I quite like cricket and find this entire concept of IPL rather entertaining! It's not exactly cricket that you are watching in here...there are over enthusiastic filmstars, dumb socialites, scantily clad cheerleaders, fancy commentators, and of course top brass players from many nations wearing the same outfit and playing as teams! What money can do! I am no classic cricket loyalist - but this isn't what we have been knowing as cricket since we learnt to fit a descrption to the term! True, Test Cricket might be boring and now with the rapidly decreasing time at our hands, even a one dayer seems long and stretched out. In comparison, a twenty over a side match is faster! But it still is far too dramatized to be called and loved as a game! But its still entertaining - far more than the cliched bollywood films or one of the innumerable shows and award functions that show swoning spectators and off beat stars showing their skills - Live and Exclusive!
This year however, I dont feel much of an attachment with the entire festival - yes, festival it is! Of colours, glamour, style, glitz, and more...the only question remaining how Indian is the Indian Premiere League? Except for the franchisee owners and players who are found mostly to warm the benches? Let's see what we have here - Coaches for almost all the teams, captains for most, management team for most, and top players for most are either from Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa. They take decisions and they decide teams - now I wonder how much of an idea they have about cricketing realities in India and the performance of domestic level cricketers to decide on who should be playing and who should not! Strange how even the owners find it more re-assuring to rely on these foreigners to decide the fate of the players, and of the team subsequently. So much so that a comment made by one of cricketing legends regarding a particular theory coined by a particular gentleman (read expert coach) could trigger off a suggestion regarding buying his own team and then deiciding trategies for them rather than commenting on strateies devised by coaches of other teams. Money talks, true - but it certainly does not give anyone the authority, no matter how sought after a star he is, to make this kind of a comment on one of the cricketing legends of not just the country but the world as a whole! Stars, they might be, in thir own field but that hardly brings in the necessity to make them the boss in a field that is not their forte! But true to our basic nature we remain bowed down to the glamourous and the powerful, oh and are we for getting the westerners?
And then to add more to the party, there appears this mysterious blogger, who can be anyone but does divulge a lot of well and better kept secrets of this big, bad party at South Africa! Was just reading through the blog and it appeared rather funny! There is this guy sitting out there pretty close to the teams, perhaps in the same hotels, bitching about them in public and shedding light on things that were hidden and yet known well! In fact whats funnier are the comments put - some appreciative, some critical, and some typical! Now, a blog is an expression of a person's feelings - so if I am writing what I feel in my blog, there should be no reason as to why players should be brought under scrutiny for venting their feelings, frustrations, and more! And for people who are not liking it! Just dont read it! No body asked you to read and criticize somebody...or did they? And if its a blog that we are reading with a disclaimer stating that it involves fictitious characters, why cant we just take it at that? Why such immense insecurity? If you like it, read it - without trying to figure out who the author is, who the characters are, what the incidents are...why cant a piece of writing be read just for the fun of reading? And do cricketers really have a lack in life that they need to do something as frivolous and childish as writing a scandalous blog? Players might not be made to play or to captain sides, inspite of their abilities - but nobody gives anybody the right to raise a finger at such people just because they are stupid enough to figure out who the real culprit is, or are insecure enough to react to a fictitious blog?
IS THAT ALL THAT IS LEFT OF INDIAN CRICKET???????
