RE: Indian Premier League Cricket : Has it Peaked?
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Yes I will concede that the IPL is here to stay. Is it getting the viewers outside of India though? I would have thought there would be a lot of English cricket fans just as dismayed about the state of the game.
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There are certainly people who don't enjoy short form cricket, lots of noise about The Hundred and a general concern about the future of red ball cricket.
That being said, as far as crowds are concerned this seems to be the only country that can consistently sell out Test Matches almost regardless of the opposition and how well we are playing. We've got Tests against WI and Sri Lanka this season, hardly great teams but 4 of them are sold out for at least the first 3 days and I'd imagine the rest of the tickets will be gone by the time the matches start.
I prefer red ball cricket (I'm off to the Oval this morning to see if Surrey can finish off Hampshire in the County Championship) but I don't mind short form cricket. Some of the scoring in the IPL at the moment is silly but that's as much to do with the length of the boundaries. One of the games I watched had a 56m boundary! I was playing on bigger grounds than that when I was 8-years-old. It makes for uncompetitive battles between batsmen and bowlers which is really what you want for any match in any format. No different though to some of the absolute roads you see produced in Tests around the world where you could play 10 days and still not see 40 wickets fall.
Most sports around the world would kill to have the amount of money that cricket has flowing into it at the moment. The reality is that without T20 franchise cricket, the game would most likely be bankrupt.