The image of a fallen Sourav Ganguly, who wasn’t wanted by anyone in the IPL auction, who then rose up from the ashes, padded up for the Pune Warriors, walked out into the blazing sunshine, the eyes of a cricket crazy nation on him AND…………….got out for a duck.
Symbolic of the anticlimax that the IPL has become. One would think that you would become bored of a couple of months of guys coming on and banging the sphere to all corners of the ground day in and day out. It’s as if even the names of the players are tailor made for entertainment. Where can you see a Gayle playing against a Blizzard anywhere else other than on the radars of the meteorological department or maybe in a crazy video game? Seriously, Chris Gayle batting like he did wasn’t all that surprising as it was made out in the media to be. If you gave a giant, humongous monster of a West Indian with a strike rate of around 5000 a hard wooden bat and tell him to get on with it, what did you expect?
Even Poonam Pandey got bored and had nothing to say before the IPL final. Rumours are that she’s somewhere in Haiti after a few failed promises during the course of the world cup ;-) And does M.S Dhoni know how to lose? It’s getting increasingly monotonous watching him win everything in the world while coming on at the end of the match saying something to the tune of, “The boys did a fantastic job. I thought it was a good pitch. The opposition (including Pakistan, Sri lanka, Australia, Kolkata, Pune, Newzealand, Shanghai, Kwung Pow and every other place in the world) played well but bad luck.”
I wonder if MSD could lead the Indian football team to the world cup. The way this is going you’l probably see him giving Cristiano and Messi a few stopovers and crossing it in better than Beckham, lifting the Cup and congratulating his ‘boys’ all over again. Yawn.
Also the renaissance of the greatest orator, on par with John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, continues - Navjot Singh Sidhu. If NATO had employed this guy to talk to the Libyans, Gaddafi would have ended up tearing his hair out, sending a few planes up and bombing the guts out of his own house to end the misery. A mistake by NATO, that one.
IPL -4 also threw up talented youngsters like Wriddhiman Saha, Ambati Rayudu and Prashant Parameshwaran. The guys at the literary department of Oxford are probably going nuts trying to pronounce these names. Lasith Malinga would’nt look out of place in a jungle, hunting vengeful rhinos by picking up pebbles, yorking them, and breaking their feet.
There are also rumours that Kochi is going to shift its home ground to Ahmedabad. So, in effect if they play a game in Chennai, their away ground will be closer to them than their home ground. How amazingly well-planned out. Might as well have made the home ground in South Africa or someplace.
And is anyone getting the eerie feeling that the IPL is becoming more like the English Premier League with every season? Players getting transferred, home and away games. So much so that R.Ashwin, the young spinner, compared his Chennai team to Manchester United! Imagine Alex Ferguson pulling on a Lungi while rooting for L.Balaji and plotting a Strategic Timeout. Lol.
Wonder what inventions we’l have in IPL 5. The way it’s gone, we might have a few more cheerleaders, the umpires might make their entrance while moonwalking, the Somali pirates may be hired to catch the attention of the crowd, and at the end of it all Dhoni would be grinning all over his cup. The Indian Volleyball League is coming up. Anyone interested?
