IPL5 has kept up the news — both good & bad

First we had some seldom-heard-before players pompously, and probably even falsely, declaring to a hidden camera that they draw more than their official auction figures.

Next, Shah Rukh Khan emerges as a serial offender. First, he is caught smoking inside a stadium for which he is booked. Then he gets into a spat with MCA officials and security guards at Wankhede stadium on a night his team won over Mumbai in style and gets banned for five years, nothing less!

The juice was just about drying up in the grapevine when another serial offender, Australian Luke Pomersbach, goes and gropes an American girl. He then beats up her fiancé and gets arrested for molestation and violence!

There is still a week to go for IPL5’s grand finale, so one doesn’t really know how the off-field will be behaving with bad news hereon. But all said, the post-Lalit Modi IPL has been overtly wary of controversies. It has completely clothed its cheer-leaders (I can’t quite get used to the rangarang karyakram they have become), has not sold tickets at obscene prices for wild IPL parties, it has kept all franchisees, especially Subroto Roy, in good humour.

Over and above that, and most importantly, it has kept the momentum strictly restricted to the explosive action on the 22 yards. There have been as many as 19 matches so far that have clinched a thriller in the last over. There’s been a hat-trick by a Faridabad boy, two centuries and close to 700 sixes swooped up into the air this season. Chris Gayle has given run build-up a newly invented rocket fuel and Rahul Dravid has worked hard to keep the romance alive in a short and sweet affair.

The only nightmare on the field has been Sourav Ganguly’s hair doing some crazy stunts on his hapless head. Some strands sometimes stood starch straight and sometimes decided to run amok in the opposite direction from the rest of their ilk. Had it not been a fulltime effort to tackle the heartbreak of seeing Ganguly struggle as a batsman and a skipper, his unruly hair would have given many viewers sleepless nights.

Returning to Shah Rukh, who has grown less and blown up more in recent past, the star tantrums have grown like his age. Though it is a fact that MCA officials have as big an ego as King Khan sports on his trim body, Shah Rukh has courted bad news too many times to get benefit of doubt this time round. Security is known to be rough on such occasions but generally they do so only when a rule is being broken. Not letting anyone into the ground after the match is a rule Shah Rukh’s and his friend’s children were trying to break. That he lost his cool about this minor thing, yes it was minor, shows he needs to put mercury to his skin and discuss BP issues with his doctor.

Personally, I am fan of Khan’s repartee, his smartass demeanour, his keen business sense and, of course, his super stardom. So, to hear him saying “I am God, I am the best” is mostly dismissed as flippancy the Khan utters but does not mean. However, over the years, his personality has constantly gotten eroded. His spats with co-star Salman Khan, his fight with best friend Farah, him slapping her husband, his jokes at Award ceremonies getting more and more tedious and now his frequent outbursts of temper — it all speaks of an ageing star, perhaps not quite in control of his receding stardom.

About time, he remembered he is a dad who needs to set an example in front of his children and not go to pieces slowly and steadily because he is 48 and not 24 any longer. In this context, even if one were to agree that security guards were rude that night, he could have just behaved like a senior citizen, reasoned with them and walked away instead of getting banned by a cricketing body.

Most probably, the BCCI will very soon negate this ban on its star IPL franchisee, but that will not take away the bad taste of the fracas from public memory in a jiffy.

Coming to the five players being suspended with spot fixing allegations around them, all of them are uncapped Indian players whose names are still so unfamiliar. It seems unlikely that they, who have not made too much of a name for themselves in cricket so far, would be given secret money by their franchisees. Most probably, they were only pumping up their own egos by suggesting this.

Though any talk of corruption is as good as corruption, and the action against them is appropriate and necessary, fact is that they have axed their own careers themselves and one is unlikely to hear about them in the future. If it is indeed true that they were mere loudmouths, it would be very difficult for them to digest that they cooked their goose without there being any necessity to do so. There’s a lesson for others in this.

And now, over to the Australian Luke Pomersbach. Well, mate there’s a line none can cross, and certainly not a non-playing Aussie in an IPL team! Pomersbach’s instability is widely known Down Under and he has been out of the Australian team, even domestic cricket, for a long time. Sad that a player with so much promise (he was once adjudged the young player of the year by Cricket Australia), goes down to anger, depression, unlawfulness and drinking when all he should have done was to build on his talent.

With Pomersbach, it is not at all about IPL and its rollicking reputation. Back home he has been involved in two hit-and-run incidents, caught for drunk driving, punished for breaking team rules on alcohol and also beat up a police officer! In his interest, RCB should put him on the shrink’s couch and do him some good. India, after all, is known to calm your senses and take you to nirvana! IPL or no IPL.

Source: Published in The Sunday Pioneer,  20 May 2012