A freewheeling confluence of colour, music, celebrity culture and endless, blinking advertisements - a sort of Pop Cricket - it is the sort of louche entertainment you can imagine Warhol putting on at the Factory. Umpires Lou Reed and Truman Capote, with Edie Sedgwick and Anita Pallenberg as sulking cheerleaders.
Where the analogy falls down, of course, is Warhol’s tendency to lace his work with a strong slug of irony. The IPL would have been his great trick installation, disowned by its creator within months; a pungent satire on Indian nationalism, with the character of Chris Gayle an acerbic pastiche of Man-as-commodity.
Watching Gayle sodomise his way to 175 off 66 balls on Tuesday certainly felt like a pastiche of something. Despite the fact that bowlers were tumbling before him like a giant stack of Campbell’s soup cans, it all felt somewhat bloodless, cartoonish, comic-book; as if every soaring six should be accompanied by the word ‘POW!’ appearing on the screen in giant letters.
It was cricket for the loins, the brain emerging largely unscathed.
What was most interesting of all was the inadequacy of the IPL’s in-house commentators, those lords of perpetual astonishment, in describing this genuinely remarkable feat. “He’s on fire!” shouted one; lamentably faint praise given that an IPL batsman is generally ‘on fire’ if he hits two fours in a row. Failing that, the one-word exegesis - “Wow!” “Whoa!”
“Bang!” - proved a favourite.
It was Sky Sports’ misfortune that Gayle’s act of cricketing conflagration came in one of the two weeks of the year when it broadcasts a live County Championship game. By contrast, Somerset’s slow roasting of Warwickshire seemed a touch prosaic, even though the commentary, presentation (that Hawkeye is available for Tim Ambrose but not Sachin Tendulkar still boggles the mind), and possibly even standard were superior.
The IPL has been to Australia's misfortune too, and not just because of the injury to Ryan Harris. In the week they announced their Ashes squad, the array of old masters living it up in India was an acrid reminder of past riches. Mike Hussey, Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist, Brett Lee, even Shaun Tait. That’s what you could have had. Here, have Phil Hughes instead.
Australia’s eclectic, aging selection, encapsulated by the linseed-soaked Chris Rogers, seems in part to be an addled expression of that nostalgia, a grasp for a gilded era when world-class batsmen were as ubiquitous as plastic cutlery. Placing faith in youth didn’t work. Betting the house on Rob Quiney certainly didn’t work. May as well try this.
The most obvious parallel to draw in this country is with the England of the 1990s, a decade of almost unimpeded strife that cricket fans of a certain age are still able to bond over, in the same way that old East End ladies bond over the Blitz, or livestock farmers over foot-and-mouth. Back then the selection committee often consisted of a single, gurgling Amstrad computer in a dusty, unvisited TCCB office, using an MS-DOS batch file to generate a string of seemingly random names - MALLENDER.DAT, WELLS.EXE, ILOTT.CONFIG.
But perhaps a more prescient analogue is the mid-1980s Australian side. Then as now, they had lost an entire roster of all-time greats. Then as now, they were led by a batsman whose rare talent and resolve was placed into sharp relief by his second-rate team. For all his buoyant, ‘aw, look’ earnestness, Michael Clarke — like Allan Border before him — often resembles a Michelin-starred chef forlornly attempting to concoct a four-course gourmet meal out of frozen peas, Holsten Pils and Vegemite.
And yet it is not just mediocrity that Clarke is fighting, but apathy. This is the paradox: the more we seem to care about the Ashes in England and Australia, they less they seem to care about it anywhere else. This is the world we live in now, where the old, abstract expressionistic brushstrokes of Test cricket feel less and less relevant with every passing year, marginalised by an alternative vision of the game’s future: hedonistic, voyeuristic, indulgent, where Chris Gayle is always hitting sixes, where everyone is famous for 20 overs.