Skip to main content

The IPL at ten (Hindu)

In an ironic, yet vivid way, the Indian Premier League has held up the mirror to cricket

A week after India clinched the Test series against Australia at Dharamsala, the memory of both the fine victory and the bad blood that marred those matches can be pushed to the sidelines. Such is the nature of frenetic cricket calendars that the Indian Premier League has already rolled in, its tenth edition commencing with the match between the defending champion, Sunrisers Hyderabad, and last year’s runner-up, Royal Challengers Bangalore, on April 5. Spread over 47 days and featuring 60 matches, the IPL has over the years blended the instant gratification of the Twenty20 format with a sense of longevity, having prospered since its inception in 2008. On the field, suspense and sixes, upsets and consistency, flair and acrobatic fielding have all combined to energise the league. The inaugural event witnessed a classic reprise of David vs Goliath. Unheralded Rajasthan Royals stunned the fancied Chennai Super Kings (CSK), and ironically both teams are currently serving a two-year suspension, a just punishment following ghastly violations that negated the spirit of the game. If S. Sreesanth, Ajit Chandila and Ankeet Chavan’s alleged forays into spot-fixing dented the Royals in 2013, further damage was caused to the league when CSK’s Gurunath Meiyappan was deemed guilty of betting. Even Rajasthan Royals co-owner Raj Kundra fell in the same category, and tragically for the IPL, the thrills on the ground were marred by the problems that shadowed its fringes.
Ironically, the IPL has actually held a mirror up to and drawn more scrutiny into the affairs of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) than have the game’s longer, more traditional formats. The cosy-club atmosphere that sullied the richest cricket board, the nepotism and an indifference to probity, all came into full public view, with the Supreme Court sitting up and taking notice. The repercussions of the 2013 spot-fixing and betting controversy are even now felt as it sowed the seeds for the wide-ranging reforms suggested by the Justice R.M. Lodha Panel, and now the Committee of Administrators appointed by the court has its hands full. A summer sporting carnival, a domestic tournament with an international flavour, as Rahul Dravid described it, had inexplicably gone beyond its pulsating cricket and virtually prised out the BCCI’s heart. The IPL not only changed the way cricket was played, increasing the tempo and adding big bucks to the players’ kitty, it also inadvertently ushered in a course-correction for the BCCI. Surely, the league has come a long way since it started with a leg-bye when Kolkata Knight Rider’s skipper Sourav Ganguly squared up to Royal Challengers Bangalore’s Praveen Kumar in the first match in 2008 in Bangalore. It was the lull before the storm unleashed by Brendon McCullum’s savage unbeaten 158 off just 73 balls. There have been many other storms since and as for what will happen this time around, no one can hazard a guess.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

SC asks Centre to strike a balance on Rohingya issue (.hindu)

Supreme Court orally indicates that the government should not deport Rohingya “now” as the Centre prevails over it to not record any such views in its formal order, citing “international ramifications”. The Supreme Court on Friday came close to ordering the government not to deport the Rohingya. It finally settled on merely observing that a balance should be struck between humanitarian concern for the community and the country's national security and economic interests. The court was hearing a bunch of petitions, one filed by persons within the Rohingya community, against a proposed move to deport over 40,000 Rohingya refugees. A three-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, began by orally indicating that the government should not deport Rohingya “now”, but the government prevailed on the court to not pass any formal order, citing “international ramifications”. With this, the status quo continues even though the court gave the community liberty to approach i...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

"ISRO has capabilities to build geostationary satellites for air quality monitoring” (downtoearth)

Pawan Gupta's findings on trans-boundary movement of pollution (Punjab to Delhi) from biomass burning in 2015 spurred debates. He participated in discussions with Indian regulators early September at the Better Air Quality Conference in Busan on the advantages of using satellite data for air quality monitoring. He explains to Down to Earth how air quality monitoring is done using satellite data. How is satellite data used to measure air pollution? Satellites that provide information on atmospheric pollutants are normally (not always) in the low earth orbits (400-1000 km above the Earth’s surface). A single satellite can carry one or more remote sensing instruments onboard that look down to earth and obtain information about the object in the field of view of satellite sensor. The Earth receives electromagnetic radiation from the sun, which travels through space and reaches the earth-atmosphere system. The radiation then interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere and the surface...
1 comment
Click Here To Read more »

What's ailing Namami Gange programme?(DTE)

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »