Jun 23 2009
The ‘Fake IPL Players’ of 2009!
After much ado, and a whole lot of shenanigans, the Indian Premier League finally got underway in South Africa, and to an extent, the strategies, based on which the auctions had shaped up would have gone for a toss. The cooler climatic conditions, the smoother outfields, the end-of-season, yet, more spinning and bouncier tracks and an atmosphere – both in and outside the stadium – as different from that found in India as a cola is from wine made for interesting viewing as the sides adjusted their play on the run-time. The cramped schedules notwithstanding, there were many a performances that stood out, but then there were a few that did so for all the wrong reasons.
So while Mathew Hayden brandished his bat like a Samurai warrior’s sword, somewhere else, one had a Virender Sehwag struggle like a baby taking its first ever steps, when Suresh Raina exhibited consistency of the top-notch, Sourav Ganguly’s bat’s middle was repelled by the white cherry as if they were like poles and just one when thought that $1.55 million spent would ensure a Bangalore fight-back, and lend more balance to Chennai, all it did was to call Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen a pair of unworthy buys!
The list of party-poopers – for their respective teams that is – was partial to neither age, nor nationality, and consisted of names big and, er, bigger, as the team management kept doling out chances for them to come good. Some showed a brief spark towards the end, while others extinguished themselves like a candle on a birthday boy’s cake.
Sanath Jayasuriya
In the 20th year of his international career, it is a rather difficult proposition to ignore someone of the calibre and experience of him but his was a clear-cut case of the unthinkable happening. In fact, at the start of the tournament, the Mumbai Indians were deemed to be one of the favourites to get to the semi-finals – if not wear the throne – on the sole basis of the opening pair of Jayasuriya and Sachin Tendulkar clicking as well as they had in the previous season. Not too many had given heed to any odds of one or both of them going through the patch that the duo went as openers, and in the end, that upset their applecart.
Except one game – against the miserable Knight Riders – when Jayasuriya showed glimpses of his true self, the Mr. Hyde in this southpaw made more than a fleeting appearance, making his opening partner and captain, do the almost unthinkable like getting in players who could hardly distinguish between the handle and the willow – like Pinal Shah and Yogesh Takawale – to bat in the top three positions!
The sorry state of affairs came to such a head that despite having no real other batsmen to boast of, Jayasuriya was dropped for a game; yet, that did nothing to get the Mumbai campaign back on track. Nor did the batsman’s comeback to the team, as he quite sadly, but fittingly ended the tournament with a first-ball duck!
Jesse Ryder
The conditions may have been an issue for most, but for a Kiwi coming into the tournament, they were a godsend, if one compared them with what they would have to endure in India. And when you are a Jesse Ryder who had only recently pummelled the opposition into submission, nothing more could have been asked for. But for Jesse Ryder, even a sniff of alcohol is usually enough to get him out of control; playing in a team that is owned by a liquor baron can only complicate the things slightly.
Ryder could barely get off the mark in the first three games, and by the time he at least got a start, the only compensation left for him was to convert it into something more meaningful. Instead, Ryder was all over the place and failed to do anything substantial for his team – scoring 56 runs in the five games he managed to get in – only to be dropped by the team management. A couple of off-the-field issues – and off the records as well – were reported as well, but nothing concrete seems to have come out there either!
Kevin Pietersen
His name would invoke a mix of enigma and aggression with traces of being a rebel. What it never had was indifference, that was seen in this second edition of the Indian Premier League. The batting that was one reason – apart from his marketability – that the stash of money was bestowed upon him, whereas Mallya had thought him to be a better leader than Rahul Dravid in the previous year.
Pietersen failed on both the counts, one more miserably than the other.
In the six games that he was a part of the tournament, there was one inning that got him 37, while the sum total of the remaining five equalled 56 only! Lacking inspiration, the Royal Challengers catapulted from one defeat to another, and were on verge of joining Kolkata Knight Riders on the sidelines, when – and one will have to thank the ECB for this – Pietersen had to leave the team for the series against West Indies! Things did a volte-face when Anil Kumble took over the reigns, going from one win to another, and at the time of writing have managed to get to the semi-final by beating all the other three semi-finalists in their last few games!
But, coming back to Pietersen, his lack of captaincy skills, or more appropriately, the treatment of the IPL as ‘tamasha’ cricket came to the fore when he consistently forgot the names of his team-mates at the toss. Thankfully for the Challengers, he was a forgotten man after six games as well!
Sourav Ganguly
‘Dada’s inning is finished’ goes a mobile service provider ad, and with no offence meant to the millions of Sourav Ganguly fans, it does look like it would need something very drastic for Ganguly to come back from this situation in the next year’s IPL. The reasons could be many, but the most plausible one could be the manner in which the captaincy got traded off with Brendon McCullum; almost like it was a repetition of the Greg Chappell-Kiran More saga. This time around, the protagonists were different – John Buchanan and Shah Rukh Khan played the good cop-bad cop role to the tee – but the result was the same.
Unfortunately, that meant that Ganguly had 11 chances for a hit, and apart from the tied game against Rajasthan Royals – which they eventually lost – in the ten outings at the crease, he accumulated 143 runs. The word ‘accumulated’ stems from the fact that he did that at an abysmal strike-rate of 91.30 per hundred balls!
Andrew Flintoff
Another million dollar baby bit the dust in the form of Andrew Flintoff, as for the umpteenth time in the couple of tournaments played so far, it was proved that money cannot buy runs or wickets! To be fair to Flintoff, it was evident that he was struggling with his fitness and hence bowled like he had deemed it to be a one-legged race. However, many an expert questioned his cricketing priorities, as it became obvious to naked eye, that he was carrying that injury from his previous series and needed to rest the ankle; instead turning up to office on the payday! As it turned out, he might now miss the ICC World T20 as well!
He may have been christened as an all-rounder, but if one were to look at his records over the last couple of years, his batting has fallen away. It was his bowling which was expected to have been the touchstone; instead, his statistics painted a picture that, by nobody’s definition could ever be called rosy. In the three games he played – before hobbling off to England – he could score only 62 runs and conceded runs at almost ten runs per over!
On a personal note, Chennai skipper had been left with no option but to play Flintoff based on his reputation, and it may have become to get him out of the playing eleven had he not stepped down himself.
Virender Sehwag
I cannot be over circumspect while writing about Veeru’s bad form, because even as I do that, he has had his first half-century in the tournament, and looks, em, hungry for more! But the plain fact of the matter is that after having more than 16 months of blessed form, Sehwag has gone through a real bad patch in this tournament; something that was so akin to the pre-2007 Australian series days, when a couple of in-swingers followed by an out-swinger – or vice versa – was all it took to get rid of him!
One would have expected that being the captain added to the fact that he had a potential 14 games to get the form back, he would have begun being amongst runs. However, an unfortunate finger injury got him out for a stretch of matches and by the time he was back, he needed to re-start the re-building process!
Graeme Smith
One doesn’t yet know whether it was a genuine case of loss of form, or an over-kill of cricket but Graeme Smith’s failures in this season’s IPL underline a couple of facts. One for sure is the vital role that Smith played in previous year’s Rajasthan Royals’ triumph, and two, the rather long, exhausting and finger-injury prone season has finally affected him enough to perform in the manner he did. Smith has had a great last one year as a leader, and good enough with the willow, but it did look towards the end that his continuously peppered fingers would have created those cobwebs of self-doubts that Nasser Hussain would have been through as a poppaddum-fingered cricketer.
A lot for Rajasthan Royals hinged on the starts that Graeme Smith provided them previously, but this time around, neither Smith, nor Swapnil Asnodkar had too much to write home about – or for me to write about either – and that in turn led to the Royals crashing out of the tournament, and Shane Warne blaming the Rajasthani batsmen for the capitulation.
Yuvraj & Gambhir
A special mention needs to be made of Yuvraj Singh who first battled spin in the earlier portion of the tournament, and then had the swing to worry about in the latter half; batted moderately, but could never be thought of as being in the zone. Gautam Gambhir comes a close second. He was thought to be one of the players to look out for, instead, the bowlers came out trumps on most occasions against him; including the semi-finals where he got a blob. His penchant to open the bat and guide the ball through to the third-man had earned him many a run previously, but on pitches where the ball did a little to begin with, it proved to be his undoing.
