Youngistan !!

I just came across Pepsi's new tag line 'Youngistan'. One of the add features Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone outwitting 'Badshah' Khan. The other one features young faces of Indian cricket team. To me this tag line emphasizes on the role of youth in India. The challenges from the young blood to the aged expertize of the old India, a country emerging out of the shackles of tradition and customs to the superpower of the new millennium. For now, lets look at new development in cricket.

The role of the youth in the recent victory of our cricket team against numer-uno team Australia showed the effects. The strategies that were chalked out where never too predictable; Dhoni leading from the front took some interesting decisions of dropping Sehwag and replacing an opening bat with an extra simmer. All our experts in cricket went on saying that was a mistake and some even commented that this may be Dhoni's tactics to keep Viru hungry for runs, whenever he is included in paying eleven. As we all saw, he never made it. Was it right or wrong in cricketing sense, I dont know. But the bottom-line is that it worked. Dhoni's decision to keep out the expertize of Ganguly and Dravid was also a shock to many of us, especially since the tour was overseas. If we keep in mind that neither Ganguly, Dravid or Tendulkar will make it to the World Cup 2011 and consider that to be the ultimate reward of playing one-dayers then it was a reasonable decision. But there was also risk of loosing the tournament. So under all these circumstances I would say Dhoni did a good job. He has his own vision and is ready to stand by it, very similar to what Ganguly did a couple of years back to revive the Indian team and giving a new title of 'Team India'. Ganguly's policy was to include new faces but also give the seniors enough chances they deserve. This might go back in keeping Dravid in the one-day team under immnese contradiction from the selectors. In fact, Ganguly went to the extent of using Dravid's wicket keeping abilities to retain him in World Cup 2003 team as a wicket-keeper batsman.
But after all these revolutionary changes Ganguly brought to Indian Team, they were still shy of the championship titles. In fact, under Ganguly Indian Team lost record number of championship finales, including the WC 2003. Its too early to comment on Dhoni's policies as a skipper, but from what we have seen so far we can say that he wants young guns in the team and is not shy of criticizing even legendary Sachin on his failure on the top order. The inclusion of new faces and giving them chances on a rotation basis might prove to be the best for the rise of Indian team and actually winning more championships. They even did that, they won T20 and now the last ever CB series in Australia. This was the last of these triangular nation tournament in Australia and Aussies are shocked to lose it to India. India proved they are the second best team in the world in Test cricket and a lot of potency to be the World No. 1 in one-dayers. Kudos to Dhoni and his men.

This is really a 'Youngistan' !!

Indian Professional League - potpouri!

Even a reluctant cricket fan anywhere in the world should be aware of the recent buzz in the world of cricket - the 'Indian Professional League' (IPL). It is sported as cricket's reply to the English Premier League (in soccer) or English County cricket, which is based on one-day cricekt format and involves lot of foreign hires. All that we know so far about IPL is that it involves a huge amount of money transaction and is probably making everyone involved in it richer by a couple of magnitude in terms of their bank balances.

For the first time in the history of sports entertainment, at this level, we have witnessed the auctioning of players, i.e. players joining to different teams without their own will. They are getting paid in an ad-hoc basis according to the mood of the bidders. Even the teams are named as franchisee of a particular company or person. The sole authority in this venture is BCCI (Board of Cricket Control in India), one of the richest organization in the world of sports and its strongman Lalit Modi visualizes IPL to revolutionize the game of cricket and popularize it to the non-cricket crazy audience. Presently, it seems that the longer nature of the game of cricket is preventing it to become a popular game worldwide as compared to soccer or basketball. So IPL is based on the shortest version of cricket till date, i.e. Twenty20 cricket.
If you ask a cricket loyalist, he will still announce that the 5-day test cricket is the real format of cricket and these shorter versions are harming the spirit of the game.

For the time-being we assume that the Twenty20 cricket might turn out to be the crowd puller, following the history where the one-day internationals became really popular from the 5-day format. In fact, the most prestigious tournament in the world cricket so far is the World Cup and that is being played in one-day format. There exists no such counterpart in test cricket. So may be in coming decade the Twenty20 World Cup will overshadow the prestige of the one-day World Cup and India will be remembered as the first ever champions in this game, overthrowing the legacy set by West Indies in 1975.

But what good will IPL do to cricket, since it is not the only tournament that adopted T20 format, ICC already has started a World Cup in this shorter version. So one may ask what is the reason for IPL. The answer can be its a immediate reply to ICL (Indian Cricket League) which is formed under some former Indian players like Kapil Dev, Sandip Patil, etc who rebelled against the monopoly of BCCI in the game. One can argue that IPL was just a hasty reply to ICL from BCCI in order to reinstate the monopoly. According to me its really a difficult link to establish between IPL and its benefit to cricket. The players generally play under a nation out of their patriotic zeal, or play for their clubs out of their choice. But here they dont even know from before who will actually own them. Under these circumstances, I really wonder what will be the source of commitment of the players to their respective team. Of course, one cannot ignore the amount of money they are getting purchased for. But even the price is not set up on the basis of the caliber of the player. The incidence of Ricky Pointing getting paid much less than the new sensation Ishant Sharma, is already rising people's concern. Apart from the rich Indian cricketers getting richer, I see IPL will involve only return of some international talents who have retired recently.

BCCI have recently announced that they will share the huge amount of their profit with other cricket boards, and also deploy some amount for the benefit of other games in the country. It will be interesting to watch how much of that will happen in practice. Lets hope as spectators, we will be able to watch all the great matches of IPL in different TV networks and there will be no more fusses with the TV rights again.