In the IPL World of Cricket...

In the IPL World of Cricket, as many as two matches played in a day, too much time devoted to on-field action, too little time left to postmortem the results, it is wise to enjoy the ride. After all, all your favorite stars are scattered across teams, the choice is easy to show your patronage to either ALL or NONE of the teams. By all means, there is no pressure felt, if a Team win or lose in IPL.

ECB seeks favorable Window, for its players to participate in the fanfare of IPL. From an Indian standpoint, I don’t agree, if BCCI agree to give into it. During my childhood days, there was hardly anything like IPL to kill the summer. Not every parent in India could afford exotic summer vacations. Leave alone exotic summer vacation, even summer camps for kids was considered a luxury. The best parents could afford was to send kids to relatives home. For many families even this wasn’t a choice. In today’s World, IPL has made the summer very entertaining for almost every kid & parent across the length and breadth of the country. A visit to stadium to one of the IPL matches makes the summer even more worthwhile. This is where BCCI the organization, cash its cow. With IPL running between April and May, it is better, if left untouched for the benefit of Indians living in India. For players of ECB to participate in IPL, well ECB don’t have much choice but giving into IPL’s schedule. In the future, ECB could come up with Indoor stadiums for yearlong cricket in England.

Back to the performances of teams in IPL so far, it does not look much different from the preview presented last week. Except that Hyderabad did not start as punch bag while Delhi seems to have taken over that cult status.  The good thing that has happened to Sunrisers is the acquisition of Thisera Perara. Being with gamut of stars, he must have lost in Mumbai. In here at Hyderabad, Perara earned himself the perfect opportunity to showcase his talent and justify his potential.

Warriors seems LOST unit altogether. Uthappa, Pandey, Suman, Yuvraj, Samuels, Taylor, Mathews, Marsh, B Kumar – you don’t get better than this for the second tier. Yet, somewhere in there the chemistry is not striking chord. May be it is time to jolt their batting order.

Last year, Gurukeerat, Mandeep and Azhar Mahmood’s arrival (that happened almost into the middle of the season) made huge difference to Punjab. This year, the new entrant Manan Vohra is already making a difference to the mercurial outfit.

As an ardent cricket fan, I die to watch the sight of PONDULKAR. In reality it is only hurting Mumbai Indians. In the young man’s game it is little too much to have two old horses. By all means, their CV does not have anything legendary in T20 to command a place in the XI.  Anyways, it is Ambani’s worry and not ours. By the way, the early departure of PONDULKAR showed what the young guns could do in the game against Delhi. I don’t term PONDULKAR to be utter failure this season, but surely they are not going to set the ground on fire.

The young sensation Unmukt Chand does not seem to enjoy any stay in the crease for Delhi. With Juneja performing well, Sehwag’s return should bring axe to Chand.

With Kolkata and Delhi choosing to go south, Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai are most likely to sleep walk into the top 4. This time we can hope for Punjab/Rajasthan to finish inside top 4.

Dinesh

Cricket Lover