The IPL is back, and the imperial march of franchise cricket continues unabated

T he world’s richest cricket tournament starts on Friday. As is tradition, most Australians will be asleep. The IPL has always taken the shape of one of those ungraspable dreams here, all haze and fog in our consciousness, a swirl of dizzying colours, shapes, sounds and salaries – 3am finishes will do that to you. When we wake, a weary scroll might sling us some highlights of somebody doing something. The TV and the papers might show us an Australian doing something. Like most dreams, soon after we wake, we ask ourselves: “what happened again?”

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That said, people who like cricket should be pretty familiar with fatigue by now. We’re not out of March, and the IPL is the ninth global T20 tournament to be staged in 2023, following the BBL, Super Smash, BPL, SA20, ILT20, Women’s T20 World Cup, PSL, and WPL. From the start of February to mid-March, there was Test cricket scheduled every single day involving Zimbabwe, West Indies, England, New Zealand, Australia, India, South Africa and Sri Lanka. There were probably some one-dayers. A Sheffield Shield. It is very hard to keep up.

But that kind of content squeeze won’t happen in April and May. The IPL takes place unthreatened and unfettered, fresh from its US $6.3bn media rights deal announced last year. In three years’ time it will expand to three months, and that’s just the tournament in India. In Abu Dhabi’s ILT20, three of the league’s six franchises are owned by IPL owners, all six teams in South Africa’s SA20 are IPL subsidiaries, and the newly formed Major League Cricket (MLC) in the US will see IPL