I have many problems with the IPL, but my biggest is that it will shove other international series out the window while it settles into the cricket room. For some fans, that’s not a big deal, since there are already far too many stupid series going on (seven matches between England and Australia? Really? Series after series between the West Indies and England?).

Fine. But when you actually get down to cutting series left and right, you face some very difficult choices that are bound to make some countries happy, and others not. Some of the big-league countries — India, Australia, England, South Africa — would be happy to just play themselves, leaving the small fry to themselves (West Indies, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh).

But while that may yield higher fan satisfaction, it essentially makes cricket an even smaller club than it already is. Besides, all sports have to endure some “boring” matches — I usually skip the first four rounds of any tennis Grand Slam, only to tune in once I hear that an underdog has beaten a known, seeded athlete.

We forget that today’s minnows are tomorrow’s top ranks. What was Sri Lanka in the 1980s? For that matter, what was India? Sure, most times Bangaldesh plays Australia (or anyone plays Australia, for that matter), we know who’ll win and who will lose. But there’s always that small chance that fortune will, just this once, anoint the other team.

During the 1990s, there was a famous billboard advertisement that read, “Tendu, Ten Don’t.” That was when bookies waited to gamble until they knew what Sachin Tendulkar did with his wicket; they knew once he was gone, more often or not, the result could be predicted.

India’s not that dependent on the man anymore, and they haven’t been for a long time, thanks to Ganguly and Dravid and Laxman and Sehwag (and now, thanks to Dhoni and Yuvraj). But the man still refuses to follow the typical script of the athlete, the rhythm of the rise, summit and fall that traces the wonder and fragility of the human body. He’s supposed to fade away, but he just won’t — that 175 against Australia wasn’t an anomaly.

Near his retirement, Ganguly once said, half-jokingly, that all cricketers get dropped and re-selected — “except Tendulkar. They’ll never drop Tendulkar.” Fine, say what you want about the man, he’ll decide his own exit and when he does, Indian cricket won’t necessarily crumble.

But what will we do when he eventually heads off? At this point, does anyone anywhere think that much of Ganguly, except perhaps when one of India’s many useless sports channels play his greatest innings reels? Or Dravid or Kumble? Will we forget Sachin once he goes?

Maybe he’ll be different. It’s not just that Tendulkar has played for so long. The man’s career also spanned India’s economic rise post license-raj. In the 1990s, faced with a still-yet uncertain future (and even more uncertain minority governments), we could always rely on Sachin, the one man who wouldn’t abandon the coalition. He almost made capitalist modernity comfortable for India; we trusted in him, and we grew to trust in ourselves (before Ganguly could take his shirt off at Lord’s, Sachin had to hammer the English and Australians). We grew too comfortable; a couple of years ago, a Mumbai crowd booed Sachin (capitalism allows for no gods).

There’s another thing, though: we’re seeing in cricket what’s already happened to most consumer goods. The market has broken into multiple niches; gone are the days when, say, one band ruled all musical charts. Now, there’s Twenty20, ODIs, Test cricket — even fantasy cricket if you prefer the virtual. We all had common cricket heroes and villains; now, we’ll find many mini-superstars who burst with an IPL innings and then disappear until the next slog.

But Tendulkar — or Ponting, or Waugh or whatever — he’s different. When he leaves, we’ll not only lose the chance to see more innings like the one he played against Australia. We’ll lose a certain way with cricket.

Back in 2007/8, Australia came to India after before a blisteringly controversial Test series to play what turned out to be an unbelievably tame seven-match ODI tournament. India lost 4-2 (with one game washed out), though it would have lost 5-1 were it not for an improbable partnership between Zaheer Khan and Murali Kartik (which ended with an ethical quandary about walking).

The current series has been far more entertaining. Back in 2007, the Australians had yet to be fully knocked off their pedestal, and they still a methodical way of dismantling opposition teams. It was a thing to behold, but not completely thrilling.

That’s all done with. If you look at the 2007 series stats, you’ll note Australia benefited largely from a solid batting line-up that has been subsequently shaken to the core. Symonds, Hayden, Clarke and Gilchrist were among the top 5 batsmen then, and all of them aren’t playing this series (and three of them won’t play internationally again). The new replacements are obviously handling themselves well (and Hussey, Ponting and Watson are in the top 5 in the 2009 series), but they’re clearly not as domineering as the 2007 foursome.

The worrying thing for India is how little it has changed. It’s been two years of “invest in the youth” strategy, and yet, the main players are still the veterans: Dhoni, Yuvraj, Tendulkar. Robin Uthappa is nowhere to be found; KD Karthik disappointed in 2007 (but may appear yet again in 2009); Suresh Raina has obvious potential but has yet to prove himself reliable; Rohit Sharma is gone, as is Irfan Pathan.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the current Indian outfit is better than the 2007 edition, but at this point, I wonder if Australia has proven better at finding and managing new talent. Let me know if I’ve gotten this completely wrong because I normally am the last person to give Australia anything by way of praise.

Continuing with the trend of shamelessly ripping off others’ work, I give you New York Times columnist David Brooks’ take on neuroscience.

The article’s more about the latest trends in “social cognitive neuroscience,” that is, the study of the effects of culture and social interactions on the human brain. The relevant paragraph here:

Mina Cikara of Princeton and others scanned the brains of Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watched baseball highlights. Neither reacted much to an Orioles-Blue Jays game, but when they saw their own team doing well, brain regions called the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens were activated. This is a look at how tribal dominance struggles get processed inside.

This is in reference to Dileep Premachandran’s column on cricket loyalties, as well as my post on why cricket should stay international: our brains are already wired to root for countries, not made-up IPL franchises.

As always, Dileep Premachandran has a brilliant column in The Guardian. Rather than write my own blog post, I’m just going to deconstruct his so you can fully appreciate the argument:

Point #1: The Champions League failed in India, largely because cricket is still about nationalism in India, not the game itself –

India went out in the first round in South Africa, and according to aMap, the average rating for the competition was 1.1 [meaning 1.1% of the homes surveyed were watching the games]. Interest peaked during the India-Pakistan encounter which had a rating of 6.2 (industry insiders say that any rating above 3 is a good one). The figure for the first few days of Champions League action? 0.74.

Point #2: Cricket fatigue doesn’t help, as the administrators kill the goose with the golden eggs –

There was a time when the first touch of late-autumn chill had cricket aficionados in a tizzy about the new season. Now, with the sport played all year round, who can summon up that excitement? “Look at the English Premier League,” says Arora. “They have a fixed three-month break at the end of each season. By the end of that, fans are desperate for play to start again. How can you have that desperation if you play all the time?”

Point #3: Indian cricket administrators are also still remarkably inept, using a ridiculous rotation schedule among still shabby stadiums that are also hung with still ridiculous reservations for VIPs who don’t show up. Phew! –

India may remain the game’s financial hub for the foreseeable future, but there seems to be no effort to create a genuine cricket culture. Where’s the annual marquee Test, the equivalent of Boxing Day at the MCG, July at Lord’s or New Year in Cape Town? Why is there a ridiculous rotation system that has denied Eden Gardens, India’s liveliest venue by far, a Test since December 2007? In that time, Mohali, where Tendulkar went past Brian Lara’s record for most Test runs in front of silent concrete stands and a few bussed-in schoolkids, has hosted two games.

There’s still more in that article worth reading that I haven’t quoted. Yeah, it’s that good. All hail. Read it.

Take a look at the short highlights of Kieron Pollard’s 54 off 18 balls against New South Wales. It’s only two minutes long, so you don’t get the match context to fully appreciate Pollard’s feat. (Head over to Cricket Online for that.)

Nagraj Gollapudi has a useful article on Cricinfo about the future of the county-based model that thrives only in cricket among global sports. He quotes a club executive to make his point:

“We are seeing the flaws in the country-versus-country model, where there is a huge disparity in the standard of teams. Some matches aren’t competitive and some countries are choosing to play others more regularly, so you haven’t got an even spread of the wealth generation.”

Here’s my problem with the club model (and feel free to correct me, because sports economics isn’t my forte): would anyone watch the IPL if its roster of stars didn’t include international luminaries? Would the IPL be such a success if its major athletes hadn’t already succeeded at the highest level?

Sure, it’s possible that club T20s will eventually provide the glitter and legimatacy that Tests currently do, but somehow I doubt clubs will easily replace the fire that international events easily provide. I want to watch India play Pakistan or England play Australia in a way that I don’t watch, um, the Delhi Daredevils play the Deccan Chargers.

Dileep Premachandran calls this Asif delivery the “ball of the tournament,” and thinks some Indian bowlers could learn from it:

Let’s play the good and bad game. On the good side, the tournament was fairly exciting, with plenty of action and close matches and compelling cricket. But on the bad side, the Australians — the ones who’ve done the most to make cricket boring in the last decade — won, and that too against New Zealand, a competent side (but nothing more).

So where does that leave us? This was supposed to be the tournament that confirmed Australia’s official demise as the best team in the world, but instead we found all the top favorites — Sri Lanka, South Africa, India — out of the running. But then again, Australia seemed much more exciting, scrapping to win down to the tail against Pakistan. If this is the future, I like it: plenty of contenders for the throne.

UPDATE: Kridaya has a different, more resigned, take.

Former West Indian cricket patron doesn’t throw punches as well as he threw around money. Via The Guardian:

The renegade financier Sir Allen Stanford, awaiting trial in Texas on $7bn (£4.4bn) fraud charges, is being moved to a different jail by US authorities after he suffered two black eyes, a broken nose and concussion in a fracas with a fellow inmate.