Surprise wins for Bangalore Royal Challengers and Mumbai Indians

Cape Town: Bangalore Royal Challengers crushed defending champions Rajasthan Royals and Mumbai Indians did the same for runners-up Chennai Super Kings to give a astounding start to the Indian Premier League (IPL) here on Saturday.

Mumbai Indians had a disastrous start in the inaugural tournament losing first four matches last year beat Chennai Super Kings by 19 runs in the opening match of the IPL.

The Bangalore Royal Challengers team, led by skipper Kevin Pietersen, annihilated Rajasthan Royals by a massive 75 runs though they had finished last in the inaugural edition.

The 3 Indian veterans of cricket - Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble, led the way for their teams, using their experience of playing on bowler-friendly wickets.

Sachine Tendulkar's 59 off 49 balls was the highlight of Mumbai Indians, whose total was 165 for seven wickets.

The Sri Lankan fast bowler Lasith Malinga (3-15), and Sanath Jayasuriya (2-34) restricted Chennai Super Kings to 146 for seven wickets.

In the second match, Dravid, who was replaced by Pietersen as Bangalore Royal Challengers captain, struck back, hitting 66 and guiding the team through a difficult phase to reach 133.

Rajasthan Royals, who had a fairytale inaugural season, were all out for the lowest IPL score of 58 runs with Kumble picking five wickets.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni's decision to bowl under cloudy skies, after a delayed start appeared spot on as Tendulkar and his opening partner Sanath Jayasuriya (26) had an unconvincing start. Jayasuriya was run out, ending the 39-run opening stand.

It turned out to be a forgettable debut for Andrew Flintoff, who was on the receiving end of Abhishek Nayar's onslaught. Nayar made a quickfire 35 off just 14 balls and hit Flintoff for three sixes in a 22-run over.

While chasing, Chennai Super Kings suffered the first set-back as Malinga got opening batsman Parthiv Patel with the second ball of the innings.

Matthew Hayden (44) played carefully but as the innings progressed he found his touch. The retired Australian opener fell while chasing a wide Jayasuriya delivery to Zaheer Khan.

Flintoff (24) and Dhoni (36) tried their best but could not see their teams through.

Tendulkar was guarded in his assessment of the team's performance.

"I am glad that we have started well, but I don't want to take anything for granted. It's too early in the tournament and it's same for the other teams also." he said.

The second match started on a exciting note with Dimitry Mascarenhas (3-20) dismissing Jesse Ryder and Ross Taylor in the first over in successive balls.

Royal Challengers were soon left tottering at 52/4 before Dravid, a master of these conditions, summoned his class to anchor the innings. His 48 balls for 66 had eight fours. Pietersen added 32.

"I am in good touch after the tour on New Zealand. Conditions here are ideal for a player like me. You have to play good cricketing shots when the ball is moving. I played few balls to set myself in the middle and then played strokes," Dravid said.

The Rajasthan Royals were sloppy in their run-chase with the batsmen getting out to poor shots. Praveen Kumar (2-7) swung the ball to create trouble for the batsmen. Ryder soon joined in (2-14) to leave Rajasthan Royals at five for 28 runs. They could never recover from such a disastrous start.

Kumble, who bid farwell to international cricket last year, running through the middle-order and tail in a flash, picking 5-5.

Rajasthan Royals captain Shane Warne said it was an "embarassing" beginning."We are the champions and we should have backed ourselves. Bangalore had a bad last year and they came out firing. Chasing a low score, we should have won with couple of overs left. The shot selections of our batsmen were bad."

[credit : http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/000200904190384.htm]

Rajasthan’s royal skipper - Shane Warne

As good as he was with the ball in hand in crunch situations, it was as a captain that Shane Warne turned out to be a game-turner. By far, he was the most perspicacious of the eight IPL captains in the league’s inaugural year. He is, arguably, the best captain Australia never had; or, to be precise, the best captain it chose not to have, writes Nirmal Shekar.

After it was all over, after a team that was written off at the start of the tournament had scripted a fairytale finish worthy of blue-blooded cricketing royalty, when you looked back on it all, the irony was inescapable.

Last year’s inaugural Indian Premier League Twenty20 tournament was a stage made-to-order for strapping young twenty-somethings with over-sized adrenal glands — men such as Yuvraj Singh and Rohit Sharma, to name only two.

What chance of triumph and glory would the merciless actuarial table of T20 cricket have given an ageing troubadour looking forward to his 39th birthday in a competition as frenzied and skill-flattening as the Indian Premier League?

These questions seem obvious until, of course, you come up with the protagonist’s name. Then, suddenly, the pieces fall in place magically and all illogic disappears like morning dew on a clear summer day.

For, rules that apply to ordinary mortals, even the ones that apply to the good and the great, don’t hold good in the case of Shane Warne.

Aged 38, well past his prime and after having retired from international cricket, you’d have thought Warne might have been an expensive misfit in a T20 championship. Yet, this was the man who turned out to be the single most influential figure in the hugely successful first year of the League.

It was a bit like a reluctant Jose Carreras descending on a Hard Rock concert stage and stealing a march over Kid Rock, Metallica and Oasis.

As good as he was with the ball in hand in crunch situations, it was as a captain that Warne turned out to be a game-turner. He is, arguably, the best captain Australia never had; or, to be precise, the best captain it chose not to have.

By far the most perspicacious of the eight IPL captains in the league’s inaugural year, Warne revelled in his role even as his under-rated team, Rajastan Royals, written off as the weakest side in the competition a week into the event, surprised everyone with a string of high-quality performances leading up to a dramatic last-ball victory over Chennai Super Kings in the final.

At $400,000, Warne was by far the best value-for-money player in the competition. But then, the virtues that the great Aussie brings to the field can hardly be represented purely in dollar terms.

There is no putative algorithm for successful leadership, especially in sport, an area of activity that makes room for a wide array of personalities at the top. However, Warne surely possesses a rare mix of attributes that turned him into a genius as a captain. A natural risk taker who backs his instincts, Warne was a hugely inspirational figure, standing on whose shoulders the Royals scaled regal heights.

As in life, in sport too, the best of leaders make things happen instead of waiting for things to happen. And there was no captain quite as pro-active as Warne in the IPL last year.

“Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious and multi-form,” wrote the late David Foster Wallace in Play.

If indeed genius were contagious, everyday reality would be a much more life-enhancing for a lot of us average blokes. But life does offer, from time to time, the illusion that another man’s genius can rub off on us. This is especially so in a cooperative venture like team sport.

Eons before modern civilisation, hundreds of thousands of years before management gurus came up with their mantras and business schools started flourishing, successful alpha males led hunter-gatherer bands through persuasion rather than coercion with ‘collaborative decision-making’ being the norm.

Even in pre-historic times, surely, there is unlikely to have been one successful brand of leadership. For, human personality differences are not exactly a modern phenomenon.

But goal-directed cooperation in the context of modern professional team sports has made way for a fascinating variety of helmsmen, not the least in cricket where the quality of leadership matters so much more than in a sport such as football or hockey. From the imperious Douglas Jardine down to the Socratically wise Mike Brearley and from an awe-inspiring Don Bradman down to a lovable larrikin such as Warne, the game has been able to fit in a range of personalities in leadership roles.

“Broken marriages, conflicts of loyalty, the problems of everyday life fall away as one faces up to (Jeff) Thomson,” wrote Brearley.

Thommo’s lethal pace apart, an English captain may have had to deal with quite a number of other vexing issues in that era. If this is true of almost all captains at all times then the brash new age of Twenty20 cricket — which has robbed on-field decision makers of valuable time — has come to favour the instinctive leaders.

Then again, apart from the speed and quality of Warne’s on-field decision-making, it was what the Aussie genius brought to the Rajasthan Royals’ dressing room that may have made a huge difference in the end.

“You can divide leadership into two aspects,” Brearley said in an interview to The Times (London) a few years ago. “One is telling, ordering even, having a clear idea of what you want and getting people to do it. You might call those masculine qualities.

“And there are the more feminine qualities you might call receptivity. This is consulting people, finding out what they think, their feelings, whether they have different ideas you can learn from.”

Ask any Rajasthan Royals player and he would be willing to swear that Warne blended those two aspects of leadership wonderfully well.

If a leader, as Napoleon said, “is a dealer in hope” then Warne brought hope in lorry loads to the Royals’ camp.

“Some people had branded us underdogs but we had self-belief,” said the charismatic Australian spinner midway through the 2008 tournament.

It was a rare brand of self-belief — instilled in them by their heroic captain — that saw young players such as Ravindra Jadeja, Siddarth Trivedi and Swapnil Asnodkar come up consistently with nerveless displays on the big stage.

“The best part about the IPL is, as well as having four or five different cultures in your team, unearthing some of the young Indian players,” Warne told BBC Sport after last year’s final.

If Warne enjoyed the process of uncovering new talent, then there is little doubt that every one of those young Indians simply adores the great man and will always cherish the days they played alongside one of the game’s greats.

Looking back, it is a bit of an irony that all this celebration of Warne’s imaginative leadership and his ability to inspire youngsters and help them raise their levels should have come after his retirement from the international game.

For, Warne did lead Australia in 11 One-Day Internationals in the late 1990s when Steve Waugh was injured and his team won 10 of those matches. And he might have gone on to lead his country in many more matches but for what the Australian Cricket Board described as “a catalogue of reckless conduct.”

It is a ‘catalogue’ that the Royals’ management is unlikely to take into account as the great man and his boys set out to defend their title in South Africa. For Warne — flawed, sinning, warts and all — may well be irreplaceable.

[credit : http://www.sportstaronnet.com/stories/20090418500700400.htm]

Shah Rukh Khan hits back at Gavaskar

Shah Rukh Khan Hits Back At Gavaskar
April 06 2009
Khan - responded to Sunny's jibes.
Khan - responded to Sunny's jibes.

The controversy over John Buchanan's 'multiple coaches' strategy has continued with Kolkata owner Shah Rukh Khan and Sunil Gavaskar entering a war of words.

The clash began when Gavaskar labelled Buchanan a "failed former cricketer making a living telling international players to do what he couldn't do" in his column for the Hindustan Times, and effectively said that the Australian was taking the Bollywood star for a ride.

"To comment on his multiple skipper theory is to give it the importance it doesn't deserve but what does require comment is how he has got his Queensland pals lucrative jobs with KKR," wrote Gavaskar.

"They have a very big support staff which includes his son and most of them are from Queensland. The owners - poor souls - have little idea that they are being milked."

But Khan has responded by insisting that Gavaskar is simply not up to date with the times.

"I respect Mr Gavaskar - his knowledge about cricket is a billion times better than me," the Knight Riders owner told reporters in Mumbai.

"But this is an era where Mr Gavaskar has not indulged in; nevertheless his knowledge about the game does allow him to make comments.

"This is a new format that's being tried out. Please give it some breathing space. I am the owner of the team, I bought it. If he wants to implement something, let him buy a team."

The franchise attempted to put the debate to bed last week when they released a statement clarifying that there would be many "strategists" but only one captain.

However that didn't stop Gavaskar launching his attack on Buchanan over the weekend, when he also criticised the coach's propensity for issuing comments to the media.

[Credit : http://www.cricket365.com/story/0,18305,6575_5153136,00.html]

Mohali teams fans, can chat with IPL players online

VADODARA: Fans of Team Mohali will be able to interact with their favourite cricketers during the upcoming Indian Premier League (IPL) next month. The team management has decided to allow the players of Team Mohali to chat online with their fans. It is probably the only team that has decided to allow the players' interaction with the fans online.

The players will be able to login on the team's website and chat with the fans an hour after the match is over.

"It is an innovative and exciting idea and I am looking forward to chat with my fans online. I have never interacted with cricket fans online and this is a great opportunity for me," said Irfan Pathan, who plays for Team Mohali.

"Such interactions will help us know the views and ideas of our fans. Many cricket followers want to ask lot of questions to the players and such chatting will help us connect with them," Irfan added.

The chatting facility is also expected to help cricketers, who will be playing in South Africa, connect with their fans back home. The Team Mohali players will also be allowed to post blogs on the team website wherein they will express their views on several aspects of cricket.

[credit : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Vadodara/Team-Mohali-fans-can-chat-with-IPL-players-online/articleshow/4331537.cms]