A game that is not cricket at all?
In the Hindustan Times , Soumya Bhattacharya wonders why he doesn't get the same rush watching Sachin Tendulkar's exquisite strokeplay in the IPL as during a Tendulkar innings for India
Cricinfo
25-Feb-2013
In the Hindustan Times, Soumya Bhattacharya wonders why he doesn't get the same rush watching Sachin Tendulkar's exquisite strokeplay in the IPL as during a Tendulkar innings for India.
For the most part, there is only one big motivation for playing — and playing well — in the IPL: money. In the league, there are many players whose international careers are over (Warne, Gilchrist, Kumble, Ganguly).
The money from this is all they can make out of playing cricket now. But for fans like me, it's different. I don't get paid to watch the IPL.
And my cricket-watching days are far from over. (At the flick of a remote, I can watch an Australia v New Zealand Test in Sydney.) Without the frisson that watching one's country play, the IPL seems like what I've suggested before: a game that is not cricket at all.
Steve Waugh chats with the Hindu about the future of Twenty20 cricket, the nomination of John Howard as successor to Sharad Pawar as ICC president, and different styles of cricket coaching.
Telford Vice makes tongue-in-cheek analogies between the IPL's protagonists and the main characters of Alice in Wonderland, in iol.co.za.
Lalit Modi would make the purrfect Cheshire cat. He's always smiling and smug, appearing and disappearing on our screens at the whim of the director, who is, we are told, at the beck and call of the fat cat himself.
So, who's the IPL's own Bandersnatch, the big, bad feline monster who first attacks Alice and then becomes her ally? Step up, Andrew Symonds.
Stayne, the Knave of Hearts? Forgive me, Shahrukh Khan.
Preity Zinta will do nicely as the White Queen. Shilpa Shetty will have to put up with playing the nasty Red Queen. Absolem, the blue caterpillar who dispenses absolute wisdom from within a cloud of hookah smoke, seems to me a dead ringer for the sage-like Sachin Tendulkar.