaks of 563,000 and 530,000 respectively. On that first Sunday, England's Test in Bangaladesh attracted an average audience of 151,000 – ITV 4's average for its nine hours of IPL transmission that day was 297,000. This on a channel that has a usual day-time return of fewer than 50,000, and this for a tournament that averaged 33,000 on Setanta last year.

It has been an astonishing success, but an evening spent at an IPL game reveals a grand spectacle desperately in search of a point, writes Barney Ronay in the Guardian.

Having sat through (and enjoyed) back-to-back Delhi Daredevils fixtures, later described separately in the Indian press as "pulsating" and "mighty", I would identify two problems. First the standard of cricket is mixed: spectacularly skilful moments, combined with some mediocre bowling and often appalling fielding. Secondly it simply doesn't matter who wins. As a sporting contest these matches have no real content. The franchises are still hotchpotches of familiar faces, (most of whom will rotate in the next two years). The allegiance in the stands is only replica shirt-deep, and the IPL itself still a vehicle mainly for personal achievement.

Harbhajan Singh might be at the top of his game with bat and ball, but his consistently poor conduct over the first three seasons of the IPL leaves a lot to be desired, feels Khalid A-H Ansari. Writing in Mid-day, Ansari says that although he loves 'Bhajji', the phenomenal entertainer, "I could do without his wanton shenanigans".

Leave aside his behaviour towards opponents in Test and one-day cricket, which have earned him opprobrium from umpires, match referees, the media and fans in India and abroad, Harbhajan's raffish behaviour in the three editions of IPL has been notably consistent.

The redoubtable off-spinner's constant refrain that his "aggression" helps his performance is patently misconceived. If anything, it is self-defeating.

Writing in his blog, Smoke Signals, Prem Panicker thinks it is time for Yuvraj Singh to rise above fitness and attitude problems, and stop taking things for granted.

When the batting bench was under-staffed, the Prince of Sulks could get away with riding his luck and playing the odd game-breaking innings once or twice a season to keep himself in the frame [when I brought up his name in a recent chat with friends, two of them were quick to go 'Remember his six sixes?']. That, I suspect, is a luxury he can no longer afford.

The IPL's reliance on foreign cheerleaders reinforces unsavoury Indian stereotypes about sex and women, writes Kanishk Tharoor in the Guardian.

I'm not offended by cheerleading, more bored by it. In any grown-up context, it offers a dispiriting definition of both leadership and cheer. Many cricket fans, including myself, would be happy to see the (metaphorical) back of these cheerleaders. Their twists and pumps add nothing to what is, in truth, a wonderful sporting spectacle. They are a reminder of the ocean of inanities that commercial modernity promises our lives, drowning all occasions in froth. First the fall from grace, then the flood.

Rohit Mahajan, writing in Outlook, examines why Kochi's bid for an IPL team made perfect business sense given the city's rapidly growing consumerism and the impending housing boom.

“It’s recognition of Kochi as the economic capital of Kerala,” says Kochi-based economist Ajit Kumar. “The average Malayali is a very emotional and competitive person, and it satisfies his ego to have a team in the IPL.” He also mentions a more compelling reason for the presence of the IPL in Kochi—fiscal fluidity and demand for housing. “I’ve estimated that by the end of the 11th Five Year Plan (2007-2012), there would be a demand for 1,20,000 housing units in Kochi alone,” he says. “At present, 50,000 units are available—the shortfall is massive, and that’s why so many builders are among the Kochi owners.” They want to build a brand through the IPL and lure customers to future housing projects

India Today, one of the country's leading newsmagazines, has a cover story that looks at the IPL money machine, whether it can be sustained and what plans Modi has for the future.

As the new teams scramble, Modi will continue to venture further. New media rights such as live streaming on mobiles, mobile Internet, mobile scorecards and smart phone applications, which he hopes will explode once 3G technology is introduced in India. He also hopes to tap international audience, changing the IPL's platform in the UK in Season 3 from the bankrupt Setanta to free-on-air ITV 4.

The Economist looks at how and whether teams can make money given the astronomical sums they have paid to be part of the IPL.

Deepti Chaudhary points out in Mint how companies who are new to India are using the IPL to become household names in the country.

On DreamCricket, Gulu Ezekiel wonders where the two new teams, Pune and Kochi, will find their players from.

Sachin Tendulkar has been electric in the IPL so far, prompting speculation last week whether he should return to international Twenty20s, which he gave up in 2007. Ayaz Memon sums up in the Daily Telegraph the three prevailing attitudes towards Tendulkar's return to India colours for Twenty20s.

One which feels that Tendulkar is too old for T20 and should not go even if he wants to (minuscule), another which believes that he should go only if he wants to, and the third which says that that he should go for the sake of the country even if he doesn’t want to.

Ayaz Memon is still flabbergasted at the money offered for the two new IPL franchises. In Mint, he ponders what player salaries are going to be like when the new auction is held later this year.

Where this will take players’ salaries is the big buzz already in board rooms and dressing rooms. Some of the figures being mentioned for stars with strong brand value are so astronomical that I can’t even repeat them here for fear of being considered a lunatic. All I can say is that cricket, and particularly the IPL, appears to be going out of whack.

In the Hindustan Times, Soumya Bhattacharya wonders why he doesn't get the same rush watching Sachin Tendulkar's exquisite strokeplay in the IPL as during a Tendulkar innings for India.

For the most part, there is only one big motivation for playing — and playing well — in the IPL: money. In the league, there are many players whose international careers are over (Warne, Gilchrist, Kumble, Ganguly).

The money from this is all they can make out of playing cricket now. But for fans like me, it's different. I don't get paid to watch the IPL.

And my cricket-watching days are far from over. (At the flick of a remote, I can watch an Australia v New Zealand Test in Sydney.) Without the frisson that watching one's country play, the IPL seems like what I've suggested before: a game that is not cricket at all.

Steve Waugh chats with the Hindu about the future of Twenty20 cricket, the nomination of John Howard as successor to Sharad Pawar as ICC president, and different styles of cricket coaching.

Telford Vice makes tongue-in-cheek analogies between the IPL's protagonists and the main characters of Alice in Wonderland, in iol.co.za.

Lalit Modi would make the purrfect Cheshire cat. He's always smiling and smug, appearing and disappearing on our screens at the whim of the director, who is, we are told, at the beck and call of the fat cat himself.

So, who's the IPL's own Bandersnatch, the big, bad feline monster who first attacks Alice and then becomes her ally? Step up, Andrew Symonds.

Stayne, the Knave of Hearts? Forgive me, Shahrukh Khan.

Preity Zinta will do nicely as the White Queen. Shilpa Shetty will have to put up with playing the nasty Red Queen. Absolem, the blue caterpillar who dispenses absolute wisdom from within a cloud of hookah smoke, seems to me a dead ringer for the sage-like Sachin Tendulkar.

An article in the Indian business paper, Mint, suggests that the IPL could be one of the 200 most valuable brands in the world, but warns that viewer fatigue is likely to become a serious problem.

We are already seeing data that suggest viewers are now being more finicky and watching only those matches that feature their teams. It is likely that IPL may not keep getting new viewers, but existing viewers may be spread across more matches. Since broadcasting revenues are so critical to profitability, this is a risk the IPL management will have to grapple with.

The Canadian newspaper, Globe and Mail, puts the valuation of the new franchises in perspective: the new teams are each worth at least US$100m more than the winners of the National Hockey League, the Pittsburg Penguins.

Gujarat may have lost out on its IPL dream with Ahmedabad failing to make the cut, but the state will still have a strong connection to the IPL going forward. A report in the Telegraph reveals that Gujarati businessmen have a 50% stake in the Kochi franchise which was picked up for the price of $333.33 million by Rendezvous Sports World Ltd.

G Viswanath, writing in the Hindu, says the IPL's two new franchises, Pune and Kochi, can expect to shell out a fair sum by way of investments and expenditure in the next few years, while the other eight franchises, that earned significantly lower bids when bought, will be bouyed by their valuation count in a short span of three years.

Barney Ronay in the Guardian dissects the ITV coverage of the Indian Premier League. Not so much the cricket, but it is the studio punditry he believes is one of the most compellingly stilted and uneven productions the game has seen.

"We've got 10 times last year's audience in the UK," Ravi Shastri purred on commentary, and a high-water mark of 400,000 viewers does sound impressive. This must be put into perspective. In the same time-slot Grandpa In My Pocket (target age: 4-6 years) is pulling in 518,000 viewers on CBeebies, a margin of victory that makes you wonder if Grandpa In My Pocket should think about getting in a DJ, fringing itself with podium dancers and going out to "crack" America

	What were you thinking Shane? © (file photo) Getty Images

The Twenty20 format is too one-sided and monotonous to enjoy, where the batsman is the emperor and the bowler a pauper. Pradeep Magazine, while assessing the IPL in the Hindustan Times, believes for any sport to be enjoyed, it has to pit two sets of skills against each other and create conditions and ground rules which do not favour one against the other.

The IPL reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen's tale 'The Emperor's New Clothes' where two conmen trick the emperor and his subjects into believing that the dress which they have made for him will not be visible to those who are either not fit for their jobs or are fools...In the story it is a child who speaks the truth. Here, at the risk of being called a dunce, I echo what the child said: “The emperor is not wearing anything at all.“

Although Shane Warne can still keep a tidy length, his days of pulling rabbits out of hats are possibly behind him. Peter Roebuck elaborates on the beginning of the end for the Rajasthan Royals captain in the Hindu.

Warne has not played any hard cricket for three years. No amount of nets or training runs, let alone hands of poker, can prepare mind and body half as well as genuine combat. Great cricketers can keep going for a year or two before time catches up with them. Eventually brazen opponents realise that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes.

More Warne bashing, as Mike Selvey in the Sport blog on the Guardian website says the Rajasthan captain calling Yusuf Pathan's blitzkrieg against Mumbai Indians as the greatest innings ever is an insult.

Dear God, Warnie, forget the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd and all that living-in-the-moment adrenaline stuff. Forget, for a minute, your vested interest in promoting IPL, or even making a team-mate feel even better about himself. Just think before you open your mouth. Nope.

With MS Dhoni, Gautam Gambhir and Yusuf Pathan all picking up injuries in the first week of the IPL, Partha Bhaduri asks in the Times of India whether the league is denting India's hopes of winning the World Twenty20 which starts next month?

Could the sheer intensity of IPL games derail India's World T20 prospects? Given the spate of injuries to players who are expected to play a key role in the West Indies starting from April 30 - New Zealand play Sri Lanka at Providence just five days after the IPL final - it might finally be time for some cricketers to take a call on how best to preserve their energies.

Sharda Ugra says the $20,000 fines handed to Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar, Gautam Gambir and Kumara Sangakkara during the IPL's first weekend is obscene because it flaunts the tournament's bloated self-image and complete detachment from proportion. Read her blog on the India Today website.

Could the IPL's slow-over rate actually just be a Prada bag in disguise? To be given to some really lucky woman (or rather the woman who thinks she is lucky to get one)?

Dileep Premachandran's spent the last week criss-crossing India to watch IPL matches. Here's his take on the tournament so far in the Guardian.

There's been some fine cricket, too. Sure, Shane Warne was guilty of hyperbole and revisionism when he called Pathan's 37-ball century the best he'd ever seen, but it was still a thrilling display of power and timing. In the same match, Ambati Rayudu, once touted as India's next big thing, and Sourabh Tiwary took on Warne with the fearlessness that comes easily to the young. A day later, Manoj Tiwary, the wasted years in Delhi behind him, delighted his home crowd in Kolkata with a superb innings against Dale Steyn and Anil Kumble.

All well worth watching, if not quite in the same league as the Kallis masterclass on Tuesday night. Not too many sides chase down 204, and even fewer do it with seven balls to spare. Manish Pandey (38 from 26 balls) and Robin Uthappa (51 from 21) exploded grenades around him, but it was Kallis that finally took out the Kings XI, easing to 45 from 38 balls before smashing 44 from the next 17 that he faced.

With the IPL, it seems jingoism has found a new vehicle in India and the rest of the cricket world is told to dance to its tune or take a hike, feels Gulu Ezekiel. Read his piece in the New Indian Express.

Make no mistake — Modi and the IPL’s ultimate target is not six or eight weeks in the calendar. The recent deals struck by the Rajasthan Royals franchise with teams from England, South Africa and the West Indies is just the first step. The franchise owners will never be satisfied with being in the spotlight for just six to eight weeks a year. Their target, hand-in-glove with Modi, is to expand their operations worldwide and year-round. The Board of Control for Cricket in India too is complicit in this scheme of things.

World cricket domination is in Modi’s sights and it is the Indian cricket public who will decide whether he gets what he desires or has his ambitious plans thwarted.

In the desperate search for superlatives, players and coaches are constantly going overboard, and a brilliant case in point is the IPL. Anand Vasu explains in his blog Drinks Break on the Hindustan Times website.

Only recently Shane Warne described Yusuf Pathan’s scorching IPL hundred as the best innings he had ever seen. Now, either the megabucks the Rajasthan Royals are paying the great leggie are getting to his head or he has completely erased two decades of international cricket from his memory.

With murmurs about West Indian great Brian Lara returning for the next season of the IPL, Ayaz Memon writes in his blog in the Daily Telegraph that while star-power was essential when the IPL was launched in 2008, it is no longer the case with the tournament having had two successful seasons.

The best talent should find expression in the tournament, which means selection should be highly merited. If Lara – and I am only using him as an example – fits in, great; if he doesn’t tough luck. Star value and the entertainment quotient, so crucial to the success of the IPL yet, can only be extraneous to the game itself. What will ensure credibility in the long run is the quality of the product. In other words, the cricket played in the middle.

The Indian Premier League's market-targeted speed brings a depressing echo of the age. Why not offer an alternative rhythm? asks Mike Marqusee in the Guardian.

There's nothing new in the power of money shaping cricket's destiny. It's 230 years since Thomas Lord put a fence around his ground and began charging admission. Gamblers and publicans sponsored much of the game's early development. But the ideology of cricket, as it developed in the 19th and for much of the 20th century, disdained the cash nexus. Sordid monetary affairs were disguised behind the cult of amateurism and its ugly shadow, "shamateurism".

The difference now is that money is in the forefront of the game's culture, its power shameless and explicit. And with the IPL's introduction of private ownership of major teams – by far the most significant and potentially invidious of its innovations – that trend is institutionally entrenched. Not since the mid-19th century (with the exception of the Packer interlude) have representative cricket entities been private assets. As in other industries, the change from patronage to ownership will prove a giant step. Whether in the right direction is another question.

When Twenty20 started a few years ago, it was famously labelled as Mickey Mouse cricket by the oracle of cricketing puritanism. But then India won the inaugural T20 World Championship in 2007 against all odds and all hell broke loose. The IPL arrived the following year and Mickey Mouse, it was realized quickly enough, was in fact Godzilla, writes Ayaz Memon in the Daily Telegraph.

For instance, a 22-year-old rookie India player is reported to have bought a three bedroom apartment in tony area in mid-town Mumbai within a year of his playing in the IPL. How high the stakes now are becomes evident from the fact that it took the great Sachin Tendulkar almost a decade to invest in an apartment in a similar neighbourhood. The rookie, I hear, has also bought a Porsche and lives life in the fast lane in more ways than one.

In the Times of India, Imran Khan gives his views on each of the eight IPL captains.

Shane Warne: A born leader, I rate him very highly for his cricket brain and also his ability to absorb pressure. Shane has also shown that he can work with youngsters, and Rajasthan did really well under him in the first year. The only reason I have not placed him at the top of the heap is because he is not playing regular cricket. This will make a difference with every
passing year of the IPL. He has now not played cricket for over two years, and that’s a long time.

In his column in the Hindustan Times, Gautam Gambhir shares an anecdote about how the IPL has brought players of different nationalities together.

At the T20 World Cup last year in England, on the eve of South Africa’s semifinal, I got an SOS visit from my Delhi Daredevils’ mate, AB de Villiers in Trent Bridge. India, unfortunately, were already out of the championship and AB, one of the mainstays of the Proteas line-up, had broken all his bats.

He dropped in and asked if he could borrow one of mine. I just said, “My kitbag’s over there, open it and take what you want. We’re out, you’re in, they're all yours”.

If you don't know the Knight Riders from the Royal Challengers, the Guardian provides a basic intro to the eight IPL teams. And in the Daily Telegraph, Nick Hoult calls this year's competition the first real IPL, since it's being held in India and is not the rush job that the first season was.

Also check out this profile of Lalit Modi in the Times, where he is called "a successor to Gandhi, in Gucci loafers."

In an interview to Mint, a business paper, Kolkata Knight Riders co-owner, Jay Mehta, talks about choosing the wrong players in the first auction, how the team has attracted pan-India support and a slew of sponsors thank to having Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan as a co-owner, and his concerns over two new teams joining the competition next year.

The addition of two more teams means there will be more competition for players, sponsors and fans. I am not too concerned on sharing of revenues. But it will mean more teams vying for the same sponsor base.

In the Guardian, Jason Burke watches IPL mania build up in Kolkata, while in the same paper, Dileep Premachandran warns that the bounty on offer at the IPL could distract Bangladesh's upcoming young stars.

You also wonder how much both Ashraful and Mortaza have been affected by IPL fortune. The Knight Riders' signing of Mortaza for $600,000 represented perhaps the most bizarre acquisition in the annals of sport. As everyone assembled at the auction in Goa and thousands watching on TV scratched heads in disbelief, he joined the august rank of misfits like the footballers Andrea Silenzi and Juan Sebastián Verón. Apart from being carted all over the park by Rohit Sharma in a match that the Knight Riders had as good as won, he did next to nothing in South Africa.

Also read this Economic Times article which suggests that brand clutter is gaining momentum with more than 100 brands competing for the consumer’s attention during the IPL.

The sport is big money in India, but this piece in the Economic Times believes it’s not quite cricket to prise such sums for new IPL franchises in a country where others sports house themselves in cowsheds and crumbling infrastructure.

Is some enterprising soul going to now try and convince us that some sort of trickle-down effect from the rich coffers of the IPL/BCCI is going to better things all around? Or are these vast sums more a reflection of what the bosses of the IPL think their scheme deserves?

It's become fashionable to criticise Lalit Modi at every opportunity, but his stance over the relocation (or not) of games appears reasonable. While players do have an individual choice to make over the IPL, Dileep Premachandran writing in the Guardian website believes Lalit Modi is right to stand firm.

Do we seriously expect Modi or other sports administrators to go weak at the knees each time some obscure terror group decides to exercise the speed-dial option? India has the Commonwealth Games to host in October and a cricket World Cup final next March. Admission of any inability to secure the IPL would be tantamount to saying that those events should be moved as well. After all, how many Commonwealth athletes, Usain Bolt apart, are as renowned as a Warne or Sachin Tendulkar?

The IPL doesn't count its success merely in terms of valuation on paper. According to Sundar Raman, the IPL CEO, the bigger achievement is the ability to get more fans involved in the game. Read his full interview in the Economic Times.

The basic difference between brands and IPL is that it caters to consumers and fans respectively. Sure, IPL is a brand and there’s a big opportunity, but we are content, we are cricket and it’s a sport at the end of the day. We are multi-dimensional and people see us as a multifaceted brand.

Lalit Modi has decided to limit the number of IPL teams to 10, at least for the next eight years. Contractual obligations with channels, a limit on the number of playing days and the availability of players may even prompt two tiers in the league. He reveals more in an interview to Anand Vasu in the Hindustan Times.

The bread and butter of the BCCI are still Tests and ODIs. It's really important for us to invest in this because it's at the core of our cricket culture. What Twenty20 is doing is bringing new fans into the game. We were all worried about football making giant strides and capturing the minds of young people. Twenty20 has stemmed that, at least in our country.

After the Ravindra Jadeja IPL fiasco, Desh Gaurav Sekhri, a sports attorney, writes on the sportzpower.net website that currently the balance of power is firmly on the side of the tournament's organisers and not at all on the side of the players. He says that eventually a players' association should evolve to represent them in interaction with franchises and the organisers.

At present there is little representation for the players, and while critics may claim that the players have a sweet deal in the IPL, the fact remains that for dispute resolution or any sort of unified negotiations with the League, a group of Players Representatives is required. In international leagues this is a vital aspect of any leagues’ functioning, dealing with issues ranging from suspensions, labor negotiations/lockouts, agency, and drug-testing, to collective bargaining. For the successful and sustainable functioning of the IPL, it too will need a Players’ body which is well-represented by a cross-section of key personnel and other appointees along with a diverse representative pool of players both international as well as domestic.

The IPL's decision to move matches from Hyderabad and Vishakapatnam over the Telengana issue is criticised in this editorial in the Indian Express. The decision, the editorial says, has been taken by ignoring the situation on the ground and state government, and the overreach has damaged efforts to manage the security situation in the country.

But the board’s overreach is making the IPL unsafe for this country. Take the latest two-step. Sharad Pawar last week called on Bal Thackeray, at a time when the Shiv Sena stood at its most politically isolated, an isolation that threatened to also marginalise the NCP. But it was let out that Pawar was not calling on Thackeray in his capacity as an NCP leader, but in fact, to win the Sena chief over for the smooth conduct of IPL matches.

In the Wisden Cricketer, Lawrence Booth wonders what the implications the global deal between Rajasthan Royals and teams from three other countries mean. Among the questions he asks are:

Will anyone watch?

If you were a Hampshire supporter, would you pay to turn up at the Rose Bowl in July and watch Trinidad & Tobago v Cape Cobras? The Royals 2020 brains trust insists big names and high-quality cricket will be enough to fill grounds, but this was presumably said with fingers crossed, and the example of the Champions League was not encouraging: Indian fans quickly lost interest after the IPL franchises were knocked out. But if this idea can attract yet another new type of fan (or are we running out of new types of fans?), then at the very least, the suits will be telling themselves, it’s got to be worth a try.

Mike Atherton, in the Times, says "national governing bodies hold sway" for the moment but he feels that "ultimately, the franchises have certain advantages in this battle for power."

Having scored his runs, taken his wickets and contextualised his name in perpetuity, there is no doubting which side Shane Warne is on now: forget the Ashes, he said this week, the IPL was one of the greatest moments of his cricketing career, if not the greatest.

The scramble is on. Paul Sheldon, the Surrey chief executive, has been in India, along with several other county chief executives, gauging reaction and potential tie-ups; Jim Cumbes, the Lancashire chief executive, sounding somewhat late out of the blocks, said that a county of Lancashire’s size, reputation and importance would be foolish to overlook the potential. All the while they sounded like newspaper executives did when they talked of the internet not so long ago — that there must be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow somewhere and they had better not be the ones to miss out.

In the Guardian, Mike Selvey writes about what really bothers him about the deal -"... the sheer arrogance of Manoj Badale, Warne and Sean Morris, men who speak not of cricket but in the language of franchises, marketing models, brand awareness, business opportunities and bottom lines in trying to impose something upon a structure which is already overseen by another organisation."

As the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament draws closer, the buzz around team owners selling partial or even full stakes in their franchises gets stronger, writes Priyanka Mehra Dayal in the Mint.

Shares of publisher Deccan Chronicle Holdings Ltd, owner of Deccan Chargers, surged after the report that Kings XI Punjab had been sold, prompting speculation the firm’s valuation may increase. The stock rose 4.9% to Rs152.30 on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Meanwhile, Delhi Daredevils is looking to sell a 30% stake and is in talks with investors, confirmed a senior executive from the IPL franchise owned by GMR Holdings Pvt. Ltd, an infrastructure and construction firm.

It's that time of the year again. We're a little more than a month away from the third season of the IPL. The League has issued its guidelines for the media. Most of it appears excessively stringent for television channels, websites and other news outlets. Read Prem Panicker's take on it.

He [Modi] is shrewd enough to understand that he cannot achieve that objective in one stroke — so his preferred option seems to be, each season, to come up with a slate of laws that are clearly unacceptable. The media will talk boycott; Modi will in turn talk compromise. And knowing that the media is hungry for anything it can get, he will make a few “concessions”, the media will proclaim a victory — and Modi will be the one laughing last, for despite those “concessions” he will reluctantly acquiesce to under “media pressure”, he would have managed to get many restrictions in place, and institutionalised. He can then wait for season four, and start the dance all over again. And each season, he will get a little more, and be that bit further along on the road to the complete monopoly that is his ultimate goal.

From the pointed end of terrorism to the relatively mundane possibility of lost baggage, the IPL has every eventuality covered. Falaknaaz Syed in the Hindustan Times explains the insurance framework in place for the third season.

As players not bought at one of the auctions generally cost their owners less, the cover is proportionately lower - a Rs 25 lakh to one crore personal accident policy and a Rs 5 lakh medical cover. Finally, there's also a cushion in place for a staging association, in case of any mishap - a stampede, a fire in the stands etc - Rs 10 crore for each of the 60 matches.

	The truth is out there: Lalit Modi © Getty Images

In her blog on the India Today website, Sharda Ugra questions why the people involved in the IPL did not choose to be plainspeakers by explaining their view why the Pakistanis couldn’t be a part of the auction.

The statement would have made us all shift in our chairs and accuse the IPL/ movie stars/ businessmen/ franchise owners of a pragmatism-overload or a lack of courage and that would have been the end of it. Maybe that’s why it was never said. Better to put 11 Pakistani cricketers on the block and then out to dry by talking about “limited slots”, “tactical decisions” and “availability issues”.

Rohit Mahajan, writing in Outlook magazine, has a similar view. He not only believes that excluding Pakistanis from the IPL was a sordid affair, but that Lalit Modi was its unctuous author.

In the same magazine, Ajith Pillai imagines the secret diary of Lalit Modi.

The outrage in Pakistan over the exclusion of their players in the IPL auctions is understandable, because of the manner in which the delicate situation was handled by the franchises and Lalit Modi, who didn't drop any hints as to what could happen at the auction, writes Rohit Mahajan in Outlook. Salman Ahmed of Portfolio World Sports Management, who manages several Pakistani players, says the sponsors had a right to be wary after the Mumbai attacks, but could have used a bit of tact and honesty in dealing with the Pakistan players.

Tanvir, who played a key role in the Rajasthan Royals win in 2008, says it was a bolt from the blue when their names were added to the auction list. “I was certain I was going to play for my team!” he told Outlook. “I’d got a letter from Rajasthan Royals saying I’d be playing this season for them, to help me get the visa. Then, three days before the auction, I was told I was going to be put on auction. And then came the humiliation at the auction—there was no need to do this!”

It is time, people on either side of the [India-Pakistan] divide realise that IPL is all to do with greed and it is best not to get emotionally used and mix "lofty" sentiments like nationalism with this mean business, which gives money primacy over sport, writes Pradeep Magazine in the Hindustan Times.

One wonders as to how long it will take India and Pakistan to start regretting their part in the affair of the so-called Indian Premier League’s snub to Pakistani cricketers, for neither party can claim to have reason on its side, writes IA Rehman in Dawn.

	The anger in Pakistan about their players not playing in the IPL is entirely justified © Getty Images

Pradeep Magazine, in the Hindustan Times, says it was insensitive on the part of the IPL and the franchises to put the Pakistan players on the auction list but then ignore them. The strong protests in Pakistan have gone further in intensifying the differences and bode poorly for relations between the two countries and the game itself.

The Pioneer's Ashok Malik believes there are two ways of looking at the decision of the eight franchises to not bid for a single Pakistani cricketer. The first is to resort to the old cliché that “sports and politics must not mix”. The second is to consider a broader phenomenon - the increasing role of Indian business in both shaping and reflecting foreign policy and its concerns.

Asha’ar Rehman, writing in the Pakistan daily Dawn, compares the standard diagnosis and prescription procedure of the IPL mess as somewhat reminiscent of a theme in a Manto story whose main character believed he had a cure for constipation and wanted to convince people that they all suffered from it.

On his India Uncut blog, Amit Varma writes that all this speculation about government directives and collusion between teams is pointless. Each franchise looked to its self-interest and made a perfectly rational decision. Such as it goes.

In Mint, Ayaz Memon looks back at the history of political tension between India and Pakistan and wonders if cricket can provide the healing touch once more.

With the politicians from both countries getting involved in the IPL auction controversy, the editorials of most Indian newspapers are also holding forth on the issue. The Hindu wonders why Pakistan players weren't excluded from the auction shortlist if there were concerns over their security clearances or visas.

The Indian Express calls for the Indian government to bring the IPL's organisers to account for the damage caused to relations between the two countries.

IPL is a work in progress, and cricket officials are clearly using it to test the limits to which they can consolidate their turf as a state within a state. Last year they invoked the calendar as a pretext for conceit. Now they are wrecking a civility that’s survived even through the darkest days of Indo-Pak relations. Whatever be the state of play in relations between the two governments, cricket has been a sphere to assert a normative standard of people-to-people interaction. In fact, governments have drunk deep from this carefully harvested reservoir of goodwill. Modi and his cohorts, by their arrogant disregard for the consequences for their actions, have depleted that reservoir.

The Times of India says both the Indian government and the IPL's organisers come out poorly from the episode.

In the Hindustan Times, Ayaz Memon writes that it is improbable that the three major stakeholders - the Indian government, the IPL and the franchise owners - were driven by plain business considerations.

The Kolkata-based Telegraph also says the hamhandedness involved in allowing Pakistan players on the shortlist and then not picking them has done immense disservice to the game, and to the cause of peace.

And in the Pakistani daily Dawn, Saad Shafqat calls the exclusion of Pakistan players "patently cruel" and urges the PCB to launch a franchise-based Twenty20 league in Pakistan.

On her blog Free Hit in India Today, Sharda Ugra says the IPL should just have been upfront about the reasons behind the exclusion of the Pakistan players, instead of hiding behind less-than-satisfactory excuses like a lack of slots or availability issues.

	The exclusion of the Twenty20 world champions has not gone down well in Pakistan © Getty Images

Gaurav Kalra, writing on Cricketnext.com, says the IPL franchises should have expressed their reluctance to bid for Pakistan cricketers upfront, instead of resorting to weak cricketing logic to justify their decision.

So it was the presumption that they might become "unavailable" led to this decision. And since the team owners are pumping in the money, they have every right to put it where the investment returns. If they choose not to risk it, that's fine too. All we ask is that instead of skirting the issue and hiding behind shallow words, they let us know. What's that line about honesty being the best policy??!

The PCB should have seen this coming, says Nauman Niaz in Pakistan's Daily Times. India's attempts at dominating cricket's financial market were evident in some of their previous actions, he says, and it is now up to the PCB to rebuild Pakistan's cricket by delivering a better deal to its cricketers.

Pakistan have proved a competitive outfit and performed admirably despite the absence of international cricket in their country in the aftermath of the Lahore attacks, and their exclusion from the IPL is just plain wrong, writes Kevin McCallum in the Independent Online.

Rajesh Kalra is one of the few journalists defending the move to not pick the Pakistan players. He writes on his blog in the Times of India:

We all know the fan following in the current scenario is fickle. Fans may adore someone, but one brutal attack in Kashmir or elsewhere will change the situation diametrically in a jiffy. Now, if I am a franchisee who has invested in a Pakistani player, why would I risk it? And it is not just risking the franchisee’s reputation, it is even risking the safety of players from all over the world, on the ground, in the hotel where they stay and while they travel. Why would a franchisee invest heavily in a great player if the wrongdoings by his country somewhere works against his interest? The franchisee, after all is investing in these teams for brand building, not negative publicity.

The Indian Express Editorial has lashed out at the exclusion of Pakistan’s cricketers in the IPL auction, which has “damaged the special place cricket has held during even the worst phases in India-Pakistan ties”.

It is a moment when the older ethos of cricket, based on the domestic and international calendars, is contrasted with the go-getting flamboyance of the IPL franchisees, all too often a moment when the future reveals itself. On Tuesday, when a bunch of cricketers including the 11 Pakistanis went under the hammer, that possible future revealed itself to be heartless.

The US$220,000 bid for batsman and occasional wicketkeeper Eoin Morgan, the only England player to be sold in the IPL auction, is a sign of the rapid strides he's made in international cricket, writes David Clough in the Independent.

The 23-year-old Morgan's 67 from just 34 balls as England knocked South Africa out of their own Champions Trophy last September was doubtless the innings which alerted the money men at the IPL to his potential.

Many others already knew, of course, that – despite a meagre first-class average – Morgan was going places.

Read Dileep Premachandran's take on the IPL auctions in the Guardian. The story of the day was the franchises' snub of the Pakistani players; a decision based on political realities than on form.

When Richard Madley, who usually helps sell antiques and carpets, started proceedings by inviting bids for Shahid Afridi – an absolute steal at the base price of $250,000 – not one of the paddles shaped like the Olympic flame went up. There was only silence, an emptiness that echoed around the room at the Trident Hotel later when names like Umar Akmal and Rana Naved-ul-Hasan came up.

In the New Zealand Herald, Adam Parore writes that private Twenty20 franchises will become the bedrock of cricket, a la professional clubs in football, and this is where the bulk of the game will exist. He also gives his views on who's best suited to take over the management of the New Zealand team.

You'd have trouble finding anyone with a bad word to say about former New Zealand skipper Jeff Crowe. He is just the sort of person who would work very well with the all-powerful captain Daniel Vettori. Greatbatch is definitely someone who could bring improvements to our batters.

At the third IPL auctions on Tuesday, four New Zealanders will go under the hammer - Shane Bond, Lou Vincent, Nathan McCullum and Grant Elliott. David Leggat, in the New Zealand Herald, looks at their prospects and those who missed out.

You might wonder why Martin Guptill is not there. Daryl Tuffey had a decent case for inclusion on a short list (and there's a joke, considering it numbers 52, but there you are - sometimes it's not so much how you perform but where you're from).

An editorial in the Guardian says the discussion over batting and bowling averages have been replaced with players' value in hard cash. So is the IPL auction exciting or stupid?

Dileep Premachandran has one eye on the upcoming IPL auction. Though the league might think it is recession-proof, but no franchise is likely to splurge money on those yet to prove themselves he writes in his blog on the Guardian website.

Of the 60 names hoping for the Henderson type of payday, only about 20 will walk away content. The chances of Monty Panesar or Anthony McGrath picking up a lucrative contract are as slim as mine of emerging unscathed from a round with Manny Pacquiao, and even a batsman as good as Ramnaresh Sarwan is likely to be left disappointed.

Lalit Modi's rejection of alleged match-fixers from the IPL auction will not by itself deter bookies or money-lusting players. While the unofficial ICL took several measures to uncover anything untoward, the IPL has complained about the cost of security and taken no such precautions. Peter Roebuck lets his fears known in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Cricket captains wield enormous influence. Accordingly, they belong in the front line of any campaign to stop the bookies damaging the IPL's reputation. Besides taking stringent security measures, the IPL needs to call in its captains and urge them them to set an example by saying they stand united against attempts to infect the league and cricket at large. Consider the stature of the franchise leaders - Tendulkar, Sehwag, Dhoni, Kumble, Gilchrist, Warne, Ganguly (sometimes), Yuvraj. These are the biggest names in the game. Where they tread others will follow. Those with the highest integrity will speak out the strongest.

How to buy an IPL cricketer? In a paper to be soon published in the Journal of Sports Economics, Ajit Karnik, a professor of economics at the Middlesex University campus in Dubai, placed the IPL player auction of 2008 under the scrutiny of an econometric instrument known as hedonic regression. The result was an equation to help determine a cricketer’s value; the more remarkable by-product, however, was its accurate picks of IPL 2008’s four semi-finalists and its eventual winner. Karnik explains the theory to Samanth Subramanian in Mint.

Here’s where it helped to be a cricket nut as well as an economist. The basic price equation would have to include runs and wickets, and Karnik knew enough about the non-stop nature of Twenty20 to fold age into that mix as well. For data, he used the players’ previous one-day international records, since many of the cricketers in the auction hadn’t played even a single Twenty20 game.

	Lalit Modi has successfully turned business giants’ heads towards cricket © AFP

The NFL, MLB, NBA, English Premier League and the NHL, the world’s most lucrative sports leagues, centred in both the USA and Europe, can only provide a cue to where the game will be heading in the near future, following the advent of the IPL. Revata S Silva finds out in his column in the Island, the Sri Lankan daily.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s estimated earning of US$ 10 m of endorsement income over the last year is more than, according to Forbes, the top baseball players Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols and Ryan Howard’s, combined income. No wonder, Dhoni, the Indian skipper, is the top in the highest earning cricketer’ list of The Forbes published last month.

	Lalit Modi and IMG are likely to find satisfaction © Getty Images

The great duel of egos, for the control of the IPL, was fought with letters. N Srinivasan, the BCCI secretary, initiated the move to clip the wings of commissioner Lalit Modi by terminating IMG's contract. But, by the time the dust settled five days later — it was Modi who emerged as the victor, provisionally at least. Rohit Mahajan has more on the tussle between the two cricket overlords that resulted in epistolary fireworks in Outlook.

The battle had been on more than one front. Sources say the BCCI, trying to hurt Modi in as many ways as possible, had refused to ratify the charitable endowments he had announced in South Africa during IPL-2. Modi, a BCCI source says, had two choices: submit to the will of his antagonists and persuade the IMG to renegotiate—or fight. “It’s a slap on the face of Modi,” says a senior officer with a franchise. “If he’s upset, he has every reason to be so.”

The IPL can only flourish through an institutional framework and not by the cult of personalities, writes Harsha Bhogle in the Indian Express. He says that the league, in the long-term, will have to learn to survive without the aid of its visionaries. He adds that the league also ought to put franchise and team before the individual, something the growing focus on film stars and celebrities buying a stake in the tournament threatens to undermine.

You can see that at IIM-Ahmedabad where the great Vikram Sarabhai was the visionary. It is as powerful forty five years later. Infosys is headed that way with Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani slowly stepping aside. The IPL has a visionary in Lalit Modi but if it wants to compete with Wimbledon or the English FA or the Augusta Masters it must create strong systems and ease away from personality cults. Modi and Srinivasan cannot oppose each other!

Most of the IPL franchises and even the influential Sharad Pawar have thrown their weight behind IMG in the sports management firm's tussle with the Twenty20 tournament's organisers. This is unprecedented in Indian cricket, writes Kunal Pradhan in the Indian Express, as it is the first time those within the BCCI are forming alliances with those outside it (franchise owners, who can't be ignored). This is making Indian board officials worry about a loss in their independence and power, Pradhan says.

While one side is waving letters — from Ambani, Shah Rukh Khan and even former Board chief Sharad Pawar — to oppose the dismissal of IMG, which was praised so lavishly by Modi at the end of the second IPL; the other side’s old-school BCCI survival instincts are considering this a sign that the exclusivity of their private club is in danger of being breached forever.

“Today, they (franchisees) are saying which company should be the IPL’s promoter, tomorrow they will want so-and-so to be the league’s commissioner, and the day after they’ll say we want this man as Board president,” a top BCCI official said on Tuesday, clearly expressing his faction’s biggest fear. “This is not proper.”

Over at sportzpower.com, Desh Gaurav Sekhri, a sports attorney, writes that there are no viable alternatives to IMG in India for organising an event of the IPL's magnitude. He also wonders whether the contract termination is a merely an attempt by the IPL to reduce the amount it will have to pay IMG, a tactic the IPL had successfully used to re-negotiate their deal with broadcasters World Sports Group.

With more than a dozen names in contention for the Kolkata Knight Riders coaching spot, Sharda Ugra wonders in India Today whether the IPL franchise's head honchos have heard of the concept of a shortlist.

Walking distance from Mannat, Shahrukh Khan’s bungalow on Bandra Band Stand is a bus stop. These days, you can find KKR officials lurking there, hissing at folks waiting for the 211 bus: “Pssst, hey you, want to coach the Knight Riders?”

Well almost. At least that’s what it looks like. They haven’t left out anyone not so why not give Mrs Yvette Salgado from Chium or Jude D’Lima from Shirley Rajan Village a try?

Kolkata Knight Riders had a tumultous IPL in South Africa - the entire team needed dialogue and, more importantly, shared understanding and focus. The head of KKR's talent hunt wing tells Makarand Waingankar in Open magazine how coach John Buchanan destroyed a good team. Turn to page 23 for the full story.

Makarand Waingankar, writing in the Hindu, discusses some of the reasons why big names like Kevin Pietersen, Sachin Tendulkar and Brendon McCullum faltered as captains in the IPL.

Whatever may be the level of the game, it is imperative that a captain must know his players. Tendulkar, Pietersen and McCullum didn’t seem to know the strengths and weaknesses of their players to counter the strategies of the opposition.

The IPL has failed to draw a line between the entertainment provided by the cricket and the entertainment from the singing, dancing, drumming and DJ-ing. The 20-over format is enough of an entertainment spectacle on its own without the rest of the junk that has accompanied IPL matches. But then the IPL's priority has never been the cricket, it's always been money and they certainly made a lot of that in South Africa in the last five weeks, writes Stuart Hess in iol.co.za.

...when television starts dictating the make up of teams you may as well ask Shah Rukh Khan to pad up and hit the winning runs.

When Gilchrist and the Chargers eventually lifted that ostentatious trophy the Wanderers was barely a third full. That's a damning indictment on Modi and the IPL for getting their priorities totally warped.

And in the Guardian, Dileep Premachandran has twenty things we learnt in the IPL.

Captaincy is not for everyone. Rahul Dravid seemed relieved and relaxed without it. Sourav Ganguly looked lost when deprived of its oxygen. Gautam Gambhir won every game when Sehwag was out injured. Sachin Tendulkar looked as weary as Atlas. Yuvraj looked bored. MS Dhoni wasn't always unflappable. Warne did what he could with a weak side. Kumble appeared to shed 10 years. Gilchrist was everywhere.

Hayden, Gilchrist, Raina, de Villiers, Dilshan, Duminy, Kumble, Ojha, RP Singh, Nehra and Malinga. That's Travis Hopkins' IPL dream team. Read why on Independent Online.

1 Matthew Hayden (Chennai Super Kings)

The standout performer of the tournament, it was Hayden's consistency that was most impressive. Having retired from international cricket at the beginning of the year, the opener was a picture of calm as he wrought destruction on opposition bowlers and finished top run-scorer in the competition despite missing several matches through injury.

2 Adam Gilchrist (Deccan Chargers)

Another Australian retiree who clearly still has it. More than a year since he last donned his country's colours, Gilchrist remains one of the game's most explosive hitters, best glovemen, and a nifty captain to boot. In his first full season as Deccan skipper he turned them from 2008 whipping boys to 2009 champions.

The IPL 2009 has been a huge success but not quite in the way Lalit Modi or most of the mainstream stakeholders and media would see it. It has been a success because it has brokered a completely unexpected peace between two contradictory parties, writes Sreeram Ramachandran on Holding Willey.

A peaceful co-existence between pure, classical, competitive cricket, and the brash, crass, commercial side of the game was never thought possible - it was always going to be survival of one of the two. Since T20 brought in the money, we had begun resigning ourselves to a world of Yusuf Pathan's and Sunny Sohal's, and a world without Rahul Dravid and Jacques Kallis.

Anil Kumble's forlorn walk back to the pavilion was in contrast to the scenes after bowling his counterpart Adam Gilchrist in the first over of the game. Is there anything more that he could have done? Is there anything that can get more heartbreakingly cruel than sport, wonders Ayaz Memon in Daily News and Analysis.

Indeed, the topsy-turvy nature of sport serves as a microcosm of life itself. The lesson in this -- for players, franchise owners, all of us -- is that success and failure are transitory, but hope must be eternal.

The big question before the organisers is not whether they can sustain the IPL’s insistent excessiveness to squeeze in two tournaments a year. It is whether they can prove the maturing of the IPL by showing that it adheres to sport’s pervasive norms. The Indian Express has this editorial.

Neil Manthorp says the IPL administrators have to be congratulated on their success in organising the tournament at such short notice. The Pro20 in South Africa can pick up a lot of tips from the IPL and if all goes well, South Africa can not only lead the way in 'crickertainment' domestically, but make a brilliant reality of the Southern Premier League (SPL) involving teams from Australia and perhaps New Zealand. Read on in Supercricket.

If the ability to market a sports tournament is usually a science, then the IPL and its South African partners raised it to art. The people saw IPL, they heard IPL and they read IPL - and they bought tickets and came to the IPL. Crowd figures exceeded all expectations and then exceeded all pre-tournament hopes, too.

Arthur Turner, on the Sport24 website, writes that though the IPL was a big success, there is room for improvement. He says organisers need to improve the way it is marketed, tackle problems related to scheduling and increase the quota of foreign stars in the playing XI.

In a more critical vein, Stuart Hess, in his article in the Sunday Independent, writes that the IPL, despite its popularity, has also been a terrible inconvenience for South Africa.

Anil Kumble, in his syndicated newspaper column, looks back at Royal Challengers Bangalore's amazing turnaround this season and the lessons learnt after a forgettable 2008 campaign. Read on in the Hindu.

This season we decided to bring in a couple of extra hitters, but more importantly, all of us from last year had evolved more in terms of the Twenty20 game. There was more experience, individuals were more aware of the possibilities of what could be done in a short time. Naturally, the results were better and we ensured that no one could have any complaints of us as a team.

The decision to shift the IPL to South Africa hasn't turned out to be a loss-making venture as feared by all the franchises. In fact, all are expected to make healthy profits, thanks to the jump in the share of revenues from broadcasting. Prabhakar Sinha finds out in Times of India.

According to a report by equity research firm IIFL, Team Jaipur will make the highest profit of Rs 35.1 crore in the group matches of the second edition of the tournament. Jaipur had also made the second-highest profit of Rs 14.50 crore in 2008, including the Rs 4.50 crore ($1 million) prize money. Knight Riders, which finished lowest in the league table during the qualifying round in South Africa, will nevertheless end up with the third-highest profit of Rs 25.8 crore in the second edition of IPL.

Boria Majumdar, in his column on Espnstar.com, assesses this year's IPL, it's positives and the areas where organizers need to work more to ensure another success in 2010.

In fact, for sixty plus years since independence, India hasn't been able to cultivate a sports brand of its own. We still crave for the Wimbledon, English Premier League or even the more fancy Formula One circuit, a recent rage in the country. Never, however, have we bothered about our own international sports brand, which the IPL is finally turning out to be.

In the Indian Express, Siddhartha Mishra writes that the IPL has been a success despite a variety of factors working against it: the shift away from India, the over-the-top punditry, and the reduced number of sixes because of bowler-friendly pitches.

An amalgam of good old curiosity, the drawing power of cricket’s poster boys dr­essed up in coloured pyjamas and, above all, the ability of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to sell a bed of nails to a porcupine has led to favourable ev­idence coming smoking out from the outsourced cricket circus.

Atreyo Mukhopadhyay, in his blog in the Hindustan Times, ponders over why the IPL has been as successful in South Africa. South Africans, he says, are passionate about the sport in its totality, while Indians are drawn more to personalities.

The best part is, this love for sport doesn’t restrict them to the confines of their national boundary. I was astonished when an elderly man at one of the practice grounds in Cape Town started checking out Indian sports stars with me. Forget cricket, he asked me about Sania Mirza and the dress code she has to follow, the split between Paes-Bhupathi and the golfer called “Singh” who has been doing well of late.

Peter Roebuck, writing in the Hindu, says the IPL has been more satisfying this year than its inaugural version, with bowlers playing a prominent role, veterans stamping their authority and local fans embracing the tournament.

Almost everyone was in the dark in 2008. No one was quite sure whether IPL was a romp in cricketing clothes, a frolic in a park, a gift from the gods or a significant cricket tournament. Now a galaxy of stars were signed and all of them played with their hearts.

Lalit Modi may have dreams of building a global fan base for the IPL, but Neil Manthorp doesn't think that is likely to happen. He explains in South Africa's Mail and Guardian.

There are three reasons it won't happen. First, it is a diminutive version of the game. Five-a-side soccer is cool and sevens rugby is a joy to watch - but is it the real thing ... [another] reason the IPL - in its current format - will never be more than very expensive wallpaper in the global sports village is the absurd glass ceiling placed on the playing quality of the teams

An editorial piece in the Times of India debates the issue of including more foreign players in the XI, after Delhi Daredevils coach Greg Shipperd echoed John Buchanan's call for an increase in quota allotted to overseas players. One view challenges the notion of having restrictions based on nationality in a purportedly global tournament, while the other asserts that the rule ought to stay as one of the IPL's main objective is to groom Indian talent.

Those who argue that allowing teams to simply import players from other countries will deny opportunities to young aspiring Indian cricketers can again take heart from the English example, where the likes of Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard came through youth programmes at various clubs to achieve fame. Besides, there are any number of tournaments that young Indian cricketers can use as a springboard to success, including the Ranji Trophy, the Duleep Trophy and the Under-19 World Cup, to name just a few.
..........
The match might be played in Cape Town, not Chennai, but it remains the Indian Premier League. And as was made clear at the tournament’s inception, one of its main goals is to provide a platform for Indian players who might otherwise never make it to the big leagues. The IPL experience is invaluable for them, allowing them a chance to showcase their talent before the national selectors that might have been years in coming, if at all.

John Buchanan, in an interview with the Telegraph, reflects on Kolkata Knight Riders' poor performance in the IPL, and touches upon issues such as Sourav Ganguly's disappointing run and sending back some players early in the tournament.

Brendon couldn’t get started at the start of the tournament, while Sourav did... Later, Brendon started getting his game together, but Sourav didn’t get any momentum... I’m sure he left feeling disappointed, both with his own and the franchise’s performance.

After the defending champions Rajasthan Royals have been knocked out of the IPL, Harsha Bhogle writes in the Indian Express that he's sad to see the tournament's underdogs bow out this early.

An oddball collection of talents led by a magnificent, ageing general, they should have had a movie made about them. They were the romantics of the tournament, full of hope and optimism; a kid who bowled left-arm quick and had never played at any level before this, another barely known outside his province who replaced him and took wickets at a miserly rate, there were people who batted anywhere, you never knew who was going to play when. They should call themselves the Rajasthan Romantics.

Cricket is unique in how it privileges the captain. Its duration and its susceptibility to changing conditions ensure it can’t be remote-controlled from outside. But Twenty20 short-circuits both these attributes, says S Ram Mahesh in the Sportstar.

A case may be made that the captain has therefore less of role in this version; only, the fact that it’s so fluid and sensitive to turns of flow (an over can prove irreversible) necessitates a different sort of captaincy. A leader of studied deliberation, of rigorous pre-match planning, or one given to elaborate set-ups isn’t out of place — for cricket, whatever its format, allows everyone space — but a captain who reacts intuitively and spontaneously often does better

In its two, brief, fun-filled years of existence, the IPL has been an entertainment spectacle, a commercial bonanza, a television reality show, Party Central and also, (leastly and lastly?) an earth-moving cricket event. On Friday night, it was taken to the next level. It actually levitated to another plane of consciousness, writes Sharda Ugra on India Today.

At the match presentation after Kings XI Punjab and the Delhi Daredevils game, in the middle of the suits, jeans and polyester T-shirts, stood the yellow-robed, long-haired His Holiness Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev. Alongside him, in front of the perspex sponsors board, were His Luminous Loudness Ravi Shastri, Her Perpetual Perkiness Preity Zinta, His Loopy Loquaciousness Niranjan Shah and His Humble Anonymousness (gentleman in King’s XI gear). To hear LL Shastri utter the words “His Holiness” was like listening to the Pope holler, “Yo, who de maan, maan?” but LL did ensure that HH could smoothly hand over cardboard cheque and acrylic trophy that was the Maximum Sixes Award to Irfan Pathan.

In T20 cricket we have now reached a stage where fielding standards are expected to be high; where really, an ordinary fielder rather than a brilliant one, should stand out. That hasn’t happened because the fielding has been pretty average and that is disappointing, writes Harsha Bhogle in the Indian Express.

Jonty Rhodes threw some light on it a few days ago when he talked about the difference between playing on the coast (Capetown, Port Elizabeth) and playing on the highlands (Johannesburg, Pretoria) or the highveld as they are called here. Because of the high altitude the ball travels further and so fielders might find the ball going a bit behind them as they wait for it. More interestingly, he said, the ball comes down much faster than you think it is going to and so you can be caught out of position. The obvious solution therefore is to practise a lot of skiers. Now while Jonty’s local knowledge, and his enormous skill, clears the air a bit, it still doesn’t explain why fielders are not catching more high balls in practice. Or maybe they are and it isn’t working.

Australia’s dominance of the Indian Premier league is unhealthy. Lalit Modi and the IPL will have to ensure a better balance of coaches for a more objective approach to contracting. They need to ensure that the best foreign players are being contracted to improve the standard of the competition, writes Arthur Turner on Sport24.

If one draws a comparison with the Australian players to certain South Africans it tells the true story.

For example if one looks at Rob Quiney. a batsman from Victoria who plays for the Rajasthan Royals. In 21 matches he has scored 299 runs at an average of 14.95 with a strike rate of 112.44. Henry Davids in 34 matches has scored 545 runs at an average of 20.14 with a strike rate of 140.44. He has also scored a 41-ball hundred in the Pro20 series while Quiney’s highest score is 91.

Another good comparison is Ryan Harris from New South Wales who plays for the Deccan Chargers coached by Lehmann. In 16 matches he has scored 86 runs at an average of 10.75 with a strike rate of 95.55. He has taken 18 wickets with an economy rate of 6.87. Compare this to Rory Kleinveldt who has played 38 matches and scored 338 runs at an average of 16.09 with a strike rate of 159.43. He has also taken 34 wickets with an economy rate of 7.23.

	Choke's on you: Muttiah Muarlitharan © AFP

Not having the greatest of times in IPL II hasn’t really bothered Muttiah Muralitharan. For someone with more international wickets than anybody in history that may seem surprising, but Murali explains to Atreyo Mukhopadhyay in the Hindustan Times that T20 for him is more about containment than taking wickets.

'Not quite. A good player can hit you out of the park because he’s taking more chances. A not-so-good player can do the same because he too is taking more chances. He won’t be blamed by the captain if he’s caught at the boundary line. The same shot that can draw criticism in Test matches will make a player famous in T20. As a bowler, I’ve to accept this.'

In the same paper, Anil Kumble feels for the Kolkata Knight Riders, the only team with a prolonged slump this season. With his team, the Royal Challengers Bangalore, in a similar situation last year he believes the most important thing is to be on the button all the time, as well as the team rallying around one or two players.

When the results are not going your way the challenge , is to look at each game as an individual event, keep away the frustration and be brave till things turn around. If you go in thinking about the last lost match, you’ll only end up making things difficult.

It’s not easy to have such a fearless mindset and we’ve seen that the younger guys can adapt quicker. The way we were brought up, smashing the ball in the air first up isn’t the most natural thing. But the younger guys have grown up with a different way of looking at the game.

He is the team’s official DJ — playing a selection of rock, pop, jazz and blues in the team bus; he’s also a jester of sorts, keeping the team in good spirits. Apart from that, he beats Glenn McGrath and Daniel Vettori in card games every night here, tees off with conviction and surfs as well as any Australian on the beach. But it’s when David Warner walks in to bat that the buzz really catches on in the Delhi Daredevils dug-out. GS Vivek has more in the Indian Express.

In the same paper, he also lists a few must-haves for the shortest format of the game.

While the IPL has been a happy place for little-known Australians, Owais Shah returned to county cricket with Middlesex with little to show for three weeks in the tournament apart from some memories, a few new friends — and almost £100,000. The story is the same for Paul Collingwood, Glenn McGrath, Mashrafe Mortaza and Tyron Henderson among many others. Patrick Kidd in The Times finds out more.

Meanwhile, Steve Waugh, in an interview with Mid-Day, speaks of the pros and cons of Twenty20 cricket and his own interesting association with the IPL.

Twenty20 is still an infant, yet there's enough evidence to say that in this format, only uncertainty is a constant says Rohit Mahajan in this week's Outlook magazine. Twenty20 is not a many-nuanced battle.It's akin to a duel with pistols, a game of chance, not a battle of strategy. Team owners need to understand this.

In this form of the game, in a matter of days, Rajasthan can be bowled out for 58 and then score 211, the highest and lowest totals of IPL-2. Anil Kumble can take five wickets for five runs in one match and follow it up with five (for 165 runs) in the next seven. Yuvraj Singh can take a hat-trick and score a 50 in one game and still lose. Yusuf Abdulla can be much more successful than Zaheer Khan, Muttiah Muralitharan and Shane Warne. Brendon McCullum, hitter of 10 fours and 13 sixers in the first match of IPL-1, can end up with three fours and five sixers after eight matches this year. The anonymous, inexpensive Abhishek Nayar can smite Andrew Flintoff, the most expensive IPL player, for three sixers in one over. And the ageing Rahul Dravid, having opted to not play T20 for India, can completely outshine the high-priced Kevin Pietersen, the big flop of the event this year.

Dylan Cleaver takes a look at the captain of the Kolkata Knight Riders and says the man bumbling around for the gold-plated yet tarnished franchised is but a pale imitation. Brendon McCullum needed to rest before the IPL and he now needs rest from the IPL. Read more in the New Zealand Herald.

There is New Zealand's next captain, giving the signal to the rest of the world that he will walk away if things don't go his way. Anybody who has had anything to do with McCullum will tell you it is not his nature to walk from a scrap, which, again, goes to show how far removed McCullum, IPL version:2 is from the real thing. Daniel Vettori, who has done considerably better with Delhi, will meet McCullum tonight and hopefully offer advice that will lift his heir apparent.

A wicketkeeper with exceptional batting skills is a super allrounder who saves a place in the XI and Adam Gilchrist is the foremost example, writes S Dinakar in the weekly magazine Sportstar. While he creates havoc with his bat speed and the ability to pick the length early, Gilchrist continues to be reliable behind the stumps.

From a psychological perspective, Gilchrist forces the bowlers into a defensive and negative mind-set, disrupts their rhythm. He, then, inflicts greater damage with his pulls, straight hits and those back-footed punches through the off-side.

Gilchrist has been largely steady and safe behind the stumps if not spectacular. Crucially, he has led with imagination as the Chargers appear to have brushed aside the memories of a disastrous 2008. The West Australian is still fit and hungry. The form of the game might change but a ‘keeper’s value doesn’t.

In the same issue WV Raman says it is rather unfortunate that the Kolkata Knight Riders have persisted with Brendon McCullum as captain even though they have Sourav Ganguly in their line-up. He will have more influence with the local players than a McCullum ever can for the simple reason that Ganguly can convey things in a language that all the players can comprehend.

In her blog Free Hit for India Today, Sharda Ugra lists out five things to like about the IPL, ranging from Shane Warne's curious tactics to 'Buddy Talk'.

3. Template Training: As it goes through its interminable schedule, every day the IPL throws up situations that clarify many things to young cricketers’ and about them. One over to go and ten to get, a screaming crowd, a wobbly white ball under lights, have you got what it takes? How do you contain Dhoni on a bull-run and restrict damage in your final over?

I am delighted that the process of eliminating the time-out (maybe marginalising is a more appropriate word at the moment) has begun. It was clear that it wasn't working, either for the spectators or the viewers, and that it had to go at some point. And it is nice to see that people are not being dogmatic about it, writes Harsha Bhogle in the Indian Express.

A time-out also allowed many other theories to enter a captain's mind, many theories from many sources and I am not sure that is how it should be. For the hour and a half that an innings lasts, the captain must run the ship, take bold and yet calculated decisions, soar or sink with them. He must only have the six balls between an over and the one to follow to decide on the next course of action. It will require the captain to juggle many possibilities in a short period of time, to have his mind working furiously and yet project calm. T20 cricket tests a captain in many different ways than a Test match does — neither is necessarily the superior test for it requires a different skill. Is the 5000 metres a more skilful race than the 100 metres? Or does it demand different skills? Even in its infancy, T20 is showing that a good captain is an invaluable asset to possess.

John Buchanan is never short of ideas. Nor is he afraid of propounding them. Maybe, he should sometimes look inwards and ask whether one reason why his Kolkata Knight Riders are languishing at the bottom of the IPL pool is his propensity to throw bizarre ideas around at the cost of harmony, writes R Mohan on ESPNStar.

The IPL has seen an excess of everything and it's no wonder that many South Africans haven't taken to it. It may have been a coup for South Africa to have landed this tournament to show off the country's organisational skill, particularly in light of next year's football World Cup, but the event has been soulless, writes Stuart Hess in the Star.

However, subtlety and the IPL are about as compatible as oil and water - the two just don't mix - so we'll have to put up with spokesmen screaming about a six that's no longer a six, but a maximum sponsored by an Indian property company whose finances have taken a hit during the credit crunch, and a catch that's a success backed by a bank that needed bail-out money from the Obama administration.

Expensive investments don't always turn out right in cricket, as the IPL has demonstrated. Two of the biggest buys - Flintoff and Pietersen - did little to justify their heavy price tags and there are lessons to be learnt for all franchises to invest in lesser-known names like Sudeep Tyagi and Shadab Jakati, writes Dileep Premachandran in the Guardian.

All of this merely reinforces the lessons learnt from last season, when the best batsman (Shaun Marsh), best bowler (Pakistan's Sohail Tanvir) and best allrounder (Shane Watson) were all bargain-basement buys. At the auction in Goa, Lalit Modi had boasted that his brainchild was recession-proof. It could well be, but in hard times, you don't throw the banknotes around. Just ask Shah Rukh Khan, who skulked off back to India after his Knight Riders sank quicker than a crap movie in opening week.

In India Today, Sharda Ugra analyses the team uniforms and wonders why the player names seem to get lost under the massive numbers and sponsor names. She says the IPL can follow the English Premier League model with home and away strips for all teams so that no one wears the same colour on the field, making it possible to tell the teams apart on the telly.

In the IPL-II, most players (barring a few Delhi Daredevils) have given up the names on their backs for the sponsors’ name (which means money). Below the sponsors' names comes a gigantic numeral (which means nothing). The player’s name has sunk somewhere below the nonsense number, near the waistband. Which is why you hear the commentators hollering sponsors’ names out rather than identifying the lesser-known cricketers accurately – see, the cameras can’t catch the names on their T-shirts fast enough.

One of the greatest, and indeed finest, variables in cricket, only matched to some extent by tennis and golf, is the nature of the surface the game is played on and here in South Africa, it has turned existing ideas on T20 cricket completely topsy-turvy, writes Harsha Bhogle on ESPNStar.

It isn't as if the pitches are rock hard and adding momentum to the ball. In fact sometimes they cause the ball to stop a bit, lose pace but nip around off the seam. As a result the old philosophy of sight the ball once and hit through the line isn't exactly working. You might argue that Gilchrist and Gibbs and Jayasuriya and Tendulkar are still doing quite well but the answer to that might lie beyond the surface and in their pedigree. Young Indian openers are discovering that there is a world beyond and their education hasn't yet taken them there. Good strikers of the ball like Swapnil Asnodkar, Karan Goel and even Sreevats Goswami in the early part of a fine innings against the Knight Riders looked uncomfortable with the ball gaining height on them.

This is a time when we, in the media, need to pose some serious questions — both to the game’s administrators and, as an extension, to ourselves for leaving no stone unturned in hyping the IPL as a coming of age of world cricket when, in fact, it is no more than a coming together of existing business tycoons with those who fancy themselves as the tycoons of tomorrow, writes Kunal Pradhan in the Indian Express.

As a result, the organisers — who have a host of monetary problems to tackle in the middle of a global slowdown — have at least been saved the trouble of worrying about media management. The only time anybody was on the back foot in this tournament was when the Fake IPL Player rattled the Kolkata administration with a witty, fictional account of the inner rumblings of a confused IPL team. In a country that likes to boast about a strong, vibrant, free press, that’s not something for us to take pride in.

In a hard-hitting editorial, the Indian Express criticises the IPL for the "sheer hyperbolic wall-to-wall gushing" from its approved commentators, the "endless corporate tie-ins" and the "extraordinary, Beijing-like attempts to control media coverage and commentary".

The stars of the IPL, they’d have us believe, are the strutting team owners and the IPL’s “owner” himself, Lalit Modi. Certainly, Modi (or, as Rajasthan Royals star Shilpa Shetty recently called him, “the brainchild behind the IPL”) is signing autographs like he’s the main attraction. Well-trained cameras follow him adoringly across the stadium, as he waves magisterially to the people his minions have summoned to gawk at the wonders of his IPL. You would be forgiven for thinking that you were watching one of Kim Jong-Il’s giant propaganda games from North Korea; since we aren’t allowed to see the relatively thin crowds, the resemblance is even more marked. And, in all this, the cricketers that actually prop up the system are forgotten — it doesn’t give a damn for them.

	Bowlers are having much more of a say in this IPL © AFP

Harsha Bhogle writes in the Indian Express that the bowler-friendly pitches in South Africa have given a new dimension to matches in the IPL.

The power play, for example, has been almost completely redefined. Earlier, with a hard ball and a flat deck, it was a licence to the openers to go for it ... But the world has a way of turning things around and the bowlers are now the beneficiaries of the stand-off between the government and the IPL! Help comes from unlikely sources sometimes!

In the Times of India, Bobilli Vijay Kumar says John Buchanan's ideas have completely failed to lift the Kolkata Knight Riders. He also observes that most of India's ODI and Twenty20 stars are looking jaded.

In the Guardian, Lawrence Booth looks at the 'Fake IPL player' blog which has generated loads of interest in the first couple of weeks of the IPL.

S Dinakar writes in the weekly magazine Sportstar that the IPL has provided many peripheral Indian players a chance on the big stage, and has helped give the national team greater bench strength.

In the same magazine, Frank Tyson writes: The introduction of Twenty20 cricket into the schema of first-class and international cricket has infused fresh blood, a new dynamism, a wider dimension and sprightlier life into what was the sluggish blood stream of the universal game.

RP Singh hasn't been part of the Indian team for a while now but the fast-bowler is currently wearing a purple cap in South Africa for being the IPL's highest wicket-taker. He told GS Vivek, of the Indian Express, that he hopes his performances will catch the Indian selectors' attention.

How frustrating is it for a new-ball bowler to go out of the Indian team because of an injury and then be relegated to the sidelines?

It’s very frustrating when you sit on the bench as the third or fourth seamer, thinking that just a couple of months ago you were the team’s top bowler. I was having a good run for almost two years before I picked up the injury, so you can imagine how I must have felt when I was out of the side. Watching the team playing from the sidelines was disappointing, and to be sitting on the bench for months while I waited for another chance even more so. When I was eased out last year after just two bad matches at home, it was demoralising.

The IPL has not yet established itself as a global brand, and it can only do so if its administrators focus more on the sport than the money and the glitz around it, writes Neil Manthorp in India Today.

The IPL is a fun tournament and will make excellent wallpaper in sports bars around the world in years to come. But South Africans are already beginning to see it for what it is, rather than what it portrays itself to be. It is an entertainment circus, rather than a sporting one, designed primarily to enable a very small number of fabulously wealthy people to become even wealthier.

Also in India Today, Sharda Ugra writes that the "Fake IPL Player" blog accurately highlights the pretensions of the IPL.

He even calls himself fake, as if sensing the general tone of the proceedings. Outside the cricket, much about the IPL itself is fake. The numbers being bandied about around it as earnings or audience, the long-term sanctity of any contract signed by its IPL leading lights, the notion that the rules really matter and are not invented on the spot (and then you think up a seven and a half minute break a few days before the event and call it a ‘strategic time-out’)

Kamran Khan, the 18-year-old Rajasthan Royals rookie, had a dream game against Kolkata Knight Riders on Thursday, sending down a tidy final over to force a tie, and then bowling a Super Over which helped them clinch the win. In the Indian Express, Devendra Pandey & Mohd Arshi Rafique track his rise from a village of weavers in Uttar Pradesh to the dizzy heights of the IPL. They also tell how Kamran’s success has led to a spiralling of satellite TV connections in his hometown.

“Except for Naushad (Khan) Sir [Kamran's coach] who got me to Mumbai from UP to pursue cricket, Warne is the only person who has ever trusted my ability. I’ve lost count of the number of trials I went to in UP but nobody showed any faith in me,” Kamran said.

The second edition of the IPL is going on merrily in South Africa, despite a few rain disturbances and a mysterious blogger threatening to bring down one of the eight teams. And now a man you wouldn't really associate with cricket has decided to have a look at IPL 2's base and structure, while floating a few wacky trial balloons. Writing from South Africa for Outlook, the author of the novel Q & A - more famously known by its film adaptation Slumdog Millionaire - Vikas Swarup, says the country's weather, time zone and spectators have made the IPL a success. Add to this an aggressive marketing blitz.

In the Cape Times, a South African player who found himself a millionaire overnight says he's in a whole new world. Thats JP Duminy for you.

I've never received so much kit in my life - not even with the Proteas! I received something like 10 playing shirts, four tracksuits, caps, shoes, spikes, you name it! And all branded with the Mumbai Indians logo. I even received a 22-carat gold chain engraved with the Mumbai Indians logo. I thought I was past the stage where receiving new kit excited me but this really was something else.

	Do Bangalore have a replacement for Rahul Dravid? © AFP

In the Indian Express, Harsha Bhogle picks Chennai Super Kings, Delhi Daredevils and Mumbai Indians as the sides to beat, and says Kings XI Punjab are the squad which are struggling the most. He also says that the weakness of the Bangalore Royal Challengers is that they don't have enough quality domestic players.

Bangalore have already tried Akhil, Vinay Kumar, Karan Sharma and Rajesh Bishnoi, and are nowhere near filling their last two Indian spots. And a look through their squad doesn’t throw up much either, unless they look at Sreevats Goswami, who kept well and batted with gusto last year. It could get worse, for while there might be a replacement for Pietersen when he leaves, there appears none for Dravid when he returns, as expected, for a break to Bangalore to be with his wife for their second child.

It's ironic that one of the main reasons given by IPL commissioner Lalit Modi for preferring South Africa to England as the venue for the IPL was the (good) weather. So far, rain has fallen on each of the four days that the competition has been played, with two of the six matches already settled by the Duckworth-Lewis method, writes Patrick Compton on iol.co.za.

There was also a more preventable piece of misfortune, with the ground's Super Sopper breaking down after the first match. Fortunately for the red-faced groundstaff, the second match between the Mumbai Indians and the Rajasthan Royals never got going as sweeping rain, with devilish timing, started up a number of times at just the wrong moment after the covers were on the point of being taken off.

Was it the overwhelming success everybody had hoped for? Did India's cricket revolutionary product blow South Africa, especially Cape Town, away? asks Ashfak Mohamed on iol.co.za.

There is plenty that is good about the self-professed greatest show on earth, but it must be careful not to over-reach itself, writes Lawrence Booth in the Guardian.

It is the greatest gathering of the most of the world's best players outside the World Cup. It should, in the long run, help break down boundaries between sides and, maybe, thaw relations between, say, India and Australia. It is, when you dig beneath the hype, a bonus for South African sports fans. And Modi's regular donations to local education programmes cannot be argued with, even if the ostentatious manner in which the cheques are handed over does not feel entirely right. Modi is to be congratulated on turning around a huge operation at such short notice. Few would have the time, inclination, or drive. But the IPL has to be careful not to over-reach itself. It is a sporting event, possibly a very good one, that has found a temporary home. What it is not is some kind of elixir for the South African nation. That, the politicians tell us, will come on Wednesday.

They are rivals when opening for their countries but Sachin Tendulkar and Sanath Jayasuriya have come together to form a formidable opening combination for the Mumbai Indians. Shriniwas Rao asked Tendulkar a few questions on Jayasuriya in the Times of India.

Your views on Sanath Jayasuriya, the cricketer...

I had always known Sanath and admired him for his cricketing abilities. I knew him as an opponent, a fierce one, whose natural instincts make him one of the most dangerous of all times. He is a naturally gifted player and has the ability to dominate a game single-handedly. He has the shots, the power and the timing.

Now that the two of you are teammates, what is the general discussion that goes on between the two?

Of course, we discuss a lot of things between ourselves, but mostly we’ve done a lot of that over the last many years. We like to exchange notes, talk about the game in general. Now with him and me in the same squad, we discuss more about what we’re going to do as a pair. Plan ahead of the game, prepare, study the weaknesses of the opponent and strategise accordingly.

If Saturday brought one or two murmurs about the $1.55m price tag slapped on Andrew Flintoff, last night quelled the chatter. Pitted against Kevin Pietersen, his fellow English alpha male and the tournament's other record purchase, as early as the fifth game of the Indian Premier League, Flintoff biffed an unbeaten 22 off 13 balls for the Chennai Super Kings, bulldozed his way to figures of 1 for 11, held the winning catch and generally thrust out his chest. It was all in a night's work, writes Lawrence Booth in the Guardian.

If you were looking for the physical embodiment of the phrase "pumped-up", Andrew Flintoff provided it on Monday. His pride stung by a ropey IPL debut, and his dander roused by the prospect of bowling to Kevin Pietersen, he put in one of the most hostile spells of the tournament so far, writes Simon Briggs in the Daily Telegraph.

Cricket does not embrace change easily, but seldom is there widespread condemnation of an experiment. In this case, both winners and losers, players and coaches, have come together to make their feelings on “strategy breaks” crystal clear, writes Anand Vasu in the Hindustan Times.

In order to do that the IPL needed to leave no stone unturned in their quest to raise extra money. Had they admitted this was the case, and transparently sold the extra advertising spots created by the strategy breaks, there might have been some sympathy. After all, the Indian public’s response seems to suggest that they do want the IPL to go on, no matter what, and the strategy break, just like the shift of venue to South Africa, might have been tolerated.

It is a good thing, from the Indian Premier League's perspective, that the franchises are paying their players and coaches so well. Because if this was any normal tournament, there would have been no end of grousing about the chaotic nature of the opening weekend, writes Simon Briggs in the Daily Telegraph.

In public, coaches are talking about making the best strategic use of the interval. Privately, though, they will tell you that their first concern is just keeping players warm. As we move into May, and the start of the South African winter, the backroom staff may well be forced to drape blankets around their shivering charges. And this in a tournament whose go-getting slogan is "Feel the heat".

The opening weekend of the IPL was not quite the utterly overwhelming success it was predicted to be. The matches were entertaining, the crowd charged up although the stadium did not look not sold out, despite the claims of Modi. There were locks of open seats in the main stand, although it is understood those seats were those given to the suite holders who took the King's shilling and gave their boxes over to the IPL, writes Kevin McCallum on iol.co.za.

In the Daily Mail Alan Fraser is less than impressed with the start of the IPL, or with the commentary of Mark Nicholas.

'We are ready,' Nicholas declared as the first ball was about to be bowled. 'The start of the 2009 DLF IPL, here in South Africa, an extraordinary performance to move it in just three weeks. We have pulled it off.'

The award-winning broadcaster was not about to satirise a competition pretty much staged for, and financed by, television. Indeed, it sounded as if he and his cronies had been personally responsible for switching the event from India. Maybe they were.

While conceding that Nicholas might not have been employing the royal 'we', it remained an extraordinary use of the personal pronoun. But then the star of Britain's Best Dish-if you can be such a thing - has always entertained an elevated opinion of himself. He thinks he is Britain's Best Dish.

After a haphazard start, a meeting of the two most costly players in the IPL - Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff - should ignite the tournament, writes Rick Broadbent in the Times.

Such is the nature of England players and their counties that Flintoff has bowled at Pietersen only once in his career. It happened in 2003 and he did not get him out, but Pietersen did dismiss Flintoff when he was on 97. The rematch will mark the true start of the IPL after a troubled opening weekend. The wet weather and slow outfield at Newlands made for a staccato start rather than the extravaganza demanded by Modi.

There was plenty to talk about on the first day of IPL 2 in Cape Town. But Scyld Berry, writing in the Daily Telegraph, believes the tournament has several features which are not in IPL’s favour and which will be a major test of its zest in the five coming weeks. Most notably, the time factor, where delays and strategy breaks meant the opening game ending ten minutes short of four hours.

	Sachin Tendulkar's 59 set up Mumbai Indians' win against Chennai Super Kings on the opening day of the IPL © Getty Images

It's strike one for the old boys on the opening day of the IPL. Half-centuries for Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, a fifer for Anil Kumble (and not to forget, a spell of wizardry from Shane Warne.). By moving to South Africa, the IPL, threatening to become the instrument of anhilation (and professional humiliation) for India’s ageing greats, could actually become the stage for them to show off the many layers of their skill, feels Sharda Ugra in her blog on the India Today website.

Every innings will need its glue, its master craftsman around whom the hitters can bat and it was hardly surprising that Tendulkar and Dravid finished on top last night. In the space of ten days they have left behind the format that allows for the creation of the sweeping masterpiece and last night still found the space and time to paint the perfect miniature. No matter what the canvas, it is always the hand of the artist that matters.

The multiple-captain theory was perhaps nothing but a decoy with Sourav Ganguly, despite a string of open denials and many subtle signals, finally being divested from the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR's) throne. Bobili Vijay Kumar in the Times of India believes that by suddenly giving complete charge to Brendon McCullum, the team have unwittingly let the wily cat out of the bag.

Imagine the plight of the bowler who has just got a set of instructions from the bowling captain and an entirely different message from the fielding captain (by his placements). Worse, what happens if all three disagree?

He is regarded as one of the pioneers of big-hitting, though Sanath Jayasuriya believes it's his natural game and that he doesn't know any other way to play. He has made some adjustments, but the attacking brand has been his staple diet and has worked for him for years. GS Vivek gets talking to the Sri Lankan batsman in the Indian Express.

You have been around for more than a decade in international cricket. At 39, how long is it before you call it quits?

(Laughs) Don’t ask me how long. I don’t know the answer myself. As long as my body says I’m fine, I’ll keep coming back to bat. I try and take it series by series without looking at any specific period of time. It’s been going well so far, and I hope to carry on. And I’m not even the oldest player here.

The Indian Express shines a light on one of the darker sides of the IPL: The blurring lines between conflicts of interest or, as they call it, between Brand and Flag. Kris Srikkanth is chairman of the national selectors - and also brand ambassador for Chennai Super Kings (whose owner, in another example of the blurred lines, is the BCCI's secretary, N Srinivasan). Srikkanth's role, though, is the more intriguing, as the express editorial says:

The board, alas, has a terrible record in taking conflicts of interest seriously. There is no transparency about the stakes its personnel have in cricket-related activity; with the IPL, those conflicts have become more pervasive. And when the going is as good for Indian cricket as it has been, these conflicting loyalties are too easily overlooked. But moments of reckoning do come. Were India to have a disastrous time at the T20 world championship, tolerance for these scandalous cross-holdings will dissipate. But need it come to that?

On livemint.com, Mukul Kesavan says the IPL is a business venture in a globalized world which is only perfunctorily “Indian” and which acknowledges no territorial boundary or frontier that threatens its commercial prospects.

Watching the opening match of last year’s IPL, there had been several doubts in the minds of so-called cricket experts, including myself, that the road ahead for the tournament would not be easy once the novelty of its sideshow wore out, writes Kunal Pradhan in the Indian Express.

But the signs of a potential slump did not last too long because of one “rag-tag” unit from the smallest of the IPL franchises. The Rajasthan Royals, dismissed as frugal also-rans, started writing their own script in one corner of India, defying the odds, hurling slingshots at Goliath after Goliath, highjacking the razzmatazz and replacing it with a feel-good, cricketing story of the rise of an underdog ... Now, as the second season gets ready to kick off in distant South Africa, this time from the high of last year, it will face challenges once again — some old and some very different.

Lalit Modi told an assembled gathering of journalists in Cape Town on Thursday that the IPL had encountered nothing but generosity and co-operation. In fact, that isn’t quite true, writes Neil Manthorp on Supercricket.

So untrue, in fact, that by late Friday afternoon the Wanderers stadium was prepared to withdraw as a host venue rather than accede to requests (or demands, depending on your point of view) from the IPL which they believe to be excessive and unreasonable. “They can take their tournament somewhere else, they can hold the final somewhere else,” said one member of staff. “Unless they change their attitude then I can’t see a way forward. They are renting our facility, not buying it. We have protocols which we respect and expect them to do likewise.”

It is a financial sleight of hand that this week allowed Modi to proclaim the IPL was "recession-proof". And, with the world's financial markets hanging on for dear life, he has also declared that all eight franchises will have made a profit by the end of the tournament, writes Lawrence Booth in the Guardian.

IPL conquered its home country in 2008 and shows every sign of luring South Africa to the party. Naturally Lalit Modi and chums have used every showbiz trick to ensure South Africa feels the excitement, writes Peter Roebuck in the Hindu.

Harsha Bhogle, in the Indian Express, gives a lowdown on what teams can expect from the conditions in South Africa as compared to last year's frenzy in India. He says the switch in venues is a bold, daring one that could either end up making it far stronger or leave it insipid in the absence of home crowds.

I have a sneaking suspicion that spin will become even more important than it was at IPL 1 in India. In that same Australia-South Africa Twenty20 game, the home side bowled 10 of their 20 overs with spin; in fact of the 40 overs they bowled in all 18 were bowled by the spinners. But this was a different kind of spin (if that sounds political blame it on the way language evolves!). Peterson, Botha and van der Merwe were pinging the ball in at some pace on a middle and leg stump line. Speeds upwards of 95 kmph were routine and I swear I saw Botha bowl one at 104!

Shane Warne, in the Times, writes of his experience with Rajasthan Royals in South Africa so far, and the interesting interactions he's had with some of the Indians in the squad.

Guys like KP and myself have been lucky enough to play cricket all over the world, but the younger Indian guys in our squad are finding South Africa a bit of a culture shock. They've certainly been dragged out of their comfort zones. Some of them hadn't stepped out of their own country before, let alone played overseas. Even the language can be a problem and at the moment they perhaps feel a bit out of place. They aren't always sure how to fill the time. The danger is that they sit in their rooms and just think cricket, cricket, cricket.

Kevin Pietersen, who will captain Bangalore Royal Challengers and play in his country of birth, has a series of factors going against him as he heads into the IPL, despite the small matter of getting richer by US$1.55 million, writes Lawrence Booth in his blog in the Guardian.

Think about it for a moment. Pietersen is returning to a country where voluble sections of the crowd regard him as a traitor. He will be captaining two men - Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher - who probably have their own views on his decision to leave South Africa. He will be playing for a coach who revels in his straight-talking toughness (yesterday, he told us Pietersen "doesn't score enough runs") and for an owner - the whisky, airline and F1 magnate Vijay Mallya - whose expectations of success are such that last year he sacked his chief executive mid-tournament. What does he think this is? Football?

	Suresh Raina was among those who benefitted from the inaugural season of the IPL © Getty Images

The most important thing for a youngster is to learn from each and every international player in their IPL team. With stars coming from different parts of the world, it is a good opportunity for the youngsters to learn from the players' experiences of having played in different conditions. Suresh Raina in an interview to Harish Kotian in Rediff.com also believes that the IPL provides a good platform for up-and-coming Indian cricketers to announce themselves.

Last year the IPL was a great help because not only did I learn a lot of things playing with international cricketer, but it also helped me comeback into the Indian team...so many people all around the world follow the tournament. It is a big opportunity, especially for India's domestic cricketers to prove themselves on the world stage.

Fringe benefits apart from turning around lives for a number of unknown cricketers, the inaugural IPL also proved to be the perfect platform for fringe cricketers and those with obvious potential to enhance their reputation, writes Bharat Sundaresan in the Indian Express.

Two years is a long time in Twenty20 cricket. As MS Dhoni returns to South Africa for IPL's second season, the place of his epochal, primary triumph, he will carry with him memories of the big bang in 2007. That was the year India’s World T20 win stimulated a fledgling format into galvanizing cricket’s thought processes. Partha Bhadhuri in the Times of India believes the challenge then was to maintain a sense of proportion, which perhaps led to a charmed IPL away from Indian shores

The India Premier League thought out of the box, taking the concept and turning it on its head. Which is why a second year of IPL festivities, in the place where T20 first mutated into the game’s cheerleader, could be the best thing for a format still evolving with each keen contest.

Having burnt their fingers last year with Bangalore Royal Challengers, the bookies are a lot more careful this time around. Ahead of IPL II, they are putting money on Chennai Super Kings followed by the Delhi Daredevils and Mumbai Indians with Deccan Chargers bringing up the rear. Manish Pachouly in the Hindustan Times has more.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Shane Warne spoke about the possibility of playing in front of friendly South African crowds, how he took the Royals to victory last year and his relationship with Proteas captain Graeme Smith.

We’ve got one young player who’s going to be very interesting. We’re tossing up now what his nickname is going to be — Wild Thing or Tornado, something like that. Kamran Khan is a young kid, a left-armer, a slinger, he doesn’t speak much English at the moment. He’s a tiny little guy but he bowls 140 plus. Another guy to look out for is Ravindra Jadeja. He played last year, did enough but he’s had another year of experience. Then there’s Yusuf Pathan. He was dynamite last year, he just destroys medium pace and spin bowling. He and Andrew Symonds are two of the cleanest hitters I’ve ever seen.

	Would Pietersen agree to captain England in the World Twenty20? © AFP

Despite attracting the top dollar (1.55m of them, along with Flintoff) at the recent auction, he is not yet very good at Twenty20. In this format he has not yet found the ideal batting tempo. It has become a well-used, if perplexing to some, Twenty20 cliche that players have more time than they think. But they have; 120 balls is a long time. And a journey cannot often begin in the outside lane. Pietersen must learn this.

He is also to captain the Bangalore Royal Challengers, with a rather appetising confrontation coming a week tomorrow in Port Elizabeth against Chennai Super Kings, captained by his old rival from the winter, MS Dhoni, with Flintoff in his ranks. One must pray that, amongst such a galaxy of stars (he has the likes of Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble, Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher in his squad), Pietersen rediscovers a desire for leadership, so evidently missing in recent pronouncements. England need Pietersen to skipper their World Twenty20 campaign. If required, bended-knee entreaties must be made.

	Can Shane Warne inspire another magical run? © Getty Images

Peter Roebuck meets Shane Warne, captain of the defending champions Rajasthan Royals, and finds that the legspinner has an organised programme of preparation for his squad. Read more in the Hindu.

.. the old trouper [Warne] said he had not bowled a ball for 12 months and was unusually nervous. No sportsman, let alone a champion, wants to make a fool of himself. His hide is not quite as thick as it seems.
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Everyone thought the last word had been written on Warne but the old rogue, the great competitor, is still around, catching the eye, embracing the spotlight, playing poker off the field and on it

In the Kolkata-based Telegraph, Ashok Mitra calls for more transparency in the financial transactions of the IPL, which he argues must be registered as a corporate entity.

The IPL is, to all intents and purposes, an out-and-out business enterprise, in effect a transnational set-up. It nonetheless keeps flaunting itself as a sports body. Since it is not registered as a corporate outfit, the corporate laws are apparently not applicable to it, and this in spite of its making mountains of money that is the envy of many business houses.

Mini Kindra, writing in Outlook, feels the second edition of the IPL won't be the same despite the tournament organiser's hopes to seduce crowds with Bollywood allure. There's a buzz in South Africa alright, especially so with South African-Indians, but 59 games in 37 days - isn't that a bit too much?

Viewer fatigue, say enthusiasts, is not a worry. "Nothing like sports to beat the depressing economic mood," says John Laubscher, a cricket fan. "Besides, South Africans love the Twenty20 format." The fact that many of the games start around noon could be a big damper, though. "We cannot catch those," says a disappointed Siddarth.

By shifting the IPL, Indian cricket has put itself at the mercy of forces beyond its control. It is a mistake. Suppose everything goes along without a hitch in South Africa. What then? And when might India next be considered safe enough for international players? asks Peter Roebuck in the Hindu.

In the Indian Express, Firdose Moonda looks at the logistical challenges of shifting the IPL to South Africa.

A source close to Cricket South Africa (CSA) said the magnitude of the event hadn’t hit home just yet, but hoped that when it did, the organisers would not find themselves in an administrative tsunami. But CSA, which has successfully hosted a World Cup in 2003 and a T20 World Championship in 2007, believes it has the capacity and the infrastructure to organise a multi-team event of this nature with aplomb.

The IPL was homeless, not destitute, for its parent is the Indian cricket board (BCCI), whose might has exponentially risen with its wealth—and everyone wants to court favour with the rich. Thus England, former masters, now the poor cousins, and South Africa vied to offer IPL shelter, testifying to the BCCI's formidable clout. Rohit Mahajan senses more political undertones to the switch in venue in his article in Outlook magazine.

Manohar's reputation of being laconic was precisely why many chose to see in his candour a stinging rebuke to the UPA. It set tongues wagging—some thought Manohar, a Nagpur-based lawyer, was acting at the behest of Pawar, who was said to be incensed with the Centre playing tricks with the BCCI over the IPL. This perception gained credibility because of a sharp retort from home minister P. Chidambaram...

Writing in the same magazine, Arindam Mukherjee believes IPL II will neither have the fan following nor make the moolah in South Africa, with franchise owners ready to face a postponement in profits.

Last year the league was an unqualified TV success, but worried advertisers will try and bring down rates. Taking a wider view, the teams were looking at a three-year period to break even. That would have to wait. Much would depend on how the IPL management "accommodates" the franchisees' losses—or next year's tourney could see new faces raising the paddle to pick up yet another star player.

John Buchanan's theory of mutliple captains for the Kolkata Knight Riders has drawn its share of criticism. Suresh Menon in Dreamcricket.com believes captaincy by committee has never worked in cricket; all it has done is allowed the nominated leader to spread the blame when a decision has gone wrong.

For example, the recent England-West Indies one-dayer which England won because the West Indies coach John Dyson read Duckworth-Lewis wrong. Do you need an extra captain for the arithmetic, and if so, isn't the coach ducking responsibility?

Lalit Modi has proved his point in recent days as he has sought to play the England and Wales Cricket Board and its South African counterpart against one another as possible hosts for the travelling circus of the IPL, writes Owen Gibson in the Mail and Guardian.

When England Cricket Board (ECB) chairperson Giles Clarke celebrated in Sydney with the World Cup-winning women’s team on Sunday, England were being talked of as favourites. By the time he landed in London on Thursday morning and headed to Lord’s for a reception in their honour, Cricket South Africa chief executive Gerald Majola was organising a press conference to declare victory
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In the end one of the key deciding factors was the most mundane one -- the British weather. While it can also be unpredictable in South Africa in April, the average temperature is 10 degrees higher and the odds of rain-free days are lower. But there were other factors at play.

Edward Griffiths, writing in the Witness, examines some the reasons why South Africa is one of the most preferred destinations for hosting international sporting tournaments, including the IPL.

“See yourself as others see you” is a useful maxim, and even the most genetically cynical, miserable and negative citizens will surely reflect on this past week and accept that, notwithstanding enduring poverty, crime and corruption, somebody must be getting something right within these borders.

Robert Houwing analyses each IPL team and tries to pick out which ones fans in South Africa can support. Read his piece on the Sport24 website.

In its second year itself, the Indian Premier League (IPL) is up for multiple tests—is it recession-proof, devaluation-proof, politics-proof and now, outsourcing-proof? asks Ashok Malik in Mint.

For the eight franchisees, 2008 saw a rough outflow of Rs75-100 crore per team and an inflow of Rs80 crore, maximum. No team other than actor Shah Rukh Khan’s Kolkata Knight Riders is believed to have actually broken even, though it was reported that Rajasthan Royals, the first-year champions, and finalists Chennai Super Kings had done so too. In 2009, the first blow came when the rupee crashed from 40 to a dollar to 50. Franchise royalties—the 10-year payments range from $67 million (around Rs 340 crore) for Rajasthan Royals to $112 million for Mumbai Indians—and player fees (each team was allowed to spend a maximum of $7 million in 2008-09 on contracting cricketers) were denominated in dollars.

It has been a week spent in blabbering to others and listening to their harangue. The IPL debate rages on: on television channels, in newspapers, and in private conversations. The young are stung at the dent India's image has suffered in the world but the judgment on who is to be blamed is not as straightforward as one would have believed, writes Pradeep Magazine in the Hindustan Times.

Moving the IPL to South Africa isn’t the best thing that could have happened, but as a fall back option it has much merit, writes Harsha Bhogle in the Indian Express.

Mr Chidambaram, like a bowler does, used his prerogative to set the field. Now that was given. He wasn’t going to provide central forces (and what a sad moment in itself that the availability of anti-terror forces should be the deciding factor in our game!), and he wasn’t going to allow state governments to take policemen away from election duty. Now faced with this, the IPL could either have conceded defeat or played a shot, which is the prerogative of the batsman. They have chosen to play an unconventional shot, a switch hit if you choose, having used up other options. So now, Mr Chidambaram has what he wants, which is the forces he needs to conduct an election and Mr Modi has a sub-optimal result, not a boundary maybe but a three, but at least he is batting.

Mickey Arthur may find the idea to use multiple captains, a brainchild of Kolkata Knight Riders' coach John Buchanan, confusing but the editors at the Kolkata-based Telegraph believe the role of a cricket captain as player, strategist and tactician, goes against the simple rule for running an efficient organisation: that one person should not perform more than one function.

Translate this principle into the cricket field and it means that a player should only be a player, a captain should only be captain. A violation of this rule results in pressure on individuals and the consequent decline in performance. A player-captain combination also produces prima donnas, which create major problems in any organizational structure. Let the players do the batting, bowling and fielding and the thinker do the planning off the field. All this may appear as too alien to the cricket purist (or even to those who are lamenting Sourav Ganguly’s loss of captaincy), but the winds of change are blowing over the cricket fields. That wind will make the ball of cricket swing in various unexpected ways. Twenty20, and its popularity, are products of the change affecting cricket. Others will follow. Refashioning the definition of a cricket captain is another radical change. Mr Buchanan has taken a step in the right direction. Pioneers never make a virtue of patience.

Sharda Ugra, on the other hand, writes the idea of having multiple captains comes with its problems, the first of which is accountability. Read her blog in India Today.

Also read Dileep Premachandran's views on the multiple-captains issue on cricinfo.com.

	Lalit Modi: foresight, decisiveness and staggering self-belief © Getty Images

A tournament that was in danger of collapse because of Indian security issues has been rescued by Modi's foresight, decisiveness and staggering self-belief. It is one thing to recognise a solution, it is quite another to make it happen. England may talk at times of his arrogance, but his dynamism has lessons for us all.

But Modi's approach does have lessons for Britain. He saw a problem and dealt with it: rapidly, straightforwardly, emphatically, with not a sub-committee or viability report in sight. He deserves a tournament to remember.

Think of the IPL as a maker of biscuits (or fruitcakes, if you like) and the Season 2 migration as merely a means of staying in business, writes Sharda Ugra in India Today.

IPL's second season has become clouded in other issues like political equations, security logistics, a tussle of ego and territory but eventually a pragmatic, economic reason has sent it to another place where it will simply be less hassle to do business. It is a gamble, but the entire event was a gamble based on the Indian audience's appetite for instant cricket. So now, overseas Indians may well find their way to what is nowbeing called the NRI-PL but more importantly, satellite television should keep the TV ratings high.

Amid the madness that began with the Mumbai attacks and was further complicated by the announcement of the general elections in India, at last one can spot some semblance of common sense. The biggest credit goes to the IPL committee for acknowledging that they could not use millions of cricket fans and the cricketers themselves as collaterals in a bid to prove its organisational prowess, writes Sreyashi Dastidar in the Guardian.

Cameramen, crews and technicians in India were placed on standby yesterday, ready to travel thousands of miles in a scramble to ensure that the Indian Premier League (IPL) games will be on television for fans in the cricket- mad sub-continent to watch, writes Dan Sabbagh in the Times.

The smaller size of the country makes England an easier logistical proposition than India, although filming in Britain is more expensive. It costs about £80,000 to £90,000 to produce a typical day’s cricket in England, rising to £120,000 if you include extra features such as Hawk-Eye. That is more than in India, where a cameraman might work for £100 a day, compared with £350 a day at Lord’s. IMG’s real problem could be finding enough UK-based, experienced camera crews and production teams able to handle cricket if it cannot ship the Indian teams over cost-effectively.

An editorial comment in the Indian Express criticises the BCCI on its decision to stage this year's IPL outside of India and says the Indian fans' interests were simply kept out of the agenda while making this move.

Cranking up the ego war with the Government on the logistics of this IPL season, he [Shashank Manohar, the BCCI President] apologised to the “people of India”, but comforted himself by saying that at least they’d now be able to watch the tournament on television. Really, Mr Manohar? Is this truly what’s behind this effort to start a bidding war between England and South Africa to host the IPL? Because if it is the Indian fan’s benefit that’s on the agenda, the BCCI’s latest announcement amounts to little less than the cricketing equivalent of high treason.

England has been tipped as a possible host to the IPL but Patrick Kidd, in the Times, writes the ECB must overcome a whole host of problems including scheduling and TV rights in very little time before staging the tournament. Instead of getting embroiled in the chaotic mess, he feels the ECB's time and attention is better spent on preparing its team for the Ashes.

Another pothole is the question of TV rights, with the IPL coinciding with West Indies’ tour to England. Sky has the rights for the exclusive coverage of England internationals and would not welcome the competition from Setanta, which has the IPL rights and feels it was poorly treated over the bidding for England games. The ECB is in no position — or mood — to upset Sky.

David Hopps, writing in the Guardian, says the ECB will have to move quickly to make the boldest decision in its history and host the IPL.

Mike Norrish writes that with all the hurdles ahead of the ECB in trying to the host the IPL, it's perhaps better that South Africa gets the nod for staging the tournament. Read his blog in the Daily Telegraph.

The IPL may well have become an albatross around the government's neck, but to treat security concerns as trifles is in nobody's interest - neither the nation's nor cricket's. Pradeep Magazine in the Hindustan Times elaborates.

One can understand that everyone wants a bite of the large, juicy pie that IPL is assumed to be, but should it be at the risk of diluting security arrangements for the elections? Anyone who has a voice seems more concerned about IPL and, in this din, the Indian public's democratic right to vote in a free, fearless atmosphere does not seem to bother most of us.

The endless flip-flop over staging the second season of the IPL takes us into the theatre of the absurd - where the politics of a game have an impact on the politics of a nation - writes Kadambari M. Wade in the Hindustan Times.

With her vision of the game expanding ever since her husband Mukesh Ambani bought the Mumbai Indians team, Nita Ambani speaks to K Shriniwas Rao of Times of India about her plans for this IPL season.

By unwisely scheduling the IPL during India's general elections, the tournament organisers have placed the government and its security bureaucracy in a cruel dilemma, writes B Raman in the Outlook magazine.

If they suggest a postponement of the tournament, they might give the impression that they have allowed themselves to be intimidated by the terrorists. Such an impression could give added oxygen to the terrorists. If they go ahead with the tournament, despite its clashing with the general elections and despite the deterioration in the security situation, , they could be playing with the security of the lives and property of the citizens of this country.

Lalit Modi may be about to face his biggest challenge in the IPL yet and it may come from the source he would least expect, the players. Or at least, the international players, writes Neil Manthorp on Supercricket.

By stating that he "does not talk to FICA" he may just have bitten off more than he can chew. FICA's strongest member is the PCA of England, closely followed in strength by South Africa's SACA and Australia's ACA ... How can Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Flintoff, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene seriously take the money on offer in season two of the IPL when the man in charge of the league rudely refuses to even speak to the men they have elected to be the guardians of their collective fate?

The ICC should be urgently investigating safety measures in India – instead, it is discussing the weather, writes David Hopps in his blog in the Guardian.

What cricket must ensure is that the IPL does not present its security arrangements in brochure form. There is merit in the argument of Lalit Modi, the IPL commissioner, that India is safer than Pakistan, but only a man of such audacity would proclaim it so confidently so soon after the horrors of Mumbai.

Whatever the future, cricket lost what was left of its innocence when the gunmen opened fire near the Gaddafi stadium and the number of security personnel who fired back, in defence of the Sri Lankan players and match officials, was suspiciously few, writes Scyld Berry in the Sunday Telegraph.

Doubts were expressed last week about the second IPL taking place. But Muttiah Muralitharan, due to play with Andrew Flintoff for Chennai Super Kings, joked that he is "going to wear a bulletproof jacket for future journeys on team buses". All the Sri Lankans signed for the IPL will, at this stage, go to India – Thilan Samaraweera, the most badly injured, is not contracted – because they believe security in India will be far tighter than in Pakistan.

Near a place called Liberty Square last Monday, sport lost its freedom. The devastating attack on Sri Lanka's cricket team in Lahore will change the terms of engagement for players and spectators for as long as terrorism exists. Sadly, it threatens to stretch generations into the distance, way beyond the horizon of the foreseeable future, writes Stephen Brenkley in the Independent on Sunday.

As the news of the horrific terrorist attacks on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan reached the England team on tour in the West Indies it was impossible to avoid the feeling that though the game will survive, everything will be different as a result, wrist Steve James in the Sunday Telegraph.

How realistic is the prospect of all forms of the international game being played in the Gulf region? asks Jamie Jackson in the Observer.

When big money comes into play, the world stops being a sensible and reasonable world, writes Nirmal Shekar in the Hindu.

Repeatedly we are told that there is far too much at stake for too many people, for the IPL Board to even so much as contemplate the idea of such a postponement or a cancellation. But who are these stakeholders, and why should elected governments stretch their security apparatus dangerously thin in order to protect their interests?

The Lahore attack on the Sri Lankan players proved that cricket could indeed be a soft target for terrorists in this part of the world. While we may want to believe that India is a lot safer than Pakistan — and there is indeed some strong basis for this belief, 26/11 notwithstanding — this is not the time to traffic in illusions.

The financial fallout in the event of a cancellation of this year's IPL as a result of the threat of terrorism could be devastating, write Rhys Blakely and Kevin Eason in the Times.

Television rights deals alone are worth $1 billion (about £708 million) and income from merchandising and gate receipts are vital to the eight regional teams, which have invested $720 million in their franchises buying star players from around the world, but which have racked up financial losses from the inaugural tournament last year.
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The patience of the tycoons bankrolling the series, such as Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, who bought Mumbai Indians for £112 million and has since taken a battering on the Mumbai stock exchange, will soon wear thin unless they get rapid assurances that the tournament is guaranteed to offer a return on their ambitious investments.

Arindam Mukherjee, writing in Outlook, feels the IPL this year will struggle to match the extravagance of its inaugural edition as advertisers cut down on spending in times of recession.

This year, advertisers are showing restraint, sponsors are more demanding, and investors are wary of taking too large an exposure. Says Santosh Desai, CEO, Future Brands: "Everyone thought that this year would be a blockbuster after last year's show...it's difficult to imagine that someone would take a big bet as people are much more cautious about spending."

Amid warning bells, the second season of the IPL battens down the hatches, writes Arindam Mukherjee in Outlook. Movie star-stud Akshay Kumar will be missing in action, as may be Hrithik Roshan, Katrina Kaif, and even those fully-clad international cheerleaders. Get ready for a no-frills IPL.

Advertisers that took big IPL exposures last year—and even resorted to IPL budgeting thanks to the big opening—are now going slow. For instance, LG Electronics, one of India's top advertisers, has cut down advertising spending by 35 per cent. Spending on IPL, that too at a higher cost than last year, is a clear no-no. V. Ramachandran, LG India's director marketing, says: "Many of us—with frozen or reduced budgets—are not coming on board, thinking it's not worth it." Companies are looking at avenues that are more likely to influence sales.

In the latest edition of India Today, Sharda Ugra says that for a serious event, about serious money, and more importantly, serious cricket, there is something almost unintentionally comic about the IPL.

The rules justifying the ban on Mohammad Asif for one year gives the impression that the fast bowler has been banned by the IPL alone and not across the sport. The ICC reiterated its expectation that all members observe the ban and that Asif will not be available to play until the ban has been completed. But the question is, has the IPL got the authority to ban a player from the sport for any length of time? KP Mohan in the Hindu wonders.

The ICC anti-doping code, relevant to the year 2008, when the Asif doping offence occurred, does not extend to anything other than ICC events. Even if one were to take into account the clause relating to “mutual enforcement and assistance”, the ICC would be duty bound to enforce only a member unit’s regulations and not that of a tournament.

In the latest edition of Outlook, Smita Gupta takes a look at IPL chairman and commissioner Lalit Modi's rocky path. When Vasundhara was CM of Rajasthan, Modi was king. Power equation changed, his throne is now rocking, says Gupta.

Even as Modi finds the going tough with his friend and patron Vasundhara in the opposition, tales of his imperious style and skills in bending the law have become the stuff of contemporary folklore here. It wasn’t just the RCA which reeled under his onslaught—what with his election as president mired in court cases, allegations of financial malfeasance and forgery—but also bureaucrats, police, landowners and anyone else who dared cross his path.

Allegations against him may be flying thick and fast, but they don't worry the IPL's administrative face. In the same magazine, Rohit Mahajan interviews Modi, who says there will always be detractors if you create something.

Mahajan also traces how Modi climbed up the Rajasthan Cricket Association ranks.

The record-breaking prices paid at the Indian cricket auction might suggest sport is recession proof. It isn't - and that may be no bad thing, writes Ed Smith in the Telegraph.

But don't be fooled: the downturn will bite in sport, too. The IPL is a special case because much of its treasure chest was stashed away before the recession. Among the rank and file professional sports teams, sponsorship is getting harder to come by. And just ask Boris Johnson or Tessa Jowell how it is shaping up for the 2012 London Olympics.

The hectic buying and bonhomie among the new lords of the game confirm one thing though: the bubble is intact in India and, forget global meltdown, it won’t burst even if a meteor strikes the planet. Yes, cricket still rules, writes Bobilli Vijay Kumar in the Times of India.

	Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff have plenty to smile about © Getty Images

Derek Pringle writes in the Daily Telegraph that Friday’s IPL auction has made one of cricket’s oldest sledges – playing like a millionaire – redundant. He also wonders whether Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen becoming the most expensive players is a case of image exceeding ability.

Like Becks, KP has the pop star wife, the tattoos, and takes a good photo. He also has friends in celebrity circles ... Still, given there is a global economic meltdown, it is both surprising and gratifying that cricket appears to be recession-proof.

In the Guardian, David Hopps says that the big bucks of the IPL will not cause dressing-room problems because the disparity in earnings of the richest and poorest members of a side have long been vast due to sponsorship deals.

The IPL, as its administrators like to boast, is a classic example of the free market … It is just that, in the free market, no one has a clue any more what anything – or anyone – is really worth.

Barclays were valued at about £15bn at the start of November but only about £4bn last week as shareholders sold in droves. Perhaps they should bundle up some unwanted players like Luke Wright, Samit Patel and any number of Australian state players and flog them off to Deccan Chargers as triple-A securities.

In the same paper, Vic Marks says there was little change in the demeanour of the two millionaires in the England side.

Flintoff bowled like a million dollars, perhaps better than that by current rates of exchange but it took him a long time to get rid of Ramnaresh Sarwan. Maybe there was some justice in the fact that Stuart Broad, who had shunned the IPL, was the man whose toil was most rewarded.

In a tongue-in-cheek piece in the Times, Patrick Kidd provides an account of what transpired in the England dressing room as the auction took place.

The second player auction for IPL Season 2 was less of a grab of big-name overseas batsmen and more a pursuit of bowlers, utility men and, in the case of Kevin Pietersen and Bangalore, some much-needed inspiration, writes Sharda Ugra in India Today.

Minutes seemed like hours as the various franchises raised the stakes on Mashrafe Mortaza, who was eventually purchased by Kolkata Knight Riders for an unexpected US$ 600,000. What was the reaction back home? Tears of joy. Read on in the Daily Star.

The paceman was showered with greetings once the news broke and his parents even broke into tears of joy at their beloved son's amazing success: "My father was just crying while talking over phone from my home district (Narail)"

It baffles me that in some places the IPL is still being seen as a financial rather than as a cricketing phenomenon, writes Harsha Bhogle in the Indian Express.

The money in Indian cricket has not been earned by thuggery and its colour is the same as that from other respectable enterprises around the world. It amused me no end that last year it was pooh-poohed by players who thought this was another form of beach and beer cricket. The auction was ridiculed and it still is but one of the great advantages of sitting on a distant couch is that you don’t always have to present an alternative. In course of time the auction will cease to be important but in the first year it was essential. Already there are fewer players up for grabs since teams are more or less settled and we will slowly move towards a trading system as exists in the more established football leagues. Just as those who ridiculed Kerry Packer were the ones who looked stupid in the end, those that choose to ignore, or choose not to understand, the Indian consumer and Indian markets will become irrelevant. Those that close their eyes can only see darkness.

	Andrew Flintoff is one of seven England players in the IPL auction © Getty Images

Comical Ali would find it difficult to argue all is hunky dory in the England dressing room and Friday's IPL auction is unlikely to help matters, says Lawrence Booth in his post on the Guardian website.

The goodish news is that only four members of the squad in the West Indies - Kevin Pietersen (bidding starts at $1.35m), Andrew Flintoff ($950,000), Paul Collingwood ($250,000) and Owais Shah ($150,000) - are on the IPL list. Three others - Ravi Bopara ($150,000), Samit Patel ($100,000) and Luke Wright ($150,000) - are in England. In theory, this limits the scope for jealousy. But then in theory, the Stanford match was a simple enough proposition too, and look how England failed to get their heads round that one.

It's true that other dressing rooms round the world failed to implode with envy when the first auction took place a year ago in Mumbai. But England's circumstances right now are particularly sensitive. Pietersen is putting a brave face on the treatment he received at the hands of his team-mates and the England and Wales Cricket Board; Flintoff has had to admit he backed Peter Moores; and Andrew Strauss is doing his best to hold the whole thing together with the help of Andy Flower, a decent man who isn't even sure whether he wants to be coach. The blue touch paper is waiting to be lit.