Monday, April 07, 2008

Better late than never

The title of this blog entry has a deeper reason! correction! make it deeper reasons. One is that after nearly six months of hiatus, it was about time that I came back to my blog. The other is the catalyst that probably got me coming back. It is the Indian Cricket League a.ka. the ICL a.k.a "The Rebel League"

I was among the countless skeptics who had ruled out any possibility of success a 20-20 tournament which faced fervent opposition from the BCCI. Lets face the truth here. BCCI is probably one of the richest and most powerful bodies in the world across all sports. When Essel group decided to break away and create teams of domestic and international players (most of whom were either past their prime or in some sort of trouble with their home teams and some local lads who were struggling to make the big break into the Indian Cricket team) it was not sounding too exciting.

I did not see one single match of the ICL's first episode. The second tournament, I got a few glimpses of a few matches, but never one match from start to finish. Oh! how much I rue doing that! Yes you heard me right! I rue missing the matches for the simple fact that it is very high quality, very entertaining and very professional cricket. This I say thanks to my being present in the stadium for two matches that took place in Hyderabad. The Semi Final where the Home team Hyderabad Heroes humbled the Chennai Superstars and today where the Hyderabad Heroes played against the mighty Lahore Badshahs and beat them. I did catch the whole of the first Finals against the Badshahs as well on the TV.

Agreed that the ICL has many a mile to go (as many Industry and trade pundits have been saying) but if the beginning is like this then I am looking forward to traversing those miles along with the bandwagon. On both the days the stadium was packed to the rafters. Cops and security personnel had to resort to lathi charge to shoo away exuberant fans from gate crashing. The atmosphere was indeed electric and the game that was played lived up to the expectations of all. And in my case, surpassed it. Who had heard of IS Reddy or even Absolom? Did you know that Roger Binny had a son called Staurt who was playing cricket? Did you know that Khaleel is an up and coming wicket keeper? Boy I am pleased that I listened to one Mr. Abhijit Roy and tagged along to see the Semi-Finals. Thanks to him I can say, It is better late than never.
Page copy protected against web site content infringement by Copyscape
Copyright © Kartik Agarwal - 2007