Things We've Learned From The IPL Today (02/05)

May 02

Chennai v. Delhi


Star among stars... Virender Sehwag (Delhi D'devils)
As long as Delhi continue to have both their batting openers in form and scoring runs, they are going to be hard to beat in this league. Their pace bowling lineup is strong enough that, even on flat pitches, they can always reduce opposing teams to 15-20 runs below the par score, and then Sehwag can just cut loose and destroy the required run rate early in the chase. All it takes is a couple of overs.

In a format as contracted as Twenty20, anything under 7/over on a good pitch is just about useless for a team trying to defend. By the point Sehwag had sliced the rate to under-7 today, the chase was essentially over. All they had to do, as Happy' Gilmore's pro buddy would say, was take it home. It packed its bags, it had its ticket, all it needed was a ride to the airport

Old-timer on an egg-timer... Stephen Fleming (Chennai SuperKings)
So if you take away the "captain" part of Fleming's character, how much appeal does he lose as a player? On a scale of 1 to 10, measuring overall worth in the cricket field, where a "Captain Fleming" character would rank around a 7.2 (all things considered), how much would his score decrease if you take the captaincy from him? Would he break the 5? Would he be anything more or less than a precisely average player?

Catch from the catchment... Vidyut Sivaramakrishna (Chennai SuperKings)
Is it possible that this entire "league" idea was just one big, elaborate plan by the BCCI designed to improve the quality of the Indian international team? Maybe the haters are indeed correct, and the board is in fact a real cabal full of evil, Monty Burns-type geniuses. (To me they always seemed like any other big bureacracy -- wasteful and mediocre.)

Maybe they thought, instead of wasting time (and money) on irrelevant old residue, like Greg Chappell, for a few sessions of vague comments by the nets, why not just hire the best of existing Australian talent to come in and teach the young guys how to play? Teach them how to structure an innings, how to ride momentum, how to build on confidence, how to win. Australians have won for so long that those functions feel almost innate to them. But they're not -- they're learned behaviours. You learn them by experience, by repetition. By seeing others around you doing them, and imitating what they do until it comes naturally, every time you try.

And the Indian youth is catching on. Watch guys like Dhawan, or Tiwary, or this time, Vidyut (yet another IPL debutant scoring a fifty). These players are coming in on a daily basis and playing irrepressible, confident innings; they're holding catches in the field; they're getting run-outs; they're looking the part.

I'm just saying, I would not like to be the team who has to play India next. (Of course, that all involves the selectors looking beyond the Ganguly's and Jaffer's of this world... a very big ask.)

3 Bullets to the head...

• By far the oddest couple I've seen sitting next to each other in the dugout chatting has to be Chennai's couple in canary, Stephen Fleming and Parthiv Patel. What could they possibly be talking about? Is there any possible world in which those two have anything in common, beyond the tendency to underwhelm at the top the order?
  
  
• The weather in Chennai seemed so hot and humid during this game that every player on the field looked about as greasy as Jermaine Jackson. As Chris Rock says, "when Jermaine is on the TV, you've got to wipe the screen!"

• I don't usually care much about Billy Bowden's desperate cries for attention "quirks", but I think he may be taking his little shtick a little too far during the IPL. At times today, I wasn't sure if Billy was signaling a boundary, guiding taxiing aeroplanes in the fog, or just trying to do The Sprinkler. If he wants to play pantomime, let him join Mummenschanz. Until then, just tell us if it's a FOUR or a SIX, will ya Bill?
  
  (Besides, nothing a mime does ever registers on the population at large, right?)