And so it ends...

When the IPL began in India I had decided not to follow it (reasons detailed here).

CricInfo decided that the game of cricket was far superior to the (not-so) hidden agendas of the BCCI head honchos and covered the event as best as it could. Their motivation, as eloquently described by Sambit Bal, the editor, can be summed up in this paragraph from the article:

We will live with the restrictions. You may keep us out of cricket grounds, but you can't take cricket out of us. Boycotting the IPL is not an option for us. Our commitment to cover cricket is absolute, as is our obligation to you. We are not blind to the significance of the IPL, which could be a seminal event in cricket, for better or worse. We will try to bring you every game with the same rigour and depth you have come to expect from us. Please bear with us if some matters like photographs are beyond us.

No one is bigger than the game. Administrators will come and go, but as long as cricket is around, Cricinfo will be here to cover it. That's a promise.

I did not follow the IPL for most of its duration, except to read about it in articles by columnists that I follow regularly (notably Peter Roebuck and Harsha Bhogle). One article that caught my attention was by Michael Atherton, the erstwhile captain of England. He touched upon the potential connection between Major League Baseball and the IPL.

Are Rajasthan Royals the Oakland A's of cricket? Devotees of excellent sporting literature will need no introduction to Moneyball, a terrific yarn about how the A's, a relatively low-budget baseball team ($41million - about £22million - to spend on players counts as low budget in American sport), consistently outperformed their more illustrious and wealthier rivals by dint of the unorthodox coaching methods of Billy Beane, their general manager.

Having read Moneyball, I can see where Atherton was going with this article. But the Rajasthan Royals differ from the Oakland A's in one BIG way - they won the championship. For all the success that Billy Beane has had over the years, maximizing the talents of his lowly-paid team, he has not been able to continue the success into the playoffs. In the playoffs, possibly because the "stars" are more immune to the increased pressure, the big guns win it all. Occasionally, a smaller-market team pulls it off, but rarely does that team sustain its success.

A lot of credit will go towards Shane Warne (it will get increasingly romanticized with time) as it must, but had they lost the final (which they barely won off the last ball, mind you) then the highest-paid player in the league - MS Dhoni - would have walked off with the crown.

There is, indeed, a fine line between being the GOAT and the goat.