My I.P.L Blues

The Indian Premier League may debatably be the best thing to happen to cricket in general and Indian cricket in particular, but there are lots of things about it that irks me.

The first aggravation was the composition of the team that represents my home town, the Bangalore Royal Challengers. Currently languishing at the bottom of the points table, they've caused more embarrassment to the franchise owner than to me because I had almost given up on the Royal Challengers as soon as I saw the makeup of the team. Compared to the youth & talent of the other teams, the Royal Challengers seemed a bunch of geriatrics. Unfortunately, the team I was banking on, the Deccan Chargers of Hyderabad also proved to be damp squibs inspite of a formidable batting line-up. A week into the tournament, I shifted my loyalty to the Rajasthan Royals because being a Bangalorean it would be nothing less than sedition for me to support the other city teams.

The performance of the entire "Extra Innings" team on Set Max is more pathetic than that of the Royal Challengers. With such an exotic name as Lekha Washington, I was expecting a brainless bimbo and I wasn't disappointed. Shonali Nagrani is worse. She has the woodiness about her that one would expect from a model.. The only purpose of Shiv Pandit seems to be to embarrass himself and his guests and so far, he has been quite efficient at that, whether it is talking to Mpumelelo Mbangwa in Hindi, or using Indianisms in his English. Also, I'm not sure if Shiv Pandit is technically sound in his knowledge of the game as I've never seen him talk anything even remotely technical. I hope someone at Set Max sees some sense & kicks him out. Ajay Jadeja isn't in the same league as a Boycott or a Harsha Bhogle & therefore isn't capable of carrying the show on his own. Sivaramakrishnan & Greg Chappell are about the only hosts doing a reasonable job.

Finally watching the telecast of the matches is nothing less than a pain in the posterior. There is a limit to how many times you can see the pug lick the stamps. After a dozen or so times, it ceases to be cute and starts to be tiresome and the frizzly-haired woman going Sanju, Sanju makes me want to whack her right across the face. There is supposed to be a music played whenever the batsmen make their way to the crease. I’ve never heard it. Set Max squeezes in enough advertisements that I get to see who the batsman is only after he has played a ball. The telecast of the entire post-match presentation of the match between Rajasthan Royals and Kolkata Knight Riders was skipped to fit in a mindless conversation between Jadeja and some guests. The ads keep coming in the middle of the over too, drowning out the commentators. Surely, the channel can raise the cost of ads and reduce their time so that the viewer is not left disgruntled. It is time that the BCCI makes the telecasters accountable for the quality of their telecasts but since it is the BCCI, they wouldn’t care about some cricket-loving person sitting in his sofa, watching the TV.