7 potential alternative careers in cricket

Whenever they speak, some cricketers can be quite thought-provoking. For instance, your first thought after hearing Player A could be a wishful one – wish the proverbial cat had gotten his tongue and was not sighted since.

Some cricketers can also make a believer out of you. The first sentence has barely left Player B's lips and you start believing that human tongue functions independently of human brain.

And then there are certain cricketers, who help you understand things around. Like exactly what thought went behind adding a MUTE button to all remote controls.

But then there are others who make interesting reading and from whatever I listened/read over the last few days, I have no doubt that the seven cricketers below would have made quite a good name in other professions. Cricket's-gain-is-god-knows-what's-loss stuff, I mean.

Sample the men and their utterances.

1. Miandad the Microbiologist: "T20 cricket is a virus". (Tendulkar, clearly from the other school of thought, felt T20 was dessert. Talk about one man’s meat being another man’s poison.)

2. Dr Sunil Gavaskar, MBBS: "The way they (Indian fielders) are going about it (dropping catches), despite the cold weather I doubt if they will be able to catch a cold."

3. Adam Parore the Cardiologist: "Jesse Ryder may have the longest lower abdominal strain in history - someone with a heart transplant would have been back quicker."

4. Wayne Parnell the Actuary: "It’s (the $610,000 hole he created in Daredevils’ pocket) a huge sum of money!"

5. Matthew Hayden, Oz High Commissioner to India: "I have been welcomed into the bosom of India as a brother." (Sourav Ganguly now calls him Hayden da, one hears).

6. Lalit Modi the Environmentalist: "For every effigy burnt I will go and plant 200 trees".

7. Jamie Siddons the Proctologist: "His (Sehwag’s) comments (that Bangladesh is an ordinary side) might bite him on his bum in a few years' time."

Good morning Mr Modi…and hat’s off too

In India, if you are trying to ‘cap’ someone, you are trying to hoodwink him.

“Topi pehna raha hai kya?”

To give devil its due, Lalit Modi is obviously not the first soul on earth trying to act smart but he definitely is taking the art to a new stratosphere.

Now that the IPL is into its last leg (ok, ok, business end), the IPL madcap realizes the folly. Maximum six award, Orange Cap…oops no candy for the leather-flingers? Hastily he comes up with something for the bowler, clearly the second class citizen in this Twenty20 world, and here you have Purple Cap for the bowlers with maximum cumulative wicket against his name.

We have seen over the course of the inaugural season of the DLF Indian Premier League so far that bowlers have just as important a role to play in winning T20 matches as batsmen do.

Thus spake Zarathustra, I mean Modi.

Some would say, better late than never. In this case, I would have loved better never than late. Don’t you think it’s too early for IPL’s next edition, Mr Modi? Well, Rip Van Winkle finally has got some competition here.

It’s not that Modi the Mad Hatter is actually taking his hats off to the bowlers by introducing the Purple Cap. The Purple Cap is just yet another gimmick-rabbit which Modi the magician pulled out of his hat.

And talking of caps, this guy himself wears multiple hats, simultaneously, and talks through each of them when he obliges section of the media (which, I’m sorry to say, approach him hat in hand).

I thought it was Laxmipathy Balaji. But Modi is IPL’s original hat-trick guy.

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