IPL's age of carnage may admit, but the future of crickets can be seen in its content | IPL

II've been watching the Indian Premier League a bit over the last five weeks. And there is, I would argue, no sporting event better suited to watching than the IPL, a tournament that fits beautifully into your existing life: something to watch while you prepare breakfast, something to eat in the to eat in the morning. background as you answer emails, a random white noise of various men with accents in the airport lounge shouting things like get that! and carnage!

You go to the stores, come back, and it's still there. You go on holiday for fourteen days and it's still there. Ruturaj Gaikwad is still batting. Axar Patel is still standing at mid-wicket, hands on hips, looking deeply unimpressed. You've missed about 8,000 runs and hundreds of sixes. But in an important sense, you haven't missed anything at all.

More specifically, I've been watching this year's IPL a bit and trying to think of what it reminds me of. When I finally saw Jonny Bairstow hit a 45-ball hundred for Punjab (I think) against Kolkata (I think), it hit me. This is the sporting equivalent of those viral phone videos of huge beer garden fights during big summer tournaments. It's the shaky camerawork, the grunting and shouting, the general sense of disarray and sweaty mismanagement, the invisible commentators chuckling uncontrollably in the foreground. Oh my god, here comes Travis Head with a whole four pint jug of Aspall! Get that! Massacre!

Yes, for those of you who haven't watched yet, this year's IPL was the most special election. On Friday, Bairstows chased down Punjab (I think) 262 to beat Kolkata (I think), hitting a record 42 sixes in the match. A week earlier, Hyderabad achieved (I think) a barely believable Powerplay score of 125. The five weeks of this tournament have already produced more 260-plus totals than the first 19 years of domestic Twenty20 cricket. Cricket is turning into baseball, said a breathless Sam Curran, a man who has clearly never been exposed to the mind-bending tedium of real baseball.

Perhaps the most obvious inspiration for this year's runfest isn't baseball, but Bazball. The reinvention of Test cricket by Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum has had a profound effect on the global game, and you can see that influence in Rishabh Pant's devastating, Duckett-esque power-hitting for Delhi, or Head's fearless Crawley-esque displays that opening the batting for Hyderabad: a free-scoring revolution with Rob Keys fingerprints all over it. To be clear, I don't think this. I actually don't think the IPL has been influenced by Bazball. But saying it does is going to annoy a lot of people in a very funny way, so let's just roll with it for now.

In terms of real factors, several have been posited. An unusual heatwave that has left both pitchers and bowlers in trouble. The usual suspects like long range hitting, gym training and bigger bats. Flat places and short demarcations. The Impact Player rule, which essentially allows teams to substitute an extra batter at a maximum advantage point in the game. And yet, for all the English-language pearl-clutching, the plaintive lamentations about the violation of Our Game and the sacred balance of bat and ball, none of the discourse seems to address the real issue here, which is that the IPL has turned into a button-down mash game. , arcade-style competition, precisely because this is where the market needed it.

In a sense, this year's IPL is the perfection of its founders' original vision, the logical culmination of all that came before it: cricket as unbridled disaster capitalism. The rules were increasingly tilting in favor of hitters. A viewing audience that preferred the dopamine hit of the six to the delayed gratification of the wicket. A complete six-industrial complex built to meet that demand and generate more. People don't pay to see teams thrown out for 80, AB de Villiers said this weekend. That is not nice.

The result: a celebration of hitting, and screaming, and more hitting, and even more screaming. Commentators near the climax, crowds on the verge of ecstasy, records scattered across the bed linen. The people with the greatest structural advantages are praised as gods and geniuses. And as with everything in Indian cricket these days, there is the unspoken language of example and decision, the implication that this is simply the way things will be done from now on. Eleven players in a team, international cricket as a highlight, 180 as a decent score in the first innings: the IPL sees your hidden colonial conventions and respectfully orders you to cry louder.

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In the short term, the batriarchy will likely be overthrown at some point. Totals will drop as surfaces begin to wear later in the tournament. Trigger-happy hitters will almost certainly have a tougher time when they encounter the compost heaps of the Caribbean and the United States during this summer's World Cup. And one of the miracles that crickets endure is that bowlers will always find ways to adapt. Perhaps, as fours and sixes are devalued, the humble dot ball will become the new frontier, and the wicket maiden the new viral sensation.

But on a longer time scale, something important seems to have shifted here. IPL seasons are so long now that none of the individual parts really matter anymore. The competition itself is less important than the content it generates: an empire of products, cricket reimagined as a kind of expendable processed matter. It's really quite an impressive feat. All IPLs are the same and all IPLs are a bloodbath. Gaikwad is still batting. Axar is still at mid-wicket. The score is 211 for four after 15.2 overs. This is the revolution, and we were all watching.

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