Mayhem at Mannofield Park

The publishing industry is abuzz and grapevine has it that ICC fountainheads Ray Mali, David Morgan and Sharad Pawar are burning midnight oil, co-authoring “101 Sure Shot Ways to Kill One Day Cricket”.

How else you explain pitting an unsuspecting Liliput against the big Brobdingnag bully resulting in the ugliest mismatch in one day cricket’s history? And if this is how ICC envisages the associates improving, Mali & Co should at once be put through the SCAN.

Trust me, boxing – at least amateur boxing -- may look a gory sport but it’s more humane. You don’t see a flyweight pugilist hurled into the ring to be easy meat for his super heavyweight candidate. And then there also is this provision of RSC or Referee Stops Contest when it becomes mockery of a bout.

But then cricket is a different proposition, a different BALL game altogether. Licensed to overkill, bobblehead ICC nods in affirmative whenever an ODI tournament is proposed and the Mannofield Park massacre also reveals its criminal indifference to the associate members’ future.

Tip-toeing in its cricket infancy, all Ireland needed was to be guided to the pool. Instead, they were thrown into the deepest end, with a hungry shoal of sharks waiting for a feast. Poor Irish bowlers must have been shaking and shrinking in their boots when the McCullum-Marshall-Taylor trio was setting the ball on orbits, posing serious security hazard for the low-flying ScotAirways planes.

If ICC still claims to care for its associate members, it should engage shrinks to help the Irish players come out of the trauma.

What baffles me is ICC’s adamance not to learn the lesson from its Bangladesh experience and persisting with the same logic-defying rush to elevate the associates despite the obvious counter-productive outcome. I won’t be surprised if Kyle McCallan and his boys develop an inferiority complex, convinced of their inability to break into and hang around in the big league.

Meanwhile for ODIs, IPL has already done enough to put it on the deathbed. ICC surely can’t wait to administer the last rites.

Of liver cancer, stupid cupid and Knight Riders

Sourav Ganguly can’t be faulted if he looks a sulking misanthrope. And as if the Kolkata Knight Riders didn’t have problem enough.

Already depleted by the exit of Ricky Ponting (so what if he forgot to put bat to ball) and Brendon McCullum (so what if he sizzled only to fizzle subsequently), Shahrukh Khan and Ganguly hurriedly roped in Brad Hodge for his well-documented Twenty20 prowess. But call it quirk of fate, the hitherto-out-of-favour Hodge also gets an SOS to forget IPL and join the Australian squad in West Indies as shadow for a cupid-struck Michael Clarke.

Reports say though Clarke’s father is fighting Hodgkin's disease, it’s the condition of his fiancée Lara Bingle’s father, who is battling a liver cancer, that prompted the Australian vice captain to stay back. Well, while that may fetch Clarke a nomination for the inaugural ICC Lover of the Year 2008 award, I doubt it does not win him a friend in Ganguly.

Tourism Australia had Lara as its face till the slew of scandals forced them to replace her with Croc-Hunter Steve Irwin’s daughter Bindi. Lara featured in the 2006 campaign “So where the bloody hell are you?”

Ganguly was last seen wielding his bat and searching for the stupid cupid, mouthing the line he borrowed from the campaign.

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Who is this imposter in cricket’s garbs?

It was one of those days when you regret working in the sports desk. Calculator was out and eyes glued to television as cricketers, in an unprecedented move, went under the hammer and their high-profile, deep-pocket bidders hammer and tongs.

Mind-boggling figures and strings of never-ending zeroes -- is it the game I claimed to be so familiar with? Or is it actually a garbled annual budget of Mr P Chidambaram, which somehow got leaked? Is not the business desk a better choice to handle the issue?

And finally I found myself confronting the question -- who is this imposter?

Richard Madley, the Dreweatts auctioneer who otherwise specializes in oriental carpet probably did not have an idea of the magnitude of the event. But he can’t be blamed either. See, Ricky Ponting is sulking he went cheap. And the likes of Brendan McCullum can’t stop laughing.

The Indian Premier League auction left me with an awful feeling. Only Paris Hilton could have been more brazen.

When industry is ready to pump in money, resisting the temptation is the actual challenge for the administrators. Succumbing to the lure should not be trumpeted around.

Cricket does need money, to ensure that the Aminis of Papua New Guinea continue to strive for excellence; to help Arjuna Ranatunga at the helm of a cash-strap board to efficiently run the domestic tournaments in Sri Lanka; to make sure that youngsters see a career in cricket.

But if cricket needs money, it needs its aura as well. When a kid picks up the bat or holds the ball fort the first time in his palm, career is a word he would probably misspell and to him, money’s only perceived worth is it can be bartered for a lozenge. More than money, he needs heroes. Heroes who would make grand appearance in his innocent dreams, inspire him to rise above himself and tell him to live his dreams.

Sadly, those who offer their soul under the hammer do not fit into this hero’s role.

Blinded by his Twenty20 vision, Lalit Modi understandably fails to see it but cricket actually got pauper on February 20.