Indian Premier League embarks on crucial season after Covid debacle

It’s that time of the year. Schools are winding up and hill stations are taking record bookings from people trying to beat the heat up and down the country. The king of fruit, mango, is about to make it to shelves across India, with the season just around the corner.

But more than all these signs of summer, there is one unmistakable one: the start of the Indian Premier League. Since 2008, the IPL has gone from being a curiosity to a habit to Indians of different interests, different genders, different financial strata – you name it, the IPL has sucked in the population at large.

In 2021, the IPL found itself in the middle of a serious controversy when the tournament was initially staged in India in the middle of the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. With hospital beds filling up, morgues operating to capacity and the medical fraternity stretched, the tournament played on for too long before public opinion turned, forcing the Board of Control for Cricket in India to suspend the tournament. It was moved to the United Arab Emirates and completed in a much tighter bio-bubble, but the damage to the administrators’ reputations was done.

Despite this, the public did not change how it consumed the tournament. With large swathes of the country in different stages of lockdowns, the IPL provided respite for those who could afford it. The first 35 matches of the tournament attracted a combined viewership of 380 million, on television and via the internet.

The 2022 edition is a critical one. The league needs to get its act right to ensure that any stain from the previous season is forgotten. What’s more, two new teams have been added to the mix, the Gujarat Titans and the Lucknow Super Giants. In the first season of the