Of IPL, Gurukul and ballsy tricks

My unflinching scepticism didn’t desert me when perpetrators of the IPL preached it would be a virtual Gurukul where tricks of the trade of the cherry and the blade would change hands, from the battle-hardened bunch to the greenhorn lot.

Ungrateful souls like Cheteshwar Pujara and Ranadeb Bose swear, and swear at, it’s otherwise but IPL has indeed lived up to the Gurukul hype and I’m especially impressed by the guru-shishya parampara in the Deccan Chargers camp.

Guru Gilly has been trying to hard sell his squash-ball trick but few actually heeded to his ballsy theory. Y Venugopal Rao –- so what if he sees a cheap coiffeur -- decided to give it a try and since then, he’s having a ball with the bat and runs haven’t stopped flowing from his blade. The Andhra right-hander is now the team’s third highest run-scorer, just behind his mentor and Rohit Sharma!

Apparently, the trend is spreading like blogging in Bollywood, with Scott Styris too game for such an experiment, even though he plans to do it with a golf ball.

Triumph of the Underdog

Nothing pleases me more than the triumph of the Underdog. Since David slew Goliath and Kapil’s Devils did something similar in the 1983 World Cup, the sadist in me has invariably derived some sort of pleasure whenever the unheralded thumbed their nose at their obscenely mighty antagonists.

Deccan Chargers’ victory over Chennai Super Kings may not be a watershed in the history of the game, but it once again elicits the Archie Griffin chestnut – it’s not about the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.

Consider this. A meek, bottom-placed bunch, sans their helmsman, entered the lair of an outfit that was table-topper till the other day. They stood not a semblance of chance, it seemed, and still Adam Gilchrist’s comrades-in-arms managed to conjure up something extraordinary to pull the rug from under the feet of their fancied rivals. Stuff of a run-of-the-mill Bollywood potboiler? No, it’s IPL.

Forget it’s just a game of cricket, just a duel between a piece of wood and a hunk of leather. Consider this as a way of life and you see hopes all around. The odds maybe unflattering, the adversary unnerving. But in the end, every dog has its day, more so when it’s an Underdog.

Image