"The Gamechangers" by the Fake IPL Player

Cricket engages India. Cricketers have rewarded India. However the state of the sport was dull until Lalit Modi and IPL came along.

IPL has the right ingredients: Regional tribes are vying for national championship using a mixture of local and world-class talent. Short duration leading to assured results. Forty days of prime time TV audience that is probably equal to the population of US.

Lalit Modi rewarded the audience, the players, and the sports associations that owned the infrastructure by clever monetization of the game from the rich who vied to own the clubs and the television channels that could cash the advertisement slots.

All that was missing was some fun.

The Fake IPL Player provided it.

We got updates of what was happening among the celebrities involved. We are clever enough to figure out whom the nicks referred to.

We laughed at the plight of the owners when their teams did not go up the league table; the cascading impact on their personal brand especially when they invested their “face time” in addition to their “money”.

We smiled at the cunning manipulations of the Sports Czar who wanted to make IPL a power to reckon with in international cricket. We liked him for that.

We could imagine the coach who so believed in his lap top that he would rather send the lap top to bat!

We laughed at the machinations of power hungry support staff

We read with interest the off-field shenanigans of the players.

We ROFLed when the frustrated captain said “Attitude toh poora masala dosai ka deta hai; aur bowling aapam jaisa karta hai”.

The Gamechangers is an irreverent story that mimics the innards of IPL and the blog in an engaging way.

I enjoyed reading this book in one go more than watching some of the IPL matches at Chepauk.