Indian cricketers to play Oongli cricket?

A couple of days back, I read Andrew Symonds speak about protecting some cattle in cricket.

Then, of Gautam Gambhir speaking of resting players from the IPL for the ICC World T20. (Serious, he said that!)

Today, I read Adam Gilchrist pleading the administrators to rethink the calendar. And talk about cricket reaching a critical point. Being close to a saturation point. A clichéd sentiment echoed by a gazillion others. Repeated so often that before excess cricket kills the players off, the boredom following the repetition of the overkill of cricket would most definitely.

The irony follows.

Today, hours later, I also read about Lalit Modi make an announcement. No, he wasn’t conferring the order of cricketing peace over to Gilly opening the avenues of logic for him. Far from it. Instead, it was the fruition of another oft-spoken truth of the second IPL every year.

Teams will now need to play 4-5 games more every year over a 7-8 month period. Across the world.

Modi said, “There could be certain weekends when certain teams will have some free time and they can play some matches abroad.”

Alright, so there were a couple of weekends between the previous series that India played and the IPL. There is no weekend between the IPL and the ICC World T20. There is one weekend between the World T20 and the tour of Zimbabwe. Probably one or two after that if there is an Asia Cup, followed by a Test series against Sri Lanka. Which weekends are we referring to here unless 2011 sees some drastic compromises in the international calendar?

Groans. I can hear them emanating from every dressing room in the IPL. Especially from Indians. The others do not know whether it is alright to react one way or the other lest they be banned from making the money. They quietly stuff their mouths with the Indian curry or their ears with a gadget.

Yusuf Pathan, Virender Sehwag and Yuvraj Singh would probably now understand why their NOCs to play county cricket were revoked. An impending announcement on the IPL Carnival.

IPL was expected to unearth new talent who would probably end up been ambidextrous. IPL will probably teach the batsmen and the bowlers to be talented enough to use only one hand to do their on-field chores as well.

The other hand will hold a crutch. How about some Oongli Cricket instead?

by Suneer Chowdhary
(The writer is a cricket rambler and can be contacted at suneerchowdhary@gmail.com. He will continue doing so for us whenever he gets that 25th hour of the day.)

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3. Pakistani cricketers ban brings mixed reactions from former cricketers
4. India versus Sri Lanka: The Ashes of ODI Cricket?
5. Cairns wins defamation case against cricket website

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Posted by Sam on Apr 2 2010. Filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry