The View From Row Z
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Short of IPL-branded tat
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Some car company or other is selling “IPL” versions of one of its models, which is typically lazy sports-related marketing. What makes a car an IPL car as opposed to just a car? Are you likely to buy a vehicle simply because it has the letters I, P and L attached to it?
They aren’t the only ones cashing in. Vendors outside the Wankhede are offering IPL burgers (with dollar bills for lettuce), IPL coffee (50% froth) and even bags of IPL air, which being hotter than normal air, have to be tied to a lead stick and carried around like balloons.
The same company is auctioning one of its products, signed by all of the IPL captains, for charity and said vehicle is regularly on our screens. I’m not a connoisseur of the combustion engine - the car looks like any other car to me - but the cause is worthy and who knows, I might even be tempted to put in a bid, although my offer would be conditional on them removing the graffiti. If I wanted my car to have writing on it, I could simply invite my daughter and her friends to have at it with some marker pens.
Full postA squabble by the seaside
Tuesday’s colour-coordinated clash retold
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
The Barabati Stadium, Cuttack is the bluest stadium in the world. The advertising hoardings are blue, the pillars holding up the roofs are blue, the roofs are blue, the walls are blue, the seats are blue, the pencil that Sunil Gavaskar uses to fill out his dry-cleaning expenses claim during the strategic time-out is a pleasant shade of aquamarine.
So it was the perfect venue for Tuesday’s colour-coordinated clash between the Inky Blue Chargers and the Seasick Blue Warriors; a squabble by the seaside featuring two floundering franchises desperate to keep their heads above water.
A sea breeze was stirring the palm trees when Deccan set sail but it wasn’t long before their innings was becalmed. In a bold selection gamble, Kumar Sangakkara had picked himself and then no doubt spent the first ten overs berating Deccan’s captain for going with the out-of-form Sri Lankan. As the toe-end clunks, airy wafts and thick edges accumulated, it seemed rude to stare at the poor chap, so I flicked over to Judge Judy.
Full postWait till Delhi’s cookie crumbles
They’ll conquer all in the league games, then do a belly flop in the knockouts
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
At the risk of spoiling their top-of-the-table party, I should remind Delhi fans that the men in blue and red are deceitful blighters and they’ve been here before. They own the group matches, spank every franchise in sight and then saunter into the knockout stages as casually as David Gower wandering along the counter at the breakfast bar trying to decide between waffles and pancakes.
And then it all goes wrong. With a final on the horizon, Irfan will trip over his shoelaces and dislocate his nose, the nutritionist will mix up Morne’s rocket-fuel smoothie with Mahela’s jasmine-and-green-tea sedative drink, and Viru will decide that at long last the moment has come to unveil his left-handed alter-ego, Vincent. Delhi’s exit from the knockout stages is usually swift and unseemly.
So they aren’t fooling anyone with their seven wins. The latest, against Rajasthan, was a bit of a knuckle-whitener, the archetypal IPL game, introduced by the perfect IPL host, or at least he would be if this were 1979. I can see Ramiz Raja in an episode of Magnum PI, sitting on a Hawaiian beach, open-shirted, wearing a gold medallion and sipping from a coconut with a straw. Or is that just me?
Full postAn ode to Gangulylocks
The Pune captain's new hair is as inspiring as the man himself
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Earlier this week a reader asked me what I thought of Sourav Ganguly’s hair. It is, of course, one of the seven wonders of the IPL, and it’s a joy to see the old boy cavorting about the field like a teenager, albeit a teenager who can’t bend down in a hurry.
I don’t know precisely how hirsuteness is restored but I’ve heard that specially selected hairs are planted one at time and that the whole business is rather painful. It’s no surprise then that cricketers lead the way when it comes to cranial re-thatching since to pass this ordeal, a man must call upon the same reserves of physical courage and rock-like endurance that are required to bowl into the wind all day with a raging hangover or to face up to a Mark Nicholas interview on the fourth evening of a Test match.
And since Sourav is from the top drawer as far as cricketers go, I assume he got the premier treatment hair-wise. A former Indian captain should not be settling for the scrapings from a barber’s shop floor and I expect he insisted on a lock or two from the tomb of Genghis Khan, a clump of Elvis’ quiff and, in the hope of insinuating a touch of speed into the Ganguly DNA, a strand or two plucked from the mane of Frankel.
Full postDeccan’s mass existential crisis
Maybe propping up the points table is their raison d’etre
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
The battle for IPL supremacy is particularly confusing right now. The teams are scrapping ferociously like a bunch of angry ferrets in a bag and I have no idea which is the best. (If any readers feel this analogy is disrespectful, they should be reassured that the bag in question is a hand-stitched velvet affair and the ferrets are dressed in natty little IPL costumes, complete with adorable caps).
As it stands, every team, even perennial limp lettuces the Zinta XI and the Kolkata Katastrophes are still in it. Fans from every corner of the IPL can entertain the possibility that it might be their chaps holding aloft that blingtastic trophy come the far side of May, even though we know it will be probably be Chennai Super Kings.
Wait, did I say every team? I meant almost every team. For if you look a little closer at the damp end of the table, there you will see, yet to set a trembling foot on the first rung of the ladder of success, the men in mucky blue from Deccan. With a form line that reads like the result of falling asleep at your keyboard whilst trying to type “Llandovery”, the Hyderabad heroes are replete with defeat.
Full postAre you a cricket fan or a cricket lover?
There are two species on the couch, and never the twain shall meet
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Last week, Andy Zaltzman confessed he didn’t care about the IPL and asked if he should seek psychiatric help. I don’t think he’d get it on the NHS. Maybe there are shady cricket psychotherapists in the back streets of Kolkata, who for a small fee will strap their patients to an easy chair, force them to watch highlights of Pune Warriors versus the Royal Challengers and zap them with a dose of raw volts if they grab for the remote.
But Andy’s marbles are all present and correct. “Englishman Not All That Bothered About The IPL Shock” is not a scoop to stir Rupert Murdoch from his post-cocoa afternoon nap, nor is it a confession that would have the Spanish Inquisition high-fiving each other and heading down to the Rack and Thumbscrew for a few celebratory jars.
It’s a big universe out there and there’s room in it for all sorts. No Englishman, Dutchman, Somalian pirate or aquatic lifeform from a distant galaxy is compelled to find the IPL appetising, just as I am not forced to relish tinned sardines, although the presence of such a putrid comestible on our supermarket shelves is frankly a blight on humankind’s reputation.
Full postBiblical plagues? We’ve got those
It’s Kings XI v KKR, starring a cast of flying thousands
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Wednesday’s action was a little disorientating. KKR versus Kings XI? Hang on, haven’t we already seen this film? A quick flick through the TV guide and a call to the observatory at Greenwich confirmed that I hadn’t fallen through an IPL wormhole. This wasn’t KKR versus Kings XI, it was Kings XI versus KKR, the rematch.
A sequel can be a tricky thing, so the teams of Priety Zinta and Shahrukh Khan played it safe and stuck to exactly the same plot as the first performance. Once again the silvery reds set an inadequate total and once again challenged their eastern friends to fall short of it. But the twist for this show was that the whole game was played out during a biblical plague.
Moths, to be precise, millions of them, twinkling away under the floodlights, fluttering about all over the place, getting into helmets, under baseball caps and no doubt up the nostrils of unwary boundary fielders, and making the whole affair look like it was being staged during the opening moments of a really show-stopping blizzard.
Full postThe great word shortage of 2012
But fear not, adept thesaurus-wielder Dr Morrison is at hand, with helpful vegetable-based monikers
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Like Albanian vegetarians or Dutch mountaineers, British IPL lovers are something of a niche market, so we have to get our IPL action where we can. For some, this means those naughty internet streams that Giles Clarke warned us about, but since I have the computer skills of a three-toed sloth, this isn’t really an option. Besides, I don’t want to receive a late-night knock on my door from Officer Shastri of the BCCI’s Revenue Protection Police.
So I am slumming it in the basement of terrestrial television, on ITV4, where the IPL must compete with reruns of The Sweeney and grainy footage of car chases in Florida. But their coverage is not bad, not bad at all, like a bottle of cheap wine that turns out to be fragrant and palatable. And if you tire of listening to the presenters (which I’ve found to be around 50% of the time) you can mute them and enjoy the pretty colours in the ITV4 studio.
Their website also offers highlights, invaluable for those of us who have been unable to convince employers, relatives, friends, lovers, pets or bank managers that they must excuse us for seven weeks. I even took their IPL quiz, although it included possibly the worst pun I have ever seen. You may need to brace yourself.
Full postAt the crunch, with Tendo and the Indian Derek Pringle
Kings XI have won two games in a week
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
By the time I arrive in front of my television with a pot of Lady Grey and a slice of Battenberg, things are just getting interesting. In the battle of the tragic failures, Punjab have set a modest total and KKR are chasing it modestly. At 99 for 6 they have clearly been making a seven-course banquet of the situation and deep suffering is written on Gautam Gambhir’s face as he sits on the bench, clutching his blankie.
The Eden Gardens crowd don’t sound worried but their celebrations are surely a reckless tempting of fate. If a team I’m supporting appears to be winning, I, like Gautam, assume that they are about to throw it away and am unable to watch. But Kolkata’s fans are going prematurely berserk, even making an occasion out of the countdown to mark the end of the strategic time-out, as though it were midnight on New Year’s Eve.
By this stage, the Knight Riders’ hopes depend on Debabrata Das and Ryan ten Doeschate, or Tendo as the shirt embroiderer has labelled him; a title that makes him sound like a Japanese martial art or a Mexican wrestler. This time, the Mighty Tendo is leaving it all to Das, who is clearly a big Rafael Nadal fan. Wielding his bat like a tennis racket, he hits a lovely two-handed forehand through long-off and a fierce cross-court on-drive for four.
Full postIt’s not jealousy, KP
Why Mr Pietersen has got it wrong about English attitudes to the IPL
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Kevin Pietersen has suggested that there is a lot of IPL jealousy on the part of English cricket, which is a bit silly. It isn’t jealousy, KP. Large numbers of English cricket folk genuinely aren’t interested in the IPL. Each to their own. I happen to find county cricket the epitome of tedium, a yawnsome Victorian relic that belongs in the scrapyard of history, along with the penny farthing and the gin shop.
Yet just because I don’t like the county snoozefest, does that mean I am jealous? Such a proposition doesn’t even make any sense. I could realistically harbour feelings of jealousy towards a man who owned a really splendid hat or a woman who won $65 million on the lottery or a stock exchange trader who makes a fortune by using other people’s money to play a glorified game of “higher or lower”.
But jealousy towards an entire competition? No, the abstract noun that KP should have used is “snobbery”. Cricket is riddled with it, like a Georgian trestle table infested by woodworm. For some, the only proper game of cricket is one that takes a minimum of three days to complete. Anything shorter than that is fit only for commoners who value such vulgarities as entertainment or excitement.
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