Bopara still tempted by IPL
Ravi Bopara believes that he will return to international cricket a stronger player after the trials and tribulations of his first year of England action, but he has warned the England selectors that he could yet join the Indian Premier League if his county form for Essex is not rewarded with a recall.
Bopara endured a chastising run of Test form during his maiden series in Sri Lanka last winter, scoring 42 runs in three matches including ducks in each of his last three innings in Colombo and Galle. He was not required for the tour of New Zealand that followed, but has launched himself back into the reckoning with 416 runs at 104 in three first-class matches for Essex this season.
"The series in Sri Lanka didn't go how I wanted it to go, I'm the first to admit," said Bopara. "But that's made me a better player now. I went back home and worked on some things I knew I had to work on, and I can see the changes already. I'm glad it's happened and happened this early in my career."
One man in the Essex set-up who could sympathise with Bopara was his batting mentor, Graham Gooch, who famously made a pair on debut against Australia in 1975, before going on to become England's leading runscorer in Test cricket, with 8900 runs in a 20-year career. "I spoke to Graham, and he said if you go through your bad times now you become a better cricketer at a younger age," said Bopara. "I agree fully with him."
And yet, Bopara's loss of form did not affect his reputation as a player with bags of potential. Last month, he hit the headlines with his decision to turn down a six-figure IPL contract - a decision that was welcomed by the England & Wales Cricket Board. And yet, should a similar offer arise next year, Bopara might not dismiss it out of hand.
"The decision I made this time around was just based on what I wanted to do this season," he said. "I understood that the team was going to pick itself for the beginning of the summer, unless there were injuries, because we won in New Zealand and the batters did well. To get back in that team I had to play four-day cricket for Essex and I didn't want to miss any games. The decision was a gut feeling and it wasn't too hard to make really."
Next year, however, it might be a different story. "I don't know what my decisions will be in the future, and I think it's too early to look at it now," he said. "I look only at today or tomorrow, and I've been busy with my own stuff, but the tournament looks good fun. The pitches are tiny, so people are half-hitting the ball for six!"
Bopara's first target this summer is a recall to the England one-day squad for the series against New Zealand in June, and to that end he has been working hard on his bowling, in particular his armoury of slower balls. "I'll never have the pace to outpace any batters, so I have to be more skilful," he said. "I am optimistic, because I've had a good start to one-day cricket so far, but I'm not looking too far ahead.
"I'm very hungry, very thirsty for runs," he said. "I want to get back into that England side and I'd do anything to do that. But for the moment, I'm just concentrating on what we can do with Essex. We want to win a one-day trophy, and we want to get promotion in four-day cricket. That's all that I am aiming for."
Bopara was speaking at the Royal Exchange in the City of London, at the launch of the Big Run Chase, a fundraising scheme for the Chance to Shine project, which is helping regenerate cricket in state schools across the country. "It's nice to be outside in the summer, with the kids running around," said Bopara. "Cricket taught me to be who I am, and it's good for kids, especially around London, to have something to focus on."
(c) Cricinfo
'IPL symbol of a brash, emerging India'
New York: The multi-million-dollar Indian Premier League (IPL) is trying to spin off India's colonial inheritance - cricket - into a money-making symbol of a brash, emerging nation, says the New York Times.
"It is coming of age for both the business of sports in India and for Indian billionaires, who for the first time are staking their prestige on sports teams," the newspaper said in a detailed story Wednesday.
It cites how the rich and famous like industrialists Mukesh Ambani, Vijay Mallya and film star Shah Rukh Khan own league franchises running into millions of dollars and salaries of players are comparable to the English Premier League of soccer.
The report takes note of the league upturning many conventions of an erstwhile gentleman's game by infusing American-style cheerleaders, Bollywood stars and laser shows.
"It is cricket's version of tabloid journalism," the story quotes Rajdeep Sardesai, editor-in-chief of CNN-IBN and son of late Dilip Sardesai who played cricket for India.
(c) Sify Technologies Ltd.
RPT-Cricket-Indian board to investigate Harbhajan incident
MUMBAI, India, April 28 (Reuters) - India's cricket board has ordered an independent investigation into allegations Harbhajan Singh slapped compatriot Shanthakumaran Sreesanth during a Twenty20 league game.
The controversial off-spinner was suspended and faces a disciplinary hearing by league organisers later on Monday.
The board said in a statement it had appointed advocate Sudhir Nanavati as commissioner to make a preliminary inquiry and to call for an explanation from those involved.
Nanavati has been asked to submit his report within 15 days to the board president in order to determine whether disciplinary action against Harbhajan might be appropriate.
The president will then refer the report to the disciplinary committee.
The board on Sunday said it had felt "let down" by Harbhajan after having stood up for him in an ugly row in Australia this year.
Harbhajan was initially banned for three tests after being found guilty of making racist remarks against all-rounder Andrew Symonds, but was subsequently let off with a fine on a lesser charge following an appeal.
Harbhajan is one of his country's most successful spin bowlers, but his disciplinary record has been poor. He was even ejected from the board's National Cricket Academy early in his career.
(c) Thomson Reuters 2008
Body politics: bahu okay, others bawdy
- Call to ban cheergirls
Single standards: If Mumbai bar girls are banned, so should be the Indian Premier League's pom-pom girls.
Obscene: What the Washington Redskins wear, but not what "bahu" Aishwarya Rai wore in Dhoom:2
April 24: India's politicians are finding it tough to keep their eye on the ball - the cricket ball. After all, "Indian culture" is being battered with pom-poms near the Twenty20 boundary line by girls in skimpy skirts.
The solution: ban the IPL cheerleaders.
The Maharashtra government today promised to consider just that - for the sake of "morality" - under pressure from lawmakers who have just forced it to keep sex education away from schools.
State BJP chief Nitin Gadkari had lobbed the ban ball at the legislative council yesterday, accusing home minister R.R. Patil of double standards.
"If Patil banned bar dancers saying it was immoral, why should half-naked cheerleaders be allowed to dance? It is against Indian culture," Gadkari told The Telegraph.
Junior home minister Siddharam Mehetre caught the ball smartly, saying he found the cheerleaders "obscene and vulgar".
"We live in India....Cricket is watched by entire families, and they might find it offensive," he told reporters outside the House.
In Delhi, Amar Singh of the Samajwadi Party couldn't agree more.
"Nain sukh ke liye nagnata kee zaroorat nahin hai (you don't need nudity for a visual treat). I appeal to my friend… (cricket board chief Sharad) Pawar to put an end to this obscenity. There is no need to serve female skin on a platter. Cricket will not become less popular without this nangapan (nudity)."
Whether that's true or not, Amar had earlier confessed that in his only trip to an IPL match, he had left after watching Akshay Kumar's stunts before the start.
Here's what the girls have to say.
"It's interesting - the Hyderabad crowd sit with their eyes glued to our bodies," said Emily, one of the 12 Australian girls hired by the Deccan Chargers. "Indian crowds are more sober but more demanding than the Europeans and Americans."
Joanne and Michele, who have acted in Baywatch, said they saw a banner at the Calcutta match that said: "Will you marry me?"
Mehetre, however, said he would find out if the foreign girls had Indian work permits. Even if there was no ban, for the remaining nine matches at Mumbai and Navi Mumbai, the girls would need permission from the police, fire brigade and the collector, he said.
Yesterday, cheerleaders of both teams in the Mumbai-Chennai game wore tight-fitting clothes that covered them from neck to toe. "Our contract said 'no short skirts or skin-revealing things'," a spokesman for the Chennai franchisee said.
The Hyderabad girls leave for Mumbai tomorrow for Sunday's match. "If they want us to be fully clad, we don't mind," said Christy, one of the cheerleaders.
Congress leader Rajiv Shukla, BCCI vice-president and friend of Kolkata Knight Riders owner Shah Rukh Khan, opposed a ban.
He said the cheerleaders were an "important" part of IPL games. "If there's a problem with the way they dress, that can be changed. But doing away with them will make the whole event insipid."
(c) 2008 The Telegraph
India's Premier League Debuts
Bangladore Royal Challengers versus the Kolkata Knight Riders: Not two sports teams with storied traditions or worldwide brand recognition and fan followings, but which will be making a bit of sports history Friday.
Under the floodlights of the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore, and in front of an expected sell-out crowd of 55,000 and a global TV audience that stretches from the U.K. to Australia, they will provide the first match-up in the new Indian Premier League (IPL).
Big money--by cricket's standards--has brought together most of the top players in the world in an eight-team league playing the Twenty20 format (see "Cricket's Best Sold For Millions In India.") Twenty20 is a quick-fire, short-form version of the game in which matches take about three hours to complete; in its longest form, Test cricket between the top cricketing nations, a game can run for up to five days.
The much-hyped debut of a controversial competition has the potential to transform world cricket, and further confirm that the epicenter of the game has moved to the subcontinent, which already generates 80% of the world game's income.
Traditionalist fear that the IPL is the latest final nail in the coffin of Test cricket and may even kill off the popular modern version of international cricket, the 50-over one day international (ODI).
A common concern is whether the game's best players will desert other forms of cricket to take the IPL's shilling, or retire prematurely from the rigors of what is now year-round, round-the-globe Test cricket to pocket more from six weeks work than they now make in a year.
The star players in the IPL will be paid anywhere between $650,000 and $1.5 million for six or seven weeks' work--a king's ransom by cricket's standards, even though the league's salary cap means lesser lights will earn just $30,000, less than the minimum wage for a county cricketer in England.
The IPL is the brainchild of Lalit Modi, cricket-mad scion of one of India's richest families, who is also vice president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. Modi spent several years in the U.S. studying sports marketing, and has brought in the international sports agency IMG to manage the league.
Signs of American pro sports influence can be seen in the city franchise system adopted for the teams in the league and its version of the draft, a televised player auction to allocate players to the teams, with top stars going for more than $1 million each.
The IPL has already raised $1.8 billion from the sale of the teams, title sponsorship and electronic media broadcast rights for 10 years, making it, by most estimates, already the richest domestic cricket tournament in the world.
India's largest real estate developer, DLF, is paying $50 million to be title sponsor of the league for five years. Reliance Industries' billionaire head Mukesh Ambani and United Breweries Chairman Vijay Mallya are among those backing participating teams.
The fan-friendly Twenty20 format has become a hit with sponsors and viewers since it was introduced in England in 2003. But there are no leading English players in the league, as IPL's 59 matches over 44 days clashes with the early part of the English season.
The English Cricket Board views the IPL with a wary eye. It has told its contracted players, who comprise the core of the national team, that they cannot take part in the IPL until 2010 at the earliest. That has caused speculation that top England players may walk out of their contracts when they come up for renewal in September so they can get a cut of the action in next year's IPL.
The ECB is not blind to the prospects of this bite-sized version of the game turning into a multi-billion dollar business. It has a Twenty20 cup for domestic teams and has been considering changing it to attract more leading international players.
It has been in talks with the Caribbean-based American billionaire R. Allen Stanford, who we estimate to be the world's 605th richest man with a fortune of $2 billion, and who has invested an estimated $100 million in a Caribbean Twenty20 cricket league. As a starter, Stanford has proposed a $20 million winner-take-all Twenty20 match between a team of West Indies all-stars he would hire and the England national side.
That would be a prize pot six times larger than the IPL is offering.
For now, though, the only game is the IPL's, and it has the star names. Its teams can boast eight of the current top-10-ranked ODI batsmen and six of the top 10 bowlers.
Bangladore will be captained by Rahul Dravid and Kolkata by Sourav Ganguly, both household names in the cricket world and, in India, on a par with Kolkata's co-owner, Bollywood stars Shan Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta.
Mumbai will be fielding SachinTendulkar, probably the finest left-handed batsman in the world. Australia's Shane Warne will be representing Rajasthan and his countryman Brett Lee will be playing for Punjab. South Africa's Jacques Kallis will be playing for Bangalore and New Zealander Stephen Fleming for Chennai. The list of top names runs on and on.
The setup hasn't been without teething troubles. There are reports of players not receiving their initial fees by due dates. CricInfo, the game's leading Web site, is railing against being denied press credentials and access to pictures from matches.
There are also questions about whether cricket-mad Indian supporters will take to city teams stuffed with international stars rather than local heroes. When Rajastan's Shane Warne bowls to to Bangalore's Rahul Dravid, will it be the same as Australia's Warne bowling to India's Dravid?
None of that will be allowed to dampen the opening razzmatazz. Mallya has imported the services of the Washington Redskins' cheerleaders for the first match. But most crucially for cricket, will the Twenty 20 glitter turn to lasting gold?
(c) 2008 Forbes
Indian Premier League needs to outdo its Smaller Rival
India's rival Twenty-20 cricket leagues have been making headlines for months, but little has been about the actual cricket until now.
The so-called rebel Indian Cricket League wrapped up an absorbing tournament over the weekend. The ICL continues to be hurt by the aggressive and downright hostile opposition it faces from India's cricket board, which controls the rival Indian Premier League.
The ICL lacks recognition from the International Cricket Council or the cricket boards of other countries, who on India's behest are banning their own players who appear in the ICL. The ICL thus struggles to attract the best talent and has largely become a league for the disgruntled, the rejected and the recently retired.
Once the IPL announced its star-studded teams, which included many of the world's best active international players, the inferior ICL looked dead in the water. The ICL however, responded to the existential threat with a masterstroke.
With a number of Pakistanis signed up by the ICL, there were more than enough players to form their own team. The ICL and IPL both have city-based teams, but for logistical reasons most ICL teams cannot play in the cities that bear their name.
It is generally a big strike against the ICL, but it also renders the attachment of a city as no more than a moniker. The ICL was thus able to create a team for the Pakistani city of Lahore, the Badshahs - Urdu and Hindi for 'Kings'.
The ring to the name in English did not go unnoticed and the Lahore Badshahs swaggered around the league, undefeated right through to the finals where they were eventually stunned by the Hyderabad Heroes. The fumble at the finish notwithstanding, Lahore was far and away the best team in the ICL with its players all having represented Pakistan at the international level, most under the leadership of Inzamam-ul-Haq, who is also the Badshahs' captain.
Every game the Lahore Badshahs played had a touch of India versus Pakistan about it. The team injected excitement into the ICL and certainly generated huge TV numbers in Pakistan. With the winners of the tournament walking away with $625,000 (U.S.) the ICL showed that it is a living league and there is reason to believe that there will be more players signing on, although still of the disgruntled, rejected and retired variety.
At the upmarket IPL, the six-week inaugural season kicks off April 18, with millions of dollars handed out to the biggest names in the game. But behind the glamour of celebrity cricketers mingling with Bollywood movie stars and corporate glitterati, the stage is set for a rude awakening.
With every team filled to the brim with international stars there is sensory overload. At this point, the average fan would struggle to identify the team South Africa's Jacques Kallis will play for or who will open the bowling for the Delhi Daredevils. After the initial curiosity is over, will these matches generate any passion in fans or even the players?
Whereas ICL players need to play exciting cricket to keep their league and income alive, IPL players, with substantially fatter paycheques and thriving international careers, may have less motivation to lay it all on the line for their league.
On paper, most IPL teams would flatten the Lahore Badshahs, but the Badshahs for the moment at least are the most cohesive and recognizable team in either league. Even if the ICL will ultimately be crushed by magnitude of the IPL, it has at least won one significant battle.
(c) Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2008
Indian cricket press catch the Aussie disease of bias
The predatory sharks are out for the touring South Africans in the guise of wall-to-wall criticism on the back pages. But the Proteas will have the last laugh according to one Sportingo writer.
Of all the positive things one could glean from Australian culture in a virtual eternity of 15 minutes, the Indians have aspired to and picked up the tail-end of bad Aussie traits and become wannabe media spin-doctors.
Australia has traditionally been the home of a particularly loathsome brand of a biased press and it seems this may be outsourced to India, soon to be known as the new haven for double-talk in triplicate.
Cricketing fans are concerned. The DTT Virus (double-talk in triplicate) has mutated and a strain has found its way to India from Australia apparently somewhere towards the end of the 'season of spite.' This runaway epidemic sees the Indian media replicating Aussie-style slant at an unstoppable rate. There is no cure in sight and the prognosis is desperate.
South African cricket fans have witnessesed the rapid spread of the illness and have been shocked by the horrid nature of this dreaded disease.
Proteas' fans have witnessed some dreadful spin in India and unfortunately it has been of the off-the-field variety, normally the mainstay of Australian sport. Examples of this spin have included: psycho-babble that Paddy Upton (the Indian team shrink co-opted from the Proteas' camp) was spilling precious doctor-patient Protea phobias; that the Proteas and not India were to blame for stale draws on designer bore draw Indian pitches; that the Proteas are not using commercial airlines to travel around India; that pitches are being 'juiced up' and equally favour the quicks; that a head-to-head player comparison has an Indian player valued approximately equal to three South African players when it comes to skill, talent and ability; that South Africa deserved to forfeit their entire match fee for a slow over rate when they were just two overs behind in the first Test; that Paul Harris is a useless spin bowler and that Dale Steyn hasn't any pace at all.
We South Africans are bemused. Fans normally expect partisan support from local fans but the myopic fanatical spin from the local press hasn't been seen in this virulent form outside of Australia.
It is beyond a joke, however, when one scans the international media horizon to see this DTT-infected Indian media contingent joining the international effort, led by Australia and England. However, judging by the number of (more than all the international cricket journos put together) Indian journalists spewing their bias around the internet's favourite cricket news sites, Proteas' fans should prepare for a pandemic.
A South African proverb frames the prospects: "Until lions have their own historians, heroic tales of the hunt will always favour the hunter!"
The underdog South Africans are currently ranked No.1 in ODIs and are stalking the top Test spot, just like man-eating lions up against their foe.
(c) SportBuzz All rights reserved 2008
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