Today’s IPL game between Delhi and Hyderabad was much more interesting than I expected. The Daredevils batted first and while Sehwag made another duck, Gambhir and Dhawan more than made up for it. 194 always looked like a difficult target. But the Chargers made a valiant attempt at chasing it down. Afridi, Sharma and Venugopal Rao all played good innings. Gibbs was a little slow, but he did hit Glenn McGrath for 2 sixes in an over. They always looked like they might just pull off a miracle, if only Sehwag didn’t have one final McGrath over up his sleeve. As it was Pidge did the business, dismissing Venugopal Rao with the first ball of his final over and exposing the Chargers’ tail. He left finishing the job to Amit Mishra, who picked up a hat trick in the final over to end with 5-17.
As I expected, much nonsense was talked on Test Match Special about the IPL. It was pretty clear the the whingeing was being done by people who haven’t actually been following the games. For example, it isn’t true that bowlers are irrelevant in Twenty20. Try telling that to Shoaib Akhtar. Or indeed Pollock, McGrath, Warne, Sreesanth, Mishra, etc. Nor is it true that so many balls are hit out of the park that batsmen will lose the skill of running between the wickets and fielding will become irrelevant. (Nor, indeed, are either of those things true in baseball, which the BBC pundits have clearly never watched.) In the “you just don’t get it” category was a complaint that it was a good thing that players should earn more money, but why did it have to be for playing Twenty20? And finally there was the inevitable demand that if there was going to be a Twenty20 Premier League then it ought to be in England. Sigh.
I should note, however, that Aggers wasn’t responsible for any of this. CMJ got to chair the IPL-bashing session. Aggers, on the other hand, it happily making an idiot of himself over the new England kit. So it is different? I don’t care. Why is it that some people would rather have test cricket die than have it played in any way differently to the way it was played when they were young?
Aggers is a Test Match bowler, you know. One game. Two wickets for an awful lot. Which qualifies him to sneer at players with hundreds of times the Test wickets he has. Typical BBC ‘journalist’. At least the website doesn’t have Henry Homo Habilis Blofeld.
If Aggers sneers I’m not sure I’d mind so much. But he doesn’t sneer, he whines. And mostly about things that really aren’t important, like what kits the players are wearing. Bloers, of course, is what they call “a character”.