tendulkar's statement

Tendulkar have started writing this cricket blog just past 2 am on Saturday. Not that I’ve gone batty (though this is not unusual in these parts of the world when it comes to cricket), only that I’ve just reached home after watching the opening ceremony and the opening match of the Indian Premier League and have a commitment to meet.
I’d spent more time on the road in going the 10 km to the stadium and returning back than the Pakistan batsmen spent in the middle on their entire recent tour of Australia. That’s because Mumbai’s traffic situation is impossible to cope with on any given day, and when the IPL circus is in town, it becomes impossible to even explain this impossibility. But perhaps I must start at the beginning.
To the uninitiated, the IPL is fast becoming the most coveted and influential property from India since the Taj Mahal that Shah Jahan built. More people in the world, I can wager without fear, have heard of the IPL than the new planets discovered in the solar system in the last few years; or indeed the name of the vice president of the United States. (Actually the latter is a bad example. Does anybody really know the name of the US vice president?)
When Twenty20 started a few years ago, it was famously labelled as Mickey Mouse cricket by the oracle of cricketing puritanism. But then India won the inaugural T20 World Championship in 2007 against all odds and all hell broke loose. It is now part of history — and indeed delectable irony — that India was the last country to agree to play in the 2007 Championships and had sent a virtual second string team to South Africa. By the time Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s team had returned home after the win, the game had undergone a paradigm shift globally.
The IPL arrived the following year and Mickey Mouse, it was realized quickly enough, was in fact Godzilla. A heady brew of showbiz, big biz, the world’s best players and razzmatazz borrowed from American sports leagues gripped the imagination of India’s one billion-strong cricket-crazy public like nothing else. It also turned the power-grid of international cricket inside out, upside down – and made the players rich beyond their wildest dreams, changing lifestyles dramatically and enabling decisions that would otherwise have been very, very difficult.
For instance, a 22-year-old rookie India player is reported to have bought a three bedroom apartment in tony area in mid-town Mumbai within a year of his playing in the IPL. How high the stakes now are becomes evident from the fact that it took the great Sachin Tendulkar almost a decade to invest in an apartment in a similar neighbourhood. The rookie, I hear, has also bought a Porsche and lives life in the fast lane in more ways than one.
But it’s not only the young and impressionable which have changed with the IPL. Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist came out of retirement ignoring advancing age while Andrew Flintoff and Brett Lee went into retirement from Test cricket prematurely, preferring to preserve their weary bodies for the shorter format. In either situation, the money was so good that the decision-making became relatively easy.
By the time Season 3 dawned the IPL had become so much bigger in scope, scale and ambition that it was the envy of other cricket boards across the world — and almost inevitably, also attracted controversy. Players associations like Fica, for instance, threatened that it would ask its affiliates to pull out unless it got a say in the proceedings. Even more controversially, not a single player from Pakistan was picked in the auctions in January this year, raising a row and a debate that resonated in homes, Parliament, all across the cricket world.
Nearing the tournament, of course, other issues assumed prominence (for instance the country’s current favourite passion in determining whether Tendulkar is not greater than Bradman) and the royal snub to the neighbouring country was forgotten. In hindsight, just as well. Imagine senior Pakistan pros being picked for the IPL and then being banned by their own cricket board!
But I’ve digressed enough. Suffice to say, that when the opening ceremony of this season neared, I was all ready to soak in the fun and the game. On the morning of this eventful day, I woke early, checked the traffic movement details, calculated the time it would take me to reach the stadium, and set off half an hour earlier just in case.
I reached about an hour late, well into the opening ceremony, which had been touted as a pastiche of Bollywood and Hollywood and several other entertainment genres in between. It was watched by the country’s swish set as well as the hoi polloi, not forgetting two distinguished visitors from the Caribbean who would have made sensational T20 cricketers – Sir Garfield Sobers and Brian Lara.
My first reaction on looking at the ground after reaching the press box, however, was of suspicion of having reached the wrong venue. Hundreds of chefs, it seemed, had descended into the stadium and were swaying in unison rather than working their culinary skills independently. I then spotted Lionel Richie on the giant screen; he was singing to the dancing chefs, or maybe it was the other way around. But by the time the song ended, the stadium was singing along, so I reckon both Lionel and the chefs (who it transpired were indeed dancers) had done a reasonably good job.
Shortly after, umpires called for the match to start. Gilchrist had won the toss for Deccan Chargers and chosen to field. In the first over itself, Kolkata Knightriders (KKR), the team owned by superstar Shah Rukh Khan and captained by Sourav Ganguly lost two wickets. KKR looked doomed when two more wickets fell cheaply, but there followed an amazing revival through Angelo Matthew and Owais Shah, KKR’s two lesser-known imports, which took the score to 161 after 20 overs.
Enough for a fight, cluck-clucked the knowledgeables in the press box, but not good enough to win. Indeed, so it seemed when Gilchrist and VVS Laxman put on a breezy and substantial opening partnership, aided by some sloppy catching, which made it seem that victory for the Chargers would be a cakewalk. But then Laxman fell to an ungainly swipe, Gilchrist to a mistimed hoick. KKR had got a foot in the door, and suddenly their bowling, catching and fielding improved remarkably even as Chargers’ batting went to pieces, Gibbs, Symonds, Sharma et al falling in a heap.
It was a funny kind of match, Chargers winning the battle in the first 10 overs, losing it in the next 10, winning the 10 following that again and finally surrendering everything in the last 10. The pattern of play showed why strong nerves are as important as strong shoulders in this form of the game because the margin of error is miniscule. There were several big hits and even more mishits, some spectacular fielding interspersed with some terrible bloomers, but at the end of it all, the bottom-ranked team had beaten the top-ranked one.
The IPL had got off to a sensational start. Shah Rukh Khan’s camp was in raptures at good fortune smiling on them after a horrid previous season. Commissioner Lalit Modi and his governing council were thumping themselves on their backs for a job well done. The spectators were agog, breathlessly discussing the chorus girls, the glamour people and the slam-bang batting they had seen. IPL season 3 promises to be another blockbuster.
There were some murmurs of dissent from the Mumbai Cricket Association. It’s officials had boycotted the event at the insult of not being given enough passes, but subterranean cricket politics could wait another day. The after party was about to begin. Except that I was too pooped and chose to go home.