Bangalore vs Hyderabad @ Durban

Rahul Dravid on strike for Bangalore and Ishant Sharma with a shining new white ball; opening the attack for Kolkata. There is a buzz around the ground, the spectators are anxious and here are two youngsters in the crowd playing ‘inky pinky ponky’. Why are you boys doing that? “We don’t know whom to support” comes the answer. Of course, we are in Wanderers, South Africa not in Chinnaswamy or Eden Gardens. This is IPL2, it’s about Shahrukh, Preity, Shilpa; it’s about Buchanan and his idiocracy and finally it is about Lalit Modi and his money spinning affair. Sorry officially it’s a cricket tournament.

Just some things happening in IPL

1. “Even when he is 106, Ganguly will be the captain of KKR”- Shahrukh Khan (owner), 2008

“Mccullam replaces Ganguly as captain of KKR in IPL2” – Headlines, 2009

2. “T20 isnt Gavaskar’s cup of tea, if he wants, let him buy a team and run it the way he wants” –Shahrukh Khan

“ If Gavaskar ‘Saab’ asks me to stand on my head and run the team, I will do it” – Shahrukh Khan a week later.

3. “This year I am going to sleep with all of them”- Shahrukh Khan on how to bring the best out of his players.

4. “ I hope you can spin more”- Shilpa Shetty about RR ‘fast bowler’ Shiddhart Trivedi

And many more such…….

Open ibnlive.com or ndtv.com, you can see Shahrukh, Preity and Shilpa all over the page, either releasing their team’s T-Shirt or dancing in the inaugurals. Then we have the hero of IPL Mr. Modi posing for photographs with Shilpa and Preity on either side. I even read somewhere; next we are going to see him in a Bollywood movie too. This doesn’t complete the picture; we also have two dummies posing. One is the boy friend of Shilpa , Raj Kundra and the other the companion of Prieity, Nes Wadia. What a pretty family picture they make.

So what happened to all the discussions of who is in which team, what will be the strategies’, how are they going to fit in only 4 foreign players (though this year it should be corrected to 4 non-Indian players, even Indian are foreigners in SA) and the hoards of cricketing question we discuss and debate?

I understand why they decided to move the venue, elections is much bigger and going by what we have seen in the first phase (18 people including 5 polling officers killed by Maoist), Chidambaram was right; we do not have enough security personnel to provide security. But, how can you ignore cricket in a cricket tournament. Why has it become a platform for Shahrukh Khan to make a fool of himself? IPL was supposed to rival EPL; it was supposed to be EPL of cricket. I have never heard any team owner speak so much in EPL, in the last 20 years of its existence.

Please stop this tomfoolery and get down to cricketing. I want more of, “I feel BRC made a mistake by making Pieterson the captain, because he is very temperamental and hasn’t proved his worth as a captain”- Geff Boycott before the match, “Sachin Tendulkar dancing down the wicket and has lofted the ball in the air and it goes for a six, what a player what a man”- Tony Grieg during the match and a good panel discussion involving Ravi Shastri, Harsha Bhogle and Ian Chapple discussing why KKR lost the match, at the end.

IPL Zindabad, Bad press Murdabad !!!