Tuesday, April 28, 2009

A Link A Day # 137: Talking up the IPL

Did the DLF Maximums and Citi Moments of Success get your goat? You have great company. Cricket historian Gideon Haigh has heaped scorn on how commentators have been reduced to two-bit hucksters in IPL 2. Sample this pearl: "One expects a certain degree of phoniness from Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri, who as IPL governing council members are busy getting high on their own supply. But the rest of Modi's fawning courtiers, even super-smooth Mark Nicholas and pawky Jeremy Coney, have been reduced to carnival barkers, whether greeting a full toss slogged for six like the news of VE Day, pretending that the tactical time-out is something other than a sneaky commercial trick, or, above all, hawking the sponsors like Jim Cramer used to ramp shares on Mad Money. Could Citigroup be scattering moments of success for its own morale? Can it be that somewhere in the fine print of DLF's sponsorship contract is prescribed a specified number of long-hops and full-tosses per hour, to guarantee a minimum of "maximums"? The result is that whatever the game looks like, it sounds as forced as the canned laughter in an American sitcom."

Wanna read more of Gideon's pungent critique? go here.

Posted by Anantha

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