Why Harbhajan is out of Mumbai Indians in IPL4

Assuming there will be a IPL-4, Harbhajan should start looking for a new employer.  I mean, the stupidity of this guy never fails to amaze me. Lets do a quick recap

He was dropped immediately after his debut series for "questionable on field behavior". (I always wondered what "questionable behavior" can someone have on field. The only probable explanation now seems to have been refuted with the announcement that he is marrying a girl)

Then he was thrown out of the national cricket academy on disciplinary ground. (Well, now come to think of it, may be my first guess was right. We'll watch how that wedding goes)

Then he had an altercation with police who didn't allow a male photographer friend to his hotel (Hmm.. ok I'll stop trying to force fit these into my conclusion)

Then he was reported for illegal action.. and thankfully this time they were talking about his bowling action (finally.. a cricket related controversy)

He publicly criticized the coach for dropping Dada.

He walked on the ramp.. that's not a problem at all. But look at his stupidity.. If you have hair like that, will you ever remove your turban? Hell, I'll even convert to Sikhism to hide such hair.. Gosh.. 

If you are still here, I promise.. no more such pictures of Bhajji without his turban..

He called Symonds a monkey.. which was not so bad, if you come to think of it. I've been called worse names than that.. sometimes even by my own family.. and I've called people by worse names.. but whenever I call someone such names, I ensure few things 1) They should be no more than 8 years old 2) should be smaller in size 3)should be with their parents.. This is my survival tactics.. If I have to call someone who is twice my size and has a history of drinking problems, I stick to "Sir".. look at this picture and just imagine how close we came to having Amit Mishra as our leading spinner in Tests.

With all that, just when you though Bhajji was a complete idiot, he gave us hope.. He slapped Sreesanth.. and one began to think "hey, this guy is not so bad after all.. I always knew he had some hidden qualities".. Bhajji became our hero.. Even his full tosses looked like deadly doosras and his yorkers looked like well flighted off breaks.. all was well with our world..

And that's when this happened... I can't even imagine how stupid one can be to make this mistake..  how can he break the most basic rule.. every child, growing up, has learned this at his mother's knees.. every religious book teaches you this.. this is the first lesson you learn when you enter school.. that is.. you never never mess with your boss's wife

The worse part is Nita Ambani seems to be enjoying this. Don't be surprised if Bhajji is calling Subhash Chandra for an ICL contract.

After IPL is nationalized

There is a humorous trend going on in twitter - #AfterIPLisNationalized

I joined the band wagon and tweeted like crazy. Here are ten of my selected tweets on this subject (You can view all my tweets here)

1. Pakistan will ask their players to infiltrate the border to play in the league 
2. % of IPL revenues will be used for building new cricket stadiums in Afghanistan
3. Pakistan will ask donation from US to set up PPL. Much to US's anger they will allow Taliban to field one team.
4. Fielding positions will be defined in hindi. Teesra Aadmi (third man), Acchi Tang (fine leg), Khisko (slip) etc 
5. Arundhati Roy will start a "pitch bachao" andolan.. No heavy rollers will be allowed on the pitch
6. Jharkhand team will have Dhoni, Saurabh Tiwari and 9 Dhoni look alike Maoists.. carefully selected by Shibu Soren
7. For matches between B'lore and Chennai, SC will allot the number of drinks each team can have during drinks break
8. Mandira Bedi will play for KXI once the women's bill passes in the parliment
9. Mumbai Indians will be called Mumbai Manus.. team will have only Marathis. Atul Bedade will be the batting coach
10. There will be a new team.. UP's Bhayas.. On field it'll have 9 fielders and 2 Mayawati's statues.. 

Is Warne throwing in the towel ?

I saw these tweets by Shane Warne yesterday night..
"Apologies to all royals fans, very shattering to play like that tonight in such a big game ! Out of ipl ... Such a shame, our young players"
"Sorry meant to be our young inexpeirienxed players have learnt a lot, we are all hurting , sad feeling to be knocked out, goodnight all"

One can understand how dejected and disappointed Warne must be feeling after being knocked out of the tournament.. But there is one small problem.. they are still not knocked out.. at least not mathematically. At the time of writing this article, here are the team standings
Team          Points         Matches Left
--------        --------        ----------------
Mumbai        18                    2
RCB              14                   1
CSK              12                   2
DD                12                   2
RR                 12                  1
Deccan          12                   2
KKR              10                   2
KXI               8                     2


So given that there are 7 more matches to go, only team that has been theoretically knocked out are Punjab. Even KKR, who are two points below RR in the table have a chance.


RR has two problems, they have just 1 match left and their net run rate is pretty poor compared to other teams in contention. It goes without saying that the next match is a must win for them, which will take them to 14th position. RR should also hope that Mumbai and Punjab win their remaining matches, which would make the job difficult for other teams. Although RR can still win by a big margin and improve their net run rate, there is even one possibility that net run rate won't come into picture. Here is how - 

Teams		Winner
CSK	DD	DD
KXI	Deccan	KXI
RCB	Mumbai	Mumbai
KKR	RR	RR
KXI	CSK	KXI
DD	Deccan	DD
KKR	Mumbai	Mumbai

And the points table at the end of it would look something like -

Team	Points
Mumbai	22
DD	16
RCB	14
RR	14
CSK	12
Deccan	12
KXI	12
KKR	10

So RR is definitely not out of it by any means. Admittedly, their job is difficult and not completely in their hands. But one wonders why Warne is throwing in the towel with one more match to go. 

On a related note, did anyone notice Warne signaling for a strategic time out against Mumbai from the dug out? One small problem - it was sixth over of RR innings and that time-out belonged to bowling team (Mumbai). One wonders if captaincy is taking its toll on Warney now.

The curious case of the back-up spinner

Consider the bowling figures of these 4 spinners in IPL:
                     Matches    Overs      Runs     Wickets    Avg         Eco. Rate
Exhibit-1        6              22           161         7             23.00           7.31
Exhibit-2        4              16           114         4             28.50           7.12
Exhibit-3        5              19           106         4             26.50           5.57
Exhibit-4        5              18           133         3             44.33           7.38

If you are in charge of selecting the national squad and have been asked to pick one out of these four bowlers, who would you pick? Exhibit-3 has an exceptional economy rate for a spinner in T20 cricket, he is the most experienced of the lot, but hasn't represented his national team for a while now. Exhibit-1, on the other hand, clearly leads the way with wickets and average, has been playing in the national team and has also dismissed the leading run scorers of IPL by some wonderful traditional spin bowling. Exhibit-2 has been steady and has recently played for the national team. The one who is not doing so well, in the above figures, is Exhibit-4 and he also hasn't played for the national team for a while. Now, let's also clarify that there is nothing much to choose between these four when it comes to batting.

So, who would you pick now? The best bet looks Exhibit-1. If you want to take a bit of risk and purely go by form, then you might go for Exhibit-3. Or if you want to play a bit safe and go for the steadier option, then pick Exhibit 2. Can you think of any logic based on which anyone would pick Exhibit-4 above other three?
Well, unfortunately, our selectors don't seem to base their judgment on any sort of logic that a rational human being would apply (which probably shouldn't come as a big surprise, given that the chairman of selectors is K. Srikanth).

If you haven't guessed already, here are the four players in question.
Exhibit-1: Amit Mishra
Exhibit-2: P. Ojha
Exhibit-3: M. Kartik
Exhibit-4: Piyush Chawla

Why Chawla was selected in the T20 world cup squad will remain a mystery to me. Given that India hasn't played a lot of T20 internationals off late, it was probably a good idea to base the selection mostly on the IPL performances. Or the selectors could have looked at the performance in ODIs. But none of this explain why Chawla was picked. The selectors probably know something that rest of us don't. Chawla must have some hidden talent (which, one must say, he has done well to hide so far from the world).
The best part of this entire issue is that we'll never know whether the selectors are right about Chawla. Given that Jadeja would be picked in the team as the back-up spinner and we have Pathan/ Yuvraj to roll their arms overs, Chawla may never get a game.

The aftermath of the "IPL snub"...

The "IPL snub", as Pakistan likes to call it, has come back to haunt India again. I mean, what were those private franchisees thinking, not spending thousands of dollars on players who may never show up. How can they refuse to just give away money to Pakistanis?  They never thought their actions would have such serious repercussions. How naive one can be? A nation, whose entire economy is based on receiving charity from others, was deeply hurt.

The first big causality was, wait for it, kabbadi; when Pakistan's kabbadi team refused to tour India. You would think that should have taught us a lesson. That decision by Pakistan alone should have convinced all those IPL bosses to apologize to them. But, Pakistan had moved on. One of their ministers, I forgot which one, while speaking to a news channel said that the time of saying sorry was over. India should send a delegation, personally apologize to the cricketers and take them to play in IPL. I thought that was a very fair ask. I mean, sure, the two countries may not be willing to send delegations to share information on terrorism, help in investigation; but when it comes to such important matters as IPL, how can you not send your best and brightest representatives to sort out the issue.

And now, just when India was about to recover from the "kabbadi snub", comes the killer blow. Pakistan's national cycling federation has decided not to invite Indians to the biggest athletic event on the planet; an event, which completely overshadows the Olympics or the soccer world cup in terms of the fan following; an event, which every Indian child, growing up, one day wants to be a part of; an event known as Tour de Pakistan. The secretary of the federation showed tremendous clarity of thought and rational decision making when he said "As a protest for the IPL auction we have decided not to invite Indian cyclists for our event,"  

To understand what our countrymen are missing, you have to picture a 12 day journey that goes from Peshawar to Karachi; a journey that takes you through a great land full of suicide bombers and terrorist training camps. Indian cyclists miss the once in a life time opportunity of getting up close and personal with the Taliban leaders, the Al-Qaeda members and who knows, if they were lucky, they might even have been at the receiving end of a drone attack. Name another sports event in the world that provides so much adventure and learning experience. 

The critics might point out that the Sri Lankan cricket team got attacked while touring Pakistan. But they only stayed in the high security hotels and traveled, escorted, only between their hotel and the ground. How can one even compare that to the safe environment of the Tour de Pakistan, where the participants have to pass through the mountains and forests of the Pakistan on their cycles. And particularly if the participants are from India, a country against which Pakistani terrorists have never even raised a finger.

I guess this "cycling snub" has demonstrated what the scientists called "the butterfly effect". I'm sure Lalit Modi and the IPL owners never saw this coming. They all should be held responsible for the disastrous effect it would have on our nation. Let this be a lesson for all of us. If you are a corporate, forget making profit for your partners and shareholders, forget the sentiments of your customers; if you have money, give it to Pakistan. Else who knows, may be the great game of kho kho is next in the  list of causalities.

IPL is India's most innovative company

Fastcompany.com just released its list of most innovative companies across the globe and across multiple industries; and surprise, surprise IPL is at number 22. It's the no # 1 Indian company in the list and it's the 2nd among all the sports companies. I am not aware of the criteria used in coming up with the list and I'm sure most of the readers would disagree with some of the rankings (For example, what exactly did Facebook do in the last one year to jump from 15th position to 1st?). But the point to note is that from India IPL made it to the top-50, not the infosys-es or the TCS-es ("process innovation", anyone?). IPL finds itself in the company of Googles and Apples of the world and they beat Microsoft and twitter by some margin (ok, "Microsoft" and "innovation" are two words that are generally not uttered together, but still they are on the list). Let's appreciate them for what they have achieved so far.

More on this later..