The gap narrows

The points table in the IPL may be seeing a lot of movement, but as far as Star Wars goes, it's still Ian Chappell who is as at No. 1 as we enter Day 14 of the IPL - he now has Sambit Bal snapping at his heels, just 194 points adrift.

Once again the big picks - Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, AB de Villiers, Adam Gilchrist, Rohit Sharma - had an off day, which meant that not too many points were accumulated from the Delhi Daredevils-Deccan Chargers game. Gilchrist's failure (Ian's trump) would have given Sambit a glimmer of hope, but then his own trump, de Villiers, was out for 5.

The story was slightly different in the second game. While Ian's trump, Matthew Hayden, failed to fetch him too many points (only 32), Sambit made a smart choice to go with Yusuf Pathan as his trump. Though the Rajasthan Royals may have lost the game, Pathan gave Sambit 200 points to help him close the gap to Ian. "I feel like I've been running into a Wellington gale of late and I can't even blame it on having a New Zealander in my squad," rues Ian. "I need someone to tell my trumps that it isn't duck season in South Africa. Sambit is breathing down my neck and I need to get a move on."

Ironically, Suresh Raina, who was the star for the Chennai Super Kings scored over 300 points: he was featured in Sambit's, Sanjay Manjrekar's and David Lloyd's teams in the first week of the tournament, only to be dropped a few days ago.