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…

Of gods and demi-gods; and angels and demons…

Ah, Indian cricket fans!

Ah, us Indian cricket fans! We don’t watch cricket, we indeed pray at the altar of the gods of cricket… cricket is our raison d’etre; and all this, while we find it impossible to make a rational argument on the game at any point in time.

We aren’t ignorant about the game, mind you. We know the scientific machinations behind bowling the doosra and the reverse swinging yorker, we appreciate the difference between setting the 6-3 versus the 7-2 field, and our analysis of non-Indian players and matches where India is not involved, is well nigh as precise as you can find it out of any general mass of people.

The confusion’s only when we discuss our own. And that is when our logical reasons (reasonably precise and accurate otherwise) go haywire in the face of a full-frontal attack by our cliques and cabals and me-and-my-tribe instincts. We don’t remain base cricket fans anymore, appreciating and analyzing the game like we tend to do so well otherwise. We become men (and women) of religion, be that religion that of Sachin-god, or Very-Very-Special-Laxman-god, or the Namma-Rahul-god or the immaculately named Bangalir-Gourob-Sourav-god.

And we are pulled from different directions, the primary one indeed being from the country-within-country that we belong to. So the Bihar-country boy and the Tamilnadu-country boy will not see eye-to-eye in discussions over who the greater god is among Dhoni-god and Karthik-god, and merits a place in the pantheon that is the team. And of course Sachin-god is the biggest god of them all, but does the Jat-country boy take kindly to Sehwag-god being any lesser?

And then there is continental pride, whereby the East-continent rises up in fury at any indignation, perceived or otherwise, at the great Sourav-god. Or the old very-Very-Special-god being vilified by the north-continent for keeping their devoted Yuvraj-god out of the pantheon, and the vice-versa by the south-continent for a perceived Damocles’ Sword perennially hanging on the Very-Very-Special-god’s head, even though he has played nearly a hundred tests now. (I’m not kidding about the Damocles’-sword quote, I have actually read it in some reputed newspapers and forms of Internet media).

Really, I remember in college, when I was discussing the merits and demerits of including L Balaji in the team, a classmate, visibly in disagreement with me over my perceived slight of his beloved Balaji-god, tried to end the debate by suggesting that ‘Ganguly is a bastard anyway’, knowing that I, indeed, have my base at Bengal-country***.

Oh and then there are those other invisible strings…

• The genteel gentleman cannot appreciate the modern cut-throat no-quarters-given version of cricket that is perpetrated by the teams under Sourav-god and Rahul-god, and would suggest repeatedly how the gentleman’s game is not what it used to be. (Even the ‘How dare he make the white man wait’ ideas have been bandied about).
• The old-timer has his own gods, whereby Kumble-god (if I weren’t a cricketing atheist, I would have prayed to him ##) is never given the credit he so deserves, because there are, in his mind and heart, already Prasanna-god and Chandra-god and Venkat-god and Bedi-god. So they call him a glorified medium pacer, completely disregarding whatever logic would have suggested otherwise.
• The polished gentleman (and lady) cannot appreciate the bucolic allure of a Sehwag-god or the heartland vibrancy of a Dhoni-god, like he/she couldn’t the unpolished charms of one Kapil-god.
• Why, there can even be, say for example, my evil boss (or say my ex-girlfriend) is an Andhra-country person, so I will berate the Very-Very-Special-god come whatever may (who, of course, is the Not-THAT-Special-god to the rest of the country).

And yes, I did hear your question. And I was indeed trying to dodge it all this while. Who do I support in the Ranji trophy? Sly fella, you, no? Well put. So here’s the answer. Bengal. Karnataka. Delhi. In that order.

 

*** What could I have answered? Well, having no definite locational root apart from that of language, the affront did not affect me. So I mentioned that I haven’t ever had the good fortune of meeting Ganguly or his parents and discussed this specific case of parenthood. Has he?

## As for Kumble-god, I will agree that (apart from his being so worshippable) my worshipping would have had some basis to my tribal heritage; he indeed is a senior alumnus from my college.

How important is

Graeme Smith

… this guy for the South African cricket team?

As important as

Gary Kirsten

was, for the most part of the last decade of the last millennium …

Gary Kirsten has long been one of my favourite players: dour, gritty, doing a job and doing it well….

Hope he does the job well for the Indian team. May it be known as Dhoni’s team much like the last team was Ganguly’s, we all know the great work put in by John Wright for ensuring the same. May it be Dhoni, along with Kirsten, to take the next step forward. And believe me, the werewithal is all right there.