Not just watching it, although after a few weeks I think I fell into a coma, but playing it.
All the facets take it out of you.
You are playing every second day, there is lots of travel, you have to drink and do drugs, there are women/cheerleaders/bollywood stars to bed, Danny Morrison is there, and the constant pretending to laugh at the owners jokes.
That is tiring.
Then you find out that some idiot at the ICC has scheduled their little muck about tournament straight after your uber-serious one.
Who can be bothered, not the Indians.
Gary Kisrten seemed to think his team was tired, I, and other media pundits agreed.
Every one of them was a franchise player in the IPL, and they just arrived in England looking flat.
But whose fault is that, it isn’t Gary Kirsten’s, or Navjot Sidhu’s.
Dhoni and his ‘batting order of death’ didn’t help. But perhaps he was just picking the batsman who looked most awake at the time of a wicket.
Even Greg Chappell and John Bhooka Naan had nothing to do with this.
This blunder seems to fall at the feet of the BCCi.
Their ‘domestic’ tournament was always scheduled to finish just before the world t20 (although it was moved a further week back due to the move to South Africa).
Last year Dhoni was so exhausted with the amount of cricket he was playing he had to have a kip during the Sri Lanka test series. That was after 6 weeks in the IPL and 9 one dayers in a month.
The Indian fans have a right to be pissed off; in real terms India lost all 3 of their matches against serious contenders, and came in as defnding champions and favourites.
The Indian public want answers, I just wonder how many of those will make the BCCi look bad…
You know in retrospect I’m not that pissed about India losing the plot in T20 WC. I mean for once they are putting their heart and souls into a “domestic” tournament (albeit for a fee) which has to a be a plus any given day right?
There’s something really ridiculous about the IPL trophy which I’d noticed some time back. I knew something was wrong but couldn’t put my finger on it. And then I realized, look at the batsman on the trophy, if you don’t get it, go to http://resistancerebellionanddeath.blogspot.com/2009/05/ipl-trophy.html
Vishal, I think another blog was talking about that a while back as well, I happen to think the trophy image has been stolen from shredder in TMNT.
On a call-in/talk-back radio show during the India-SA match today and someone called in during a discussion as to why India are out of the tournament. I kid you not, he said Greg Chappell is the reason why India lost their last three matches and I had all I could do to stop from pissing my pants laughing. Let the effigy burning continue!
Peter Della Penna’s last blog post..If I ever move to India, I want to own an effigy store.