First, a small confession. Over the past fortnight, I haven’t watched a single Indian Premier League (IPL) game in its entirety. I have watched hours of footage of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, four editions of football’s greatest grudge match and several movies. But not one full IPL game.

I’m no Test-match fundamentalist who’d happily barbecue a lover of Twenty20 at the stake. I have nothing against the idea of franchise cricket that allows top players to finally take home the kind of money that their counterparts in other sports make. I don’t think the IPL is the root of all cricket evil.

I haven’t watched for the simple reason that it hasn’t turned me on. Sure, there are some great players on view. I’ve seen quite a few tense finishes as well. But the spectacle as a whole pales next to what I’ve watched before. The chances are that I won’t sit a grandchild on one knee and wax eloquent about the night the Chennai Super Kings beat the Rajasthan Royals in the 10th round of games in the 2011 season.

I may, however, bore them to tears with stories of Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman at the Eden Gardens in 2001. There’s a fair chance I’ll bring up the Adam Gilchrist innings in the 2007 World Cup final, and reminisce about the unbelievable atmosphere outside Trent Bridge the night Pakistan qualified for the World T20 final in 2009. Those are the days you’ll remember.

I covered an extraordinary number of games during the first three editions of the IPL. While they never gripped me in the way that international cricket does, there are a few things lodged in the memory bank – Shane Warne’s captaincy of the Rajasthan Royals in the first season, the cricketing version of turning water into Château d'Yquem, Manish Pandey on a floodlight night at Centurion and MS Dhoni’s chest-thumping celebrations in Dharamsala.

Where the IPL lost me was with the auction last January. Once they allowed two new teams in, there was no choice, if one had to create the illusion of a level playing field. But by doing so, they made the eight existing squads unrecognisable.

Or six of them anyway. The Super Kings, courtesy their ownership-cricket board nexus, and the Mumbai Indians, thanks to Mukesh Ambani’s deep pockets, held on to their blue-chip players. Everyone else played Carousel in tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Half the Delhi Daredevils seemed to move south to Bangalore. The best of Bangalore’s young talent moved up to Pune. The Kings XI has little to boast of in terms of Punjabi players. The Kolkata Knight Riders are led by someone, Gautam Gambhir, who is the very epitome of the combative and abrasive Delhi cricketer.

If I’m confused, imagine what the fans following the teams think. A few months ago, Adam Gilchrist was a hero for the Deccan Chargers, the man who led them from last (2008) to first (2009). These days, he’s an adversary as he leads Kings XI. Ross Taylor, so adored in Bangalore for his big heaves over midwicket, now entertains fans in Jaipur.

Some will say that’s the way of professional sport. To an extent, they’re right. There have been times when Arsenal have played English Premier League games without a single Englishman, when Internazionale of Milan won a European trophy without an Italian in sight. But these are proud institutions with more than a century of tradition. For most people, supporting them is not even a choice. It’s a rite of passage, a continuation of the faith of their fathers [and mothers].

The lack of parochial straws to clutch at aside, the problem with the IPL is its lack of narrative. Games billed as Warne against Sachin Tendulkar or Virender Sehwag versus Dale Steyn often don’t even see the main protagonists squaring off. For all its alleged flaws, 50-over cricket can still snag you the way a great movie does. I’ll never forget the spell that Mohammad Asif bowled to Tendulkar and Dravid under lights at Lahore in 2006. He moved them around like puppets on a string, and only Tendulkar’s mastery of which balls to leave allowed him to turn a hopeless start into a match-winning hand.

You don’t see that in a 20-over game. Survive an over or 10 balls from Steyn and you don’t have to worry about him again. See off Warne or Lasith Malinga and feast on the lesser lights. And there are a fair few of those, with the rules insisting that there be seven Indian players in each playing XI. With the league now having 10 teams, that means 70 local players guaranteed a game. There aren’t more than 30 of the requisite quality, in India or any other country in the world.

Sooner rather than later, that quota needs to be reassessed. And if an IPL window is to be carved out of the international calendar, then it needs to take others’ concerns into account and be open to all. It needs to be played at a time when the majority of nations don’t have touring commitments and it can’t blacklist cricketers from any one country.

Most of all though, the IPL needs to understand that less is more. Much has been said about the interminably long World Cup. But at 47 games, it was a little whippersnapper next to the 74-match IPL leviathan. Increasingly, it resembles the fast-food joint in town that everyone used to flock to when it first opened. Now, the only regulars are the ones with bad dietary habits.

It’s also no game for the aesthete. The T20 format stresses on the functional. Anything goes, whether that’s a thick outside edge or a mistimed hoick that clears a small boundary. Many of us love cricket because it can be so staggeringly beautiful. There are few things in sport to compare with the well-timed straight drive, or the perfectly pitched out-swinger that just grazes the bat on its way to the keeper.

You could watch an Abdul Qadir or a Warne for hours and remain captivated. But do you really want to see Tendulkar inside-edging one to fine leg, or – horror of horrors – VVS Laxman trying to smear one over mid-on? To me, that’s like drawing a moustache on one of Raphael’s paintings of beautiful women.