I’ve been kind of watching the Indian Premier League for the last five weeks. And there is, I would proffer, no sporting event better suited to kind of watching than the IPL, a tournament that just moulds itself beautifully around your existing life: something to kind of watch while you make breakfast, something to kind of have in the background while you reply to emails, an indiscriminate white noise of various men with airport-lounge accents squealing things like “fetch that!” and “carnage!”
You go to the shops, come back, and it’s still there. You go on holiday for a fortnight, and it’s still there. Ruturaj Gaikwad is still batting. Axar Patel is still standing at mid-wicket, hands on hips, looking deeply unimpressed. You’ve missed about 8,000 runs and several hundred sixes. But in an important sense, you’ve missed nothing at all.
