10 Things # 39

As you were, everyone.....

1/ The IPL is on….

Be of good cheer

2/ ….and, for once, this is news rather than a preliminary throat-clearing. India and Pakistan having pulled back from the brink without too much damage, this weekend features Royals v Kings and KKR v RCB. No pressure on the retiree, whose net sessions are now being reported in detail more granular than most games. But will Mitch make it? Update: no!

The last few IPL matches will now be the first played in June - a portent of the tournament’s inexorable expansion - so it’s just as well India did not make the World Test Championship final and they are confined to screwing it for others. What’s the bet there’s more preparation opportunity next time? Down the track, Group A of the Asia Cup isn’t looking too robust: we’ll see if Sunil Gavaskar’s prophecies and Gautam Gambhir’s florid battle cry still echo four months hence.

3/ Cricket has a knack of muddling through violence. England tours of Pakistan coincided with the fall of military dictatorship and its reestablishment; England’s 1984-85 tour of India was interrupted by the assassinations of Indira Gandhi, the day of their arrival, and of deputy high commissioner Percy Norris, the morning after he hosted a party for David Gower’s team; twenty-four years later, the Mumbai attacks threw the itinerary awry. Nor is this peculiar to South Asia: after all, Ricky Ponting’s Australians were playing England at Headingley when Islamists in London detonated bombs that killed fifty-two people. And everyone’s favourite among cricket tours compromised by political unrest is the reputed cancellation of the visit of the Duke of Dorset’s team to France in 1789 due to the French Revolution - a rare instance of the end of reign stopping play.