The Fuck is an Indian Premier League?

As someone who had to figure out pretty much everything about cricket, there was very little I found more perplexing that the club/country conundrum.

Following soccer, I was very aware of the concept of national teams meaning a great deal to people.  But even then, there are many people that are club over country, hell I'm one.  Coming into cricket, and finding out that players are with the national team a crap ton amount of time, and a lot time times, might barely play for a club team was unbelievably confusing.  Not only that, looking at players' Wikipedia pages, a lot of them played for more than one club team during the same years!  What the shit is this?

I'd definitely heard of the Indian Premier League, leading up to its beginning a few weeks ago.  But of course, being a new cricket obsessive like I was, I wanted to read as much about it as I could.  The team names seemed a bit arbitrary and as it turns out, they sorta are.  In my few months watching, Twenty20 had been my least favorite form of the game, because there really didn't appear to be any strategy in it.  But I tuned in anyway, because it's cricket, and I needed my fix.

I decided I would root for King's XI Punjab, because they had Adam Gilchrist, and he was someone who I loved reading about and watching YouTube videos of in my primitive stages of learning.

So, I tuned in for a few games, and very much did enjoy the actual gameplay, but the whole thing is just, I dunno, arbitrary.  I can understand being Indian and supporting your hometown team, but as someone who is from America, I just can't get into it.  I'll still check in and see some scores and how some of the players I know are performing, can't say that I can truly get into this.  Get back to me in the later stages, IPL.