Being a sports freak has a lot of drawbacks. People tend to take you for granted as far as watching sports is concerned. And the magnitude of it hits you the most when the Indian Premier League (IPL) is on.

It’s assumed that you must be glued to your telly watching each and every ball of “the biggest sporting extravaganza”. So conversations with friends revolve around how weak the bowling attack of Rajasthan Royals is and you are expected to pitch in with your views on it.

Relatives will give - and seek your - expert opinion on what a brilliant innings Sehwag played, when the fact is you were busy watching re-runs of Friends (yes I did that a lot during the first season of IPL).

Personally, cricket in its Maggi noodles avatar is something which I am not too bothered about.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think of myself as a snob as far as cricket watching is concerned. I enjoy the occasional drama and edge of the seat stuff that T20 guarantees.

But give me a two-hour session of test cricket where 40 runs are scored but the players are fighting tooth and nail, over a three-hour slam bang cricket where the idea seems to be who can hit the ball longest out of the ground.

Of course, I can understand why the IPL remains such a huge draw. It’s fast paced, requires very little of your time (as compared to test matches or even ODIs), and most importantly for the paisa vasool audience, it’s all about having fun.

I may be an extremist but for me one of the biggest reasons of watching in any sport is to actually care about a particular team winning or losing. In the IPL, I find that majority of the time that goes out of the window.

‘Fans’ of IPL are content with enjoying the action and are somewhat indifferent towards the end result. It doesn’t matter too much if their team lost the match as long as they were guaranteed some action packed moments, something which is a staple ingredient of most IPL matches.

How can you expect enjoy any sport, where winning or losing is secondary and entertainment is primary. At least, I can’t.

As I said at the beginning of the post, being a sports fanatic has many drawbacks. And one of them is that you end up taking sports a bit more (in fact, a lot more) seriously than the rest. Fun and games are good, but sports is a serious business, at least for hardcore sports buffs. And when indifference creeps in, like in the case of IPL, it sadly fails to cut the ice.