Hammer the Stumps

caught the Indian Premier League auction on television the other day, although it was another day and a half before I realised what I'd actually seen. I'm not normally this intuitively slow, I mean I kind of understand Lost, and I find Frasier much funnier than My Family, as we all should, but nothing I saw on the screen intrinsically linked with sport in my mind. A room of circular tables populated by suited gentlemen politely clapping as a man talked on a microphone; for all I knew I had just watched a man's act bombing on the Asian version of Last Comic Standing.

But no this polite scene was not a Businessmans' dinner, nor a charity auction of any sort, it was actually the player auction for the coming IPL cricket season. These men, were casually shelling out thousands, and in a couple of cases millions, of dollars on the world's top cricketing talent. This was clearly a big deal, both in terms of the size of the bids being tabled, and also in the role of such an auction in world sport. Although, the most disappointing aspect of this multi-million pound auction was not the distinctly capitalist approach to sport, but the actual quality of the footage; poorly lit, unsteady camera work, Homes Under the Hammer may be the televisual equivalent of staring at a beige wall, but at least those guys now how to knock together good auction footage.

Sadly, as television demands and sofa-bound spectator interests prevail, this may be the future of many sports. The top players no longer possessing club loyalty of any kind, but instead wandering from place to place, hanging round for a season, not fussed who they are attached to, just so long as they are wanted (or paid) enough, like that dog from the Littlest Hobo, or Abi Titmus. Yes, gradually, sport is becoming similar to the cartoon series the Hurricanes; so when you next see Andrew Flintoff ambling into bat for a club side, don't be surprised if he is doing so in a hollowed out volcano.