IPL Delights: Intriguing Face Offs

Last week belonged to great face offs in and out the IPL fields. Chuck Doherty may be one person that seldom likes to foray into the battlefield where big gladiators such as Shashi Tharoor and Lalit Modi battle it out fiercely - perhaps for a living as it is with the case of those tribals in the central-western belt of India.

There has been greater face offs in the history of cricket (definitely not IPL) such as the one between Ian Chappel and Geoffrey Boycott. Doherty remembers the elder Chappel calling Boycott a selfish player. 'If he scored a hundred and fifty it could be at the cost of his team's chances for a win', said Chappel. Nevertheless, a better testimony came from former test umpire Dickie Bird that in a Wellington test English captain Bob Willis asked Ian Botham to run our man out since he had put his side 'well behind the clock'.

But Boycott too has had his mordant tongue bruising someone like Gatting when he commented on the claim of Alan Lamb that Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis had tampered the ball to clinch a test series played in England in the early nineties, "Those two would have dismissed this Gatting's England side even with an apple".

Coming back to the IPL scenario, one of those many infamous (candid in fact) exchanges was that started by Gautam Gambhir, the captain of Delhi Daredevils. Seemed the Rajasthan Royals circles were pretty annoyed hearing Gambhir say that in the RR team every one other than Yousuf Pathan was ordinary with the bat, that an apology was demanded by them. On examining the context deeply one should say that this could be one reason the RR is still on the run for the semi finals besides once winning the championship. Read that RR has survived at least until now in the very warfront, where teams boasting of players like Yuvraj Singh, Brett Lee, Surav Ganguly and Chris Gayle were virtually humiliated.

Another face off took place between a carping Ganguly and his silently lamenting KKR team mates that according to reports, paid a reasonably deaf ear to the accusation made by their captain. Of course Ganguly played a couple of gem innings', despite which his strike rate showed something around 110. Apart from those two matches in which Ganguly performed well, his eating on the balls heavily, had according to Doherty, told on the team's chances in the other ties.

Truely, it is injustice to speak about someone who has won the most tests for the country largely with his leading skills and definitely not for the heroics of Tendulkars and Kumbles who performed in spite of being kept under tremendous pressure by the Bengal Tiger. Doherty's concern here is that if dada had deaned to dive - what he does well today; think he was not paid for that then - at the instruction of the younger Chappel, well everything could have been largely different.

If the most intriguing comment came from Gautam Gambhir, although it was not taken in a lighter vein by the RRs, the most amusing remark was made by Mathew Hayden - obviously while packing his belongings to catch the first flight to Sydney with not even the volcanic ash clouds to delay it. Doherty heard Haydos disgustedly swearing at something while packing his kit, "what is this obnnoxious creature doing in here?". Doherty swears that he did not see anyone or anything there before the Oz giant except a spade-like wooden contraption that can also be called a 'crickeet bat'.