Archive for the 'Cricket' Category

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Country vs Club

Published on May 29, 2011 in Cricket. 45 Comments

And so the IPL is finally finished. Who would have thought at the start of the tournament that Chennai Super Kings would win it. I certainly didn’t. Not when the auction rules were changed “suddenly” at the last minute with only one team owner being given notice, not when the “home” pitch for Rajasthan was changed at the last minute while playing against ahem…Chennai Super Kings. The final result was thus very surprising, something as unexpected as, let’s see, the geography teacher’s son getting highest marks in geography on the class test.

I might deny saying this later but I actually felt bad for Shahrukh Khan and his team. They did a lot of things right but when you have your star bowler painting balls on woman’s hands, the star maverick going “Brrrrr” (if Lalit Modi was in charge, it would have been “Burrr”), Sanjay Kapoor rubbing off his charisma on the team as a celebrity supporter, their dud buy for three seasons going on to become pure platinum and a Trojan horse in the team, there is not much you can do. That they got to the fourth position was creditable. Though what many have forgotten is that this time they won just one more match from what they did last disaster season. Food for thought.

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IPL The Excitement

Published on April 16, 2011 in Cricket. 63 Comments

For me the highlight of the IPL so far has been Paul Valthaty. Amidst all the millions of dollars and the often dial-in performances of the national and international fatcats, Valthaty is enough to warm the hearts of even the most cynical among us.

If the IPL has any redeeming value, it is that it provides Indian first-class cricketers, off the radars of selectors, who otherwise would be consigned to a lifetime of playing great innings in front of empty stadiums in Ranji trophy, an opportunity to showcase their skills in front of thousands.

Because otherwise this IPL, in comparison to the other three, has been tepid. I am not talking about the quality of cricket (after all, cricket is to IPL what character development is to porn) but about the masala.

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Walking With The Men In Blue

Published on April 7, 2011 in Cricket and Silly. 240 Comments

I was expecting an article from my favorite Goddess of Overbloated Things, Ms. Roy on India’s triumph in the World Cup. Since I presume she has not written one yet, let me write it for her. This is *a parody* and does not purport to be written by Ms. Roy. It is also considerably shorter than her 25-page rantings.

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Rudyard Kipling, that endearing old-world colonialist, once called cricket a game of “flanneled fools”. They don’t wear flannels any longer though, favoring tacky, garish uniforms made glossy by shining droplets of sweat from the foreheads of those who made them, in Mexico or closer home in Dhaka. What still remains are fools, namely those who believe they are watching a gentle competition between bat and ball and not a few hours of vacuous manufactured reality, whose raison d’etre is to serve as an orgiastic assertion of India’s overwhelmingly Hindu middle class’s hyper-nationalistic vanity.

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The Big Hearts

Published on April 5, 2011 in Cricket and Politics. 155 Comments

When Sohail Tanveer says “Hinduyon ki zehniyaat aisi hai” or when Shoaib Malik thanks all the Muslims in the world for supporting Pakistan or when Afridi says that Muslims (by which he means Pakistanis exclusively) have much bigger hearts than Indians, I understand. I understand that for these people, Pakistan is synonymous with Muslims and India is synonymous with Hindus. You cannot blame the Pakistanis for that—-they have and are systematically removing their non-Muslim minorities (read this for a slice of minority life in the Land of the Pure) for which the equivalence they make between Muslims and Pakistan is not ridiculous at all. On the other hand, their refusal to acknowledge the presence of Muslims in India is natural. If they did, it would be a big middle finger to the basic premise of their existence—-that Hindus and Muslims cannot co-exist together peacefully. Being brought up in an educational system that teaches them that they beat India in 1971 (despite the small fact that they signed a document of surrender) and that Hindus (=Indians) are responsible for many heinous acts directed at the country including depriving them of water, I do not expect any different.

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