The curious incident of the ‘Fake IPL Player’

And of course you have seen the blog, haven’t you**? If the cave you stay in is so far removed from human contact that you have failed to have visited this site yet, well, here it is (click here).

And let me look into my crystal ball, what would be the next wave of goss on that front?

There will be a million bloggers, in their need to be famous, that will proclaim themselves to be the one. They will be the ‘fake fake IPL players’. And there will be many of them, who will be proclaimed by the media as the ‘fake fake fake IPL player’, namely, the ‘real fake IPL player’…

But eventually, the ‘real fake IPL player’ (RFIP) will never be found. Like the abominable snowman, like the chupacabra, like the sasquatch, like Keysar Soze, the RFIP will disappear soon after the IPL v2 ends. Just like that, he will be gone….

And the biggest trick that he will have played, will be to make the world believe that he did exist…

 Now wait a minute. What does my crystal ball tell me, then? Is it that the RFIP never existed?

That indeed is what it seems like, to my limited mind.

Why? Now here’s the reason….

It cannot be a player, for the simple reason that if it were, he would have been found out by now. It is not tough to track down the IP, located the cyber café/ laptop/desktop from where the posts go out, and many must have tried this already….

To no avail.

So it cannot be a regular rant by a disgruntled Ranadeb Bose (As Gulu Ezekiel claims here.. did he have a fallout with Ganguly after the biography?) or a needing-the-fame Anureet Singh. This is planned, and must have been brewing for a while, Whoever is writing the blog must have been planning this for a long while. And while I, willy-nilly, might still be convinced that there is some cricketer somewhere who can pull it off in terms of the writing skills yada yada (no, fat chance that Ranadeb or Anureet or Akash Chopra has that level of writing skill, this blog is genuine mirth… and yes I know that Akash Chopra has written a book, which I have not read yet… but I have indeed read his blog on Cricinfo, and it is honest, prosaic, solid and unexciting, pretty much like the player himself), the technical skills involved to ensure that the person is not caught, must involve some experts.

It cannot be a player in cahoots with a few other buddies of his with the necessary technical skills, because the secret will have definitely been breached… The more the people involved (if this would have just been for fun), the more the chance of the leak…

It cannot be a journo. No journo will commit that kind of professional suicide … the guy/ gal will definitely be ostracized by the media once the news comes out (and trust me it would have by now)… and the fear of libel is a big fear. It’s big, powerful, important people they are trying to take on (in whatever humorous way).

So who is left over?

One of the teams? In a bid for self publicity?

Well, that’s my hunch. One of my hunches, rather.

The IPL v2 has been a success, willy-nilly, I suppose; but has definitely not been the kind of success that the IPL had been the last time…. And what better that to spin some controversy (and fun, might I add) into the whole thing?

KKR itself would have been a possibility, Shahrukh Khan is one of the rare celebrities that has learnt the art of laughing at himself (kudos to him for that)… but would he allow his team to get into this mire of controversy? It’s his money at stake after all….

But then, the money KKR makes is not through winning or losing the tourney (and the team is pretty weak, there are few chances anyway that they will make it to the top), but through ad revenues etc etc….

So it may very well be KKR. Of course Ganguly and Gayle and Agarkar and McCullum and Buchanan and even the rest of the team would have been kept in the loop.

The doubt is that the other teams are not left out of the fun… and they might sue for damages. C’mon, at least Sresanth would definitely sue. And the secret would have to be out sometime for sure, if that many people are in the know.

Maybe.

And the other candidate might be the IPL committee itself…. They do need the publicity, this is a story! A real story! A scoop! Truth or otherwise!

And why would they care about whether a team does well or badly, when all they need is to just ensure the tournament is a success and they make their money, right? And this issue is giving the tournament a lot of publicity.

So is it the IPL committee itself? Will they do something incredulous like this?

Maybe.

And both the parties I have mentioned have the money to gather the technical wherewithal and writing prowess to create this monster…

And well, you and I have all started blogs at some point of time. Isn’t it tough to be popular? How strong, really, is word of mouth? Is it strong enough for a blog to get this incredible level of publicity in just a few days? Without someone in the background playing God? I doubt it very much.

So there, just my two pence into the whole debate.

And don’t come back to this blog and laugh at me tomorrow when some unknown XYZ cricketer (or even Ranadeb or Anureet or even Akash Chopra) owns up to being the RFIP… Or rather, please do. I do not claim to be the lord and master of all analysts, and it is nice to eat humble pie once in a while.

 

** If you are remotely interested in the IPL.

Sourav Ganguly…

Unfair? Yes. Not the sacking, but the way the matter was dealt with. I wonder why they fuck it up every single time!

Will he make it back to the Indian team, if he tries a comeback? Yes he will.

Or no he won’t, if the selectors have their way, but that will be the death-knoll for Rohit Sharma, Badrinath or Tiwary or whoever replaces Ganguly. Ganguly will perform a few heroics in the domestic scene…. and for every time the newbie underperforms, the vultures in the media will be let loose on them. Remember Mohammed Kaif?

What would one give to have the Australian system, where a Mark Waugh is told well in advance that he has one year left to his international career… and that’s all. And what would one give to ensure that Dravid is given that flexibility…

Andrew Murray and the expectations of a nation…

Do always remember that the worst, most pessimistic media of them all is the British media…. they screwed up Tim Henman’s head so much that he could never become the player he should have been.

Andy Murray is a bit different. He is a Scot for starters, and has already courted a bit of media flak for speaking his mind when he was a wee teenager. The Scottish and the Welsh are not the best fans of the English, so when Murray, then a teenager was asked who he would support in the World Cup football, he mentioned ‘Anyone except England’.  And as you could expect, all hell broke loose (click here) (click here).

Well, back to business, Murray seems tougher, and more talented. Infact, very talented. And gritty. While he might not have the sublime shotmaking ability of Richard Gasquet or the awe-inspiring power of Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Murray has a good combination of both, as well as a very Nadal-esque, very Novak-esque amount of fight in him. Oh yeah, plus he is no wilting flower, and is known for his brash press conferences (he was even referred to as ‘petulant’) … may I say, he has a bit of Kevin Pietersen about him.

And a bit of trivia here. Did you know that Murray (as well as his older brother Jamie Murray, a grand-slam winning doubles player) were kids studying in the same school in which the Dunblane massacre took place in 1996. This was one of the first few infamous school shooting incidents (click here)….

Trivia 2. They used to call the Wimbledon following of Henman, Henmania; so what do they call the Murray phenomenon? Andymonium, of course!

Well, he has reached the semis of the US open… and will be playing Nadal.

I, as normal, will support Nadal. But here’s wishing Murray a good tournament and a great career.

Scholes

… is naive, he never learnt to tackle. Notwithstanding the horrific attacks on opposition shins and ankles…

… is blameless, and an all around good-egg.

Well, Paul Scholes is a cheat. Even the Times (click here) will agree now.

Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, described Paul Scholes’s sending-off for handball in the Uefa Super Cup as “an instinctive thing”. Since when has deliberately palming the ball been an instinct in a sport in which it is expressly forbidden? It was cheating, simple as that.

Sanjay Manjrekar was pragmatic once…

but has, these days, taken up the role of being the rebel-without-a-cause among the media. In the belief that he is pulling down sacred cows, in reality, all that he is managing is mistaking an aberration for a trend. And therefore sensationalizing non-issues (or rather, as-of-yet non-issues). And thereby, making a fool of himself. Remember the ‘Sachin should be dropped‘ gaffe? Well, here’s another. Just on dint of today’s (and yesterday’s) performance, he proclaims that Indian batsmen are no more the masters of spin…. (click here for more)

After 2002-03 our batsmen haven’t shown much improvement against the spinners as they have against the faster men. So this is a changing trend in Indian batting where we cannot confidently assert that we are the best players of spin. We used to be, but now good spinners are starting to bother the Indian batsmen.

Ahem, improvement? we have had the same four players in the middle order, and their averages against pacers, nor spinners have changed much in recent times. Have they? Statistics, please…. Sehwag, if he gets to the spinners, will generally rip them apart. His problems have been short, into-the-body stuff. So is it that Manjrekar makes all his assumptions from just observing Gautam Gambhir getting dismissed twice (and being one of the top scorers in both cases) to the Sri Lankan spinners? And that too, just in one match? When did we have the great opening batsman against spinners? The last one I remember retired in 1987… The ones in the interim did not quite survive on the crease long enough get to spinners anyway

Murali is brilliant and a one-off; a mystery-spinner tends to trouble batsmen for a while before he is found out…. Let’s not be too early in denouncing what has been the greatest middle order Indian cricket has ever had. And believe me, this is a regular cricket-gods basher writing.

Sanjay Manjrekar, you really are blabbering, sir.

Indian Fantasy League / Blah!

Isn’t Indian Fantasy League the absolute pits of fantasy online games? Believe me, it is! I play both of course, but my vote will surely go to the Cricinfo games.

And they even put full-length articles on the stupid Indian Fantasy league in TOI. And then, should we go TOI-baiting again?

No, not today….