DesiPundit

WATBlog conducts some cursory research using Facebook and Orkut figures in addition to the team’s official forums on their individual websites to gauge the extent of the fan communities of IPL teams.

As I had mentioned before, league sports without fans is nothing and teams must make a conscious effort to develop their fan base if they expect their team to do well. What community site do you use to stay updated on your favorite team?

What happens if you are a non-cricket viewer in a family full of IPL crazy people?  What happens if said craziness extends to the logic to decide team loyalties? Gowri tells you exactly what to expect:

Try to make some sense of this. ‘I support Uthappa at all times. So I’ll always cheer for his team. Except’ she pauses significantly, ‘except when his team plays against Chennai Super Kings - because Chennai is my birth place! When Chennai and Uthappa’s team are not playing against Royal Challengers, I’ll always support the Royal Challengers, because I am loyal to Rahul Dravid! When the Deccan Chargers play any team other than these three, they have my support.’

Greatbong takes a comic-critical view of who will be sacked after Charu Sharma.

Welcome to India’s latest reality show—-”Will You Go Tomorrow, Tick Tick Tick Tick” (inspired by the iconic “If you come tomorrow”) presented by the same guys who brought you “Kamzor Kuri Kaun”, “Kaun Banega Laxmipati” and “Jeeto Thappad Marke”. For those of you who haven’t tuned in before, in every show, we kick out, based on popular opinion, one member of the Bangalore Royal Challengers team.

Jason Overdorf, an American journalist based in Delhi, writes about the IPL cheerleading phenomenon and hails India for its nod towards American values and the victory of the dumb over the smart, in a humorous piece:

Keep your Ramanujan and your 6,00,000 engineers a year. So you invented zero. Discovered it. Whatever. It’s a number for losers anyway. For statistical and mathematical gimcrackery, we’ll take our guys any day. Consider P.T. Barnum, the circus promoter who calculated, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Or, of course, Earl Whipple, who invented the giant foam finger, aid to sports fans everywhere, that eloquently proclaims “We’re Number One!” Anyway, what’s math compared with Reality TV? Most of your software geeks are even now cracking open cans of Budweiser, and watching large-bosomed women wolf down plates of worms on Fear Factor. Yes, readers, I will say it. American culture has converted “pop” into a celebration of the dumb. Today’s Elvis is Britney Spears. Genius!

He also gives us a mini-history lesson on cheerleading in America.

While in most quarters the handling of thorny issues by the IPL has been commended, Kartikeya takes a different view of things; especially the case of a referee (Farrokh Engineer) suspending an umpire (Pratap Kumar) in, what he considers, “unprecedented ground”. He disagrees with Engineer’s decision with his argument going thus:

The whole premise of the Umpire, is that they are above the fray. They are not in competition with the players, and hence cannot be judged alongside the players. Referee Engineer has done just that.

The Overlord demands more innovative statistics from IPL.

In my opinion, counting the number of centuries in the T-20 format is essentially meaningless. Firstly, there usually isn’t enough time to hit a 100. A team score of 200 is considered pretty good in T-20. By that measure, a good batsman would need to play about 50% of the deliveries bowled to get a 100. That’s a very difficult thing to do in any format. In contrast, a good batsmen only needs to play about 33% of the deliveries to get a 100 in ODIs (the figure was higher till people started playing ODIs differently from Tests). If you apply this standard to T-20s, the number to watch out for is 67. Lets round it off to 70 and start counting the number of times a batsmen crosses that figure in T-20s.

The professor takes the debate forward,

As cricket becomes more professionalized, with lots more players and lots more matches, and with the availability of ball-by-ball accounts and videos available in the archives, our ability to slice and dice a player’s every move and extract all kinds of statistical measures will only improve. As of now, Twenty-20 is a very young format, with even experienced players having played just a few tens of games. But Vivek’s larger point is valid: this format cries out for new, more meaningful statistical yardsticks.

[Source]

There has been a lot written about the rather inept Bangalore Royal Challengers. But, more specifically, a lot of attention has been devoted to Rahul Dravid.

The unofficial IPL blog wonders what’s in store for Dravid, and wonders if he’s done enough to foster team chemistry.

The biggest thing I have is that the team doesn’t seem to have the “cohesiveness”. The players don’t seem to be very comfortable with each other. One obvious evidence of this is the discouragingly high number of confused run calls.

RP compares his captaincy with that of Dhoni and — while he reckons Dhoni may have been a little lucky earlier on — he feels it’s the proactive nature of MS’s captaincy that makes him more successful over his predecessor.

And to round this off, a post from Prem Panicker on the BRC, following its snatch-defeat-from-victory act against the Chennai Super Kings.

First, Ashok Malik has the best take on tamacha-gate I have read yet, 

If Indian cricketers – “new”, “aggressive”, “super-confident”: choose your adjective – want to give it back when assailed or want to occasionally needle a batsman as he walks to the crease, I have no problem with that. There is an ocean that separates such acceptable gamesmanship from plain boorishness. Waving his bat, exercising his pelvic muscles mid-pitch, screaming and shouting, bearing his teeth, grimacing menacingly without reason, Sreesanth is the most visible face of this cricket boor; at least on television. The face, let us accept, is ugly.

The IPL is now 10 days old. Greatbong does a SWOT analysis of the eight IPL teams,

However formidable that roster may be, Chennai’s actual strength comes from its Indian personnel —three reliable T20 batsmen in Parthiv, Raina and Badrinath forming their batting core. Not to speak of the most potent weapon of them all: Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Here is a man who understands the T20 game like no other, makes excellent spot decisions, stays cool and agile, and most importantly does not let his batting or glovework suffer due to captaincy. Unlike some “icon” players who have been automatically foisted upon their franchises as captains without having proven themselves first in the format and consequently have embarrassingly underperformed, Dhoni (he officially is not an “icon” player) has, so far, led from the front. 

Can any discussion on IPL be complete without talking about cheerleaders? Patrix clarifies his position on Peter Foster’s much discussed article,

Although I think there are plenty of options to contextualize sports entertainment for India, cheerleading would be the last thing on my mind. Let us be clear, employing cheerleaders is less of entertainment and more of titillation; pun intended and just because NFL uses them to attract fans doesn’t mean the IPL has to literally cut-paste everything that NFL does. If they had put as much effort in coming up with creative ideas as they did in creating their media contracts, we would definitely have something that is both fun and enticing. After all, we are the country that remixed Bollywood golden oldies. where is Himesh Reshammiya and the item girls when you need them

Rohit takes Peter Foster to task for his comment that, “White cheerleaders in skimpy outfits merely reinforces the belief that all white women are easily available.”

There are many errors in Foster’s arguments. Sexual harassment in India is hardly restricted to White women; Indian women are as likely to be harassed as anyone else. Foster also displays biases of the worst kind when he argues that White women are considered fair game because they allegedly wear revealing clothes. Ask any Indian women and she will tell you that sexual harassment has nothing to do with the kind of clothes one might wear. In fact, Foster’s argument is not only disappointing but dangerous because it assumes that women can prevent harassment merely by being conservatively dressed. As the unfortunate example of Foster’s own wife shows, conservative clothes are hardly a deterrent to sexual harassment.