Did IPL revived Indian Cricket?

IPL was the big hyped T20 club cricket tournament that recently concluded in India. Beyond the entertainment it provided, did it do any good for Indian cricket?

Though at first sight it looked like an entertainment show only (involving big movie stars), and it hardly benifited Indian cricket. But to be honest, I have seen improved form of lot of our cricketers after playing in IPL which makes me happpy. The beauty of IPL was that lot's of young Indian players got a chance to play with international star's. The pressure level that comes with International cricket was also missing from IPL, and cricketers got a chance to take more risks and succeed. The Indian team selectors also identified a big pool of talented bench strength, who looked ready to perform in international level. Well time will tell how these guy's go ahead and perform in future.

Most of the Indian current players regained their form in a big way which they are continuing in the Bangladesh tour and current Asia Cup in Pakistan. Gambhir, Sehwag looks like they are in best of their form. Dhoni, Yuvraj, Suresh Raina and Rohit Sharma also looks good. So though many may not like the glitters and "Masala" of the IPL, they should be happy to see the revival of form of the players.

It also impacted career of many International players. Shane Watson and Shaun Marsh, two of the starts of the IPL was called to join the Australian national team, and they are doing wonders.
Same applies to Brendon McCullum of New Zealand.

IPL is here to stay for a longer term, and hopefully it will keep benefiting our cricket; in addition to providing entertainment to the nation and money to our cricketers.

When I played with the Indian Cricket team...

Our office have corporate booking in the badminton courts at Chinnaswamy stadium over the weekends. Every Saturday I make it a point to utilize this facility and join my friends to play badminton. We always go over and have some fun out there.

This weekend was no different and I met my office colleagues at the stadium. We were playing our regular game and suddenly we were out for surprise. We saw two strangers walking in. I suddenly realized they weren't any strangers and looked like very familiar faces to me. It was Bhajji and Dinesh Kartik from the Indian cricket team. At that time courts were occupied by us and they were looking for one. We vacated one court for them and enjoyed seeing them playing singles with each other.

(From L-R: Me, Ramesh Powar, Bhajji, Dinesh Karthik, company friends)

Finally they (Bhajji and Kartik) teamed up and we played couple of doubles games with them. My colleagues won the first match. In between Ramesh Powar also showed up. Me and Kumar teamed up to play the next match against Bhajji and Kartik. It started off well with both giving good fight. Finally we lost the match. It was fun challenging them, and firing some good smashes at them :-)

It was their time to leave and we requested for autographs. We also requested for a photograph and they happily obliged for both.

After I walked out of the indoor stadium towards my bike, I saw some of the other members from the Indian cricket team, Zaheer Khan, Laxman, Ashish Nehra, Wasim Zafar. There is a camp happening for the test team and that was the reason I saw all these Indian team players in Chinnaswamy stadium.

Pleasant surprises....

Match fixing: No games are Isolated?

Match fixing controversies have always haunted the sports fraternity. Some of them have even brought an end to big sporting careers.

Match fixing controversy created a huge flutter in Indian media when the names of Indian cricket starts was revealed as being involved in match fixing scandals. Well it ended the career of Indian players like Mohammed Azharuddin and Ajay Jadeja. Hanse Conje (one of my favorite player) was banned from all forms of cricket due to match fixing.

Some of the recent match fixing news are coming from unexpected places:
- India-Malaysia Azlan Shah tie was fixed: report (PTI News)
- Were Wimbledon matches fixed? (TOI News)

Looks like none of the games remains isolated from match fixing scandals.

I guess I will end up watching The Great Khali in WWE, because I already know the matches are fixed :-)

Do Asia cup cricket need more then three teams?

If you are tracking the Asia cup cricket in this Wimbledon and EURO soccer season, you might be disappointed to see the initial results. The big guns of Asia are winning by huge margins.

I wonder do we need to have six teams in Asia Cup just for the sake of making it bigger. Hongkong, UAE and should I add Bangladesh has come up with some awful performances. The initial scores say it all (Pak defeat Hongkong by 155 runs, India defeat Hongkong by 256 runs, Sri Lanka defeat Bangladesh by 131 runs). These are by no means competitive cricket. The three big guns India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are the real deserving candidates to participate in this level of competition.

We can expect some good records to be made in this competition. I wonder if anybody are watching these matches.

Power of Media and Indian Premier League:

Indian Premier League (IPL), the greatest T20 cricket extravaganza recently started in India. It has created a hype never seen before, with the two biggest fantasies of Indian population coming together, Cricket and Bollywood.

But sometimes I wonder, the Indian media had a very big role to play for the kind of hype that has been created. There is a parallel league that runs (which started before IPL) called the Indian Cricket League (ICL). There are equally good players, both domestic and foreign, playing in that league. But there is hardly any media attention to it, and most common Indians do not know about it. Its not being recognized by BCCI (the body governing Indian cricket), and this might be a reason for this step-motherly treatment. But not even the winner of the ICL finals getting published in the premier Indian newspapers was a disappointment.

But the IPL created hype even before it got started, with the newspapers and the television news channels flooding their space with IPL news.

The media power also came into light when they made BCCI kneel down and take back the restrictive clauses put down for the media. Indian media has become quite powerful recently with news reaching peoples within seconds and people responding emotionally to what is been published or shown in TV.

Though this media uprising is a good sign, the power has to be used responsibly. May be I can quote the Spider-Man dialogue “with power comes responsibility”. They should be neutral in performing their responsibility.

I am not sure why ICL news was not seen anywhere, not even on a small newspaper column, and IPL is driving full-page reports (and in some case 2 pages). ICL has the equal right for the news space as do IPL.