Tuesday, March 25, 2008

IPL = Ila's Parted Loyalties

One major advantage of being at home is being able to devote as much time as you want to CRICKET! For me it is like going back to my school days when my life revolved around cricket (and a certain cricketer). I enjoyed the entire Australian tour and it was made doubly enjoyable thanks to the result (yippee we won!!) and a personal discovery of a new hero. And with 24 days to go for IPL, I can hardly wait. Though I am glad about the SA series that would distract me from the ‘Dharma-sankat’ I will be facing once IPL commences. With ‘my’ team distributed amongst different teams and actually pitted against each other it’s very difficult for me to decide my loyalties.

For the last 2 decades Mumbai has been my favorite Ranji team for obvious reasons, though geographically is should have been Maharashtra. And with IPL I would definitely want to support Mumbai, again for the most obvious reasons.
But Bangalore is home! And even though Bangalore team’s captain totally turns me off and the team isn’t really that exciting I would want my home team to bring home the laurels. If it was just a matter of these 2 teams, I could have wished for a final between these two teams and hoped for the better team (Mumbai, Mumbai) to win.
Chennai is amongst my least favorite cities. (Actually it’s my most hated city; I just did not want to hurt anyone’s regional sentiments.) But the team’s acquisition of the highest bidded player of the IPL and my recent development of a serious form of attachment towards this certain gutsy cricketer (who shall remain nameless) has added a third angle to the dilemma and has rocketed the odds in Chennai’s favor. So now I am stuck with 3 favorite teams out of 8!

So my latest policy: whether the winner is Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai or Jaipur (yeah right!), as the cliché goes, the game would be the real winner.