Sports Quotient

Gideon Haigh on N Srinivasan’s claim of having no conflict of interest issues

N Srinivasan, was more conflicted than Kashmir: BCCI secretary, IPL governing council member, president of the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, proprietor of the Chennai Super Kings, which employed India’s captain as its captain and India’s chairman of selectors as “brand ambassador”.

I am wondering what else is left ?

As in, who else can Mr Srinivasan hire or what other offices can he assume before he thinks that there is the remote possibility that his cricket interests are conflicting.

He could hire the match referees and the umpires as his team’s assistant coaches.

Or he could become the third umpire himself.

Or he could contract Chirayu Amin’s pharmaceutical company to supply vitamins and other health supplements to his various teams.

Or he could recruit Shashank Manohar as his legal counsel.

Or he could hire Rajeev Shukla as a media affairs consultant for the SuperKings.

Or he could recruit Prof Ratnakar Shetty ( a chemistry teacher at Wilson College when he is not serving Indian cricket) as head of R&D at India Cements.

Or he could become head of the BCCI’s stadiums committee and decide which cement to buy for the stadiums’ construction and repair.

Or he could become the head of the match allocation committee and decide how many matches should be hosted by Chepauk.

Or he could hire L Sivaramakrishnan to play the SuperKings mascot.

Or he could hire Sharad Pawar’s son in law as the SuperKings representative during player auctions. Supriya Sule will still feign ignorance about having anything to do with the IPL.

I give up.

I don’t think there is any way Mr Srinivasan will have a conflict of interest issue.

The World Series of Boxing; a global quasi-professional boxing league with 12 franchisees is starting shortly. One of the franchisees is Delhi and the team has been sponsored by Videocon. It’s a wonderful initiative and will do a world of good for Indian boxing. The Asian franchisees had a meeting recently and the COO of the league Ivan Khodabaksh was asked this stupid question by the ESPNStar reporter.

To paraphrase

“Recently there was a scandal in the IPL, where the source of the funds used to bid for franchisees was not clearly known. What is the WSB doing to ensure it doesn’t have a similar issue?”

This boneheaded reporter obviously thought that the IPL was the centre of the professional sports leagues’ universe and everyone aspiring to set up a new league had to copy the Indian league and learn from its mistakes. He clearly had no clue that there are bigger and more well established leagues in the world which have sorted out such issues a long time back. So one doesn’t need to look at the IPL for everything. He also showed his ignorance of the real issues facing the WSB by not asking the relevant questions. That the AIBA has actually shown great vision in coming up with this concept and is not as despotic ,incompetent and corrupt as the BCCI was something that hadn’t crossed the reporter’s mind. Else he would have realized that most of the IPL controversy is of the BCCI’s own making.

I hope such dumb johnnies are not entrusted the task of covering the WSB events in India.

They will be forever on the lookout for the MRF blimp.

Viewers Choice Awards

Best Commentator – Ravi Shastri

Kudos to the Set Max team for correctly assessing that the cricket crazy fans of India love radio style commentary ( where you need to tell the viewers that the batsman has lofted the ball and its gone to the long on boundary for four); analysis which can numb your brain cells ( where the expert thinks it will be great if the team can get 40-45 runs in the last 5 overs and ignores that the batting team has already plundered 150+ runs in the first 15 overs) and will root for a champion of champions who can beat his fellow champions ( read commentators) in a battle of monotony ( reminding the viewers again and again that the MRF company is from Chennai and they make tyres and have been nurturing fast bowlers from India and abroad for the last 15 years. I have a feeling that even the MRF company is sick of hearing it).

Set Max had the best man ( Ravi Shastri ) to do the job and the cricket watching public of India has vindicated the channel’s faith in their star commentator. I sincerely hope that Shastri gets better at his craft and continues to enthral his fans with his various sightings of tracer bullets on the field.

Best Captain – Sachin Tendulkar

For some reason, the host, Karan Johar, asked Priety Zinta to list the nominees before announcing the winner. Was another lame attempt at creating some suspense. It was a waste of time going through the list of eight nominees. No ,wait, they left out Kumara Sangakkara. As if leading your team to the eighth position is bad but finishing seventh is clearly proof of inspired leadership.

The organizers could have handed over the best captain award to Sachin even before the tournament started. Because Indian fans will vote for him any which ways and irrespective of what he does on the field and how his team fares. Even harbouring thoughts about the great batsman having any flaws is tantamount to cricketing sacrilege.

This kind of voting explains the root cause of why India fails to produce great leaders on the sports field – because we first believe that the best players make the best captains and then continue to judge their captaincy by their performance on the field.

That no rabid Sachin fan has called for him to be made captain of the Indian Twenty-20 side ( especially after the Caribbean disaster) is actually a huge let down. Guess they were busy voting for the IPL awards !!!

Here are the rest of the IPL Awards

Dhoni and Mourinho are currently basking in the glory of their inspired leadership triumphs. One led the Chennai Super Kings to the IPL title and the other guided Inter to the UEFA Champions League final. There is an uncanny similarity in the radical tactics employed by the two men and the number which is representative of those tactics. It is the number ‘THREE’.

Conventional wisdom states that T-20 sides generally play with one specialist spinner. If the pitch is expected to spin then they might just play two. Dhoni broke the mould by going into the knock-out games with three spinners and in the end it proved to be a masterstroke.

In European club football, when teams are protecting a lead in an away game, they generally play with a lone striker upfront. In an off chance they might play a second one. Mourinho digressed from this beaten path and selected three forwards in away games. It proved to be a tour de force as Inter Milan stunned both Chelsea and CSKA in their away games.

You can never have ‘two’ much of a good thing.

Relax!!!. Our brightest boxing hope and Olympic bronze-medallist hasn’t been corrupted by the bright lights of film stardom.

He is not going to be on movie screens fighting filmy villains any time soon.

Rather, he will be boxing real life villains ( top national and international boxers) in cinema halls as part of a new promotion plan conjured to bring the sport of boxing closer to the common man.

Titled “ Fight Nights”, the bouts have been conceptualized as a mixture of top quality boxing and entertainment; very much on the lines of the IPL.

We just hope the similarities end there.

Naah, it’s got nothing to do with the fact that most of them have been exploiting the slow tracks to stifle batsmen; thereby denying them the opportunity to hit sixes and commentators the chance to shout “DLF Maximums”.

It’s simply because spinners prevent broadcasters from plugging TV ads between two successive deliveries ( atleast most of the time). Thanks to their super short run-ups, the most ingenious of ad-makers cannot create ads which are short enough to be displayed between two consecutive deliveries from a spin bowler.

Having saved viewers from the torture of watching advertisements between consecutive deliveries, the spinning saviours are surely worthy of a lot of good cheer from the TV audience.

So could it be possible, that the poor form of the likes of Brett Lee and Ishant Sharma is simply owing to their long run-up ( and hence lots of ads and lots of groans from viewers) induced bad karma.

Shashi Tharoor has paid the price of the ‘sweat equity’ that was given to his friend Sunanda Pushkar. Only he would know if the price was high or low.

We expect other skeletons to come out of the closet soon – the ones relating to all the bids and auctions that have taken place in the IPL so far.

There is enough circumstantial evidence already and I am not ready to believe that the IPL is bereft of financial wrongdoings , especially on the part of its self-styled commissioner.

It is also obvious that a lot of people in the corridors of power ( of both cricket and politics) are not happy with Lalit Modi. They are hell-bent on exposing him.

The IT dept and other govt sleuths are on the job and they will soon get their hands on incriminating evidence that could nail Lalit Modi and a whole lot of other people ( that is if they do their job properly)

Whether this evidence will lead to something or not is an altogether different matter.

That depends on what the people in power ( the ones mentioned above) have in mind. Do they have the best interests of Indian cricket in mind? Are they doing all this so that the money generated from the IPL does not fall into the wrong hands?

Based on the history of similar cases in this country, I would say that the answer is a confirmed NO. Powerful people who commit big scams never get caught in India. Other powerful people see to it.

The powerful people orchestrating the investigation are simply pissed off because they haven’t got their share of the booty. Because nothing or probably too little of the IPL money has fallen into their hands.

The evidence that the sleuths will find will be used to corner Mr Modi to start sharing the riches.

It is expected that Mr Modi will give in after some negotiation on the profit sharing. After all, he also knows that it is in nobody’s interest that he gets caught and nobody gets any money - all of it getting used for the betterment of Indian cricket.

They could even pay a small fine as commission to the powers that be in the IT dept

Then all of a sudden matters will cool down and the IT sleuths will go back to catching normal middle class Indians.

Everyone will go home happy. Except for Mr Suresh Kalmadi.

Why?

Because he’s been too busy with the Commonwealth Games and missed out on all the IPL action. The action that is being played out in the boardrooms that is.

Because thanks to the limit, Indian internationals can take their place in their respective IPL sides for granted.

They will never be dropped because there are no replacements for them.

You have to pick 4 foreigner slots to fill from a total of 8 players. As a result, you can replace an underperforming foreigner, no matter how high profile he is, with another quality foreign player.

We have seen the likes of Dilshan, AB de Villiers, Muralitharan, Jayasuriya, Pietersen, Brett Lee and Dale Steyn getting dropped.

But we have never seen and probably will never see ( till you have the limit on foreign players) the likes of Tendulkar, Yuvraj Singh, Virender Sehwag, Rohit Sharma or MS Dhoni getting dropped for poor performance.

Unless they touch some unthinkable low, like getting half a dozen ducks in a row. But I can bet my mortgage against that ever happening.

These guys cannot be dropped because there aren’t enough quality Indian players in any side. There is no one, say in the Delhi side, who can come in for the likes of Gambhir or Sehwag. The likes of Kedar Jadhav or Mithun Manhas can only come in if Sehwag or Gambhir gets injured.

Similarly who do you bring in if you plan to drop Yuvraj; the Kings would rather play his corpse than take a chance with Tanmay Srivastava or Karan Goel.

No wonder we have seen Indian internationals continue to bat and bowl in crucial positions ( and not just play) irrespective of their form.

The same thing would never happen in European football If an English international ( say Wayne Rooney) plays poorly, his manager will drop him in favour of an overseas player.

He doesn’t have to worry about finding a quality English replacement.

That ensures that Rooney can never take his place for granted.

An IPL side cannot replace a poor performing Indian with an overseas star.

So would an Indian international ever have to worry about the prospect of getting dropped. No

Is that a good thing for Indian Cricket?

Gautam Gambhir after the Delhi Daredevils won comfortably against the Kolkata Knight riders at the Ferozeshah Kotla

“We know how to play on such a track, it’s difficult for a new team to adjust to this pitch.”

Gautam Gambhir after the Delhi Daredevils were thrashed in convincing fashion by the Kings Eleven Punjab at the Ferozeshah Kotla

“I would prefer to play away matches”. “You have seen the pitch, it wasn’t easy to bat. T20 is a kind of game played with fours and sixes and this is a pitch where you need to graft.”

This guy’s talent to make about turns can give the most two-faced of politicians a run for their money

The IPL is awash with stars. These players have been paid good money and come with huge reputations. But many of the big names have been stinking the joint in the third season of the IPL. Let’s try and identify the biggest bust of them all. First the list of the flop stars

DC

Kemar Roach – has given away 80 runs in 8 over and been wicket less so far

DD

Tillekratne Dilshan – 32 runs in 4 games at an average of 8 and a strike rate of 80

AB de Villiers – 107 runs in 6 games at a strike rate of 95.

It’s no surprise that both have been dropped.

KXP

Mahela Jayawardene – 102 runs in 7 games

Brett Lee – 111 runs in 10.3 overs and no wickets. More so because he came in place of Juan Theron who took 2 for 42 in his 8 overs.

KKR

Ishant Sharma –The teams most expensive bowler has been their most expensive bowler as well. 190 runs in 21 overs.

MI

Sanath Jayasuriya – dropped after managing just 32 runs in 3 games

No one from CSK, RR and RCB

Tillekratne Dilshan looks to be the favourite. Came in with such a huge T-20 reputation but is currently at the top of the flop list. And worse he might not get a chance to salvage his reputation. Collingwood is doing well for Delhi and if he fails, AB de Villiers might get a look in before the Sri Lankan. Brett Lee is a close second.