When the Contest Goes Missing: Why IPL 2026 Left Me Cold

This tournament has had my love since its first ball, which is exactly why it will not get my flattery. Pretending has never come easily, even when pretending would have kept me on a few more dinner lists. So when, somewhere in the middle of IPL 2026, a hand reached for the phone during the back ten overs of a run chase — the very passage of play once lived for — that small surrender felt like evidence. Four decades inside the game, played through the 1980s and 90s and watched ever since from the middle and the commentary box, had never produced such indifference at a cricket ground. That it should arrive at the IPL, of all places, says something is wrong.

The headline is honourable enough. Royal Challengers Bengaluru went back-to-back, only the third side ever to win two finals in succession — a fine team, well led, and a club known to me from the inside. Having sat at its very first auction table, where the money was spent with the serene confidence of men who had never been shown a balance sheet, and having given three years to it as batting coach — a post that ages a man faster than any other in sport — I begrudge them nothing. But greatness at the summit thrills only when the climb beneath it is real, and for long stretches this season the climb was a moving walkway. Win the toss, consult the dew, post or chase 210, shake hands: too many league games ran on those rails, the result settled by coin and curator long before a contest could break out.

The grievance is not who lifted the trophy. It is what the spectator was asked to watch on the way to it. We have engineered a version of T20 in which the bat carries almost no fear. Flat decks, square boundaries a brisk cough would clear, two new balls, the impact-player cushion that lets a side bat with one eye serenely closed — every lever has been pulled towards the man with the willow. When everyone can clear the rope at will, clearing it stops meaning anything. A six ought to be an event; this season it barely interrupted a sandwich.

Here is the irony that should make administrators sit up. The final, on the night, was a proper contest — Gujarat could muster only a modest total, the bowlers were suddenly allowed a voice, and the match had genuine tension in its veins. That is the whole argument in a single evening. Let the bowler back into the conversation and the cricket grips again. Knockout pressure achieved what flat pitches and fearless batting had spent two months suppressing: it restored doubt. And doubt, not dominance, is what keeps a man in his seat. The most influential figures in the modern IPL are no longer the captains; they are the groundsman with the heavy roller and whichever deity is rostered to decide when the dew descends.

What worries me most is the boy watching at home in Hubballi, or in the maidanas across Mysuru. He is being taught that batting is brute range-hitting and bowling mere damage limitation, a profession to be pitied rather than admired. He is not being taught the slow, beautiful art of constructing a contest: the bowler setting a batsman up across three deliveries, the batsman absorbing pressure and biding his time. A generation is being raised on fireworks and told it is a feast. Having once finished a season as the leading run-scorer, I can promise that the runs worth remembering are never the easy ones. They are the ones wrenched from a bowler trying, with everything he has, to get you out — and succeeding often enough to keep you honest.

A lopsided spectacle can entertain for an over. It cannot hold a nation for two months. This league’s genius was always jeopardy: the conviction that any side could topple any other on a given night, and that within a single match the pendulum might swing four times before tea. Strip the jeopardy out and boredom is never far behind, however many runs are stacked on the board. Let it be plain — this is no plea for low scores. It is a plea for the fight: for the stomach to knot when a captain tosses the ball to a raw quick at the death with fifteen to defend and the look of a man asked to defuse something; for a batsman to be truly beaten, rather than top-edging one to the rope for six anyway and trotting through for the formality of running it.

None of this is fate. The conditions were built and can be dismantled. The companion piece that follows sets out exactly how — pitches, boundaries, the ball, the rules — to drag the fight between bat and ball back to the centre of the IPL, where it has always belonged. A tournament this precious deserves better than a stadium full of people watching it through their phones.