Although not an IPL fan, I wanted to browse through the daily newspapers to see how my favourites, Sachin Tendulkar, Adam Gilchrist, Shane Warne, Rahul Dravid, Jacques Kallis, and Matthew Hayden were going in India. But there was hardly a paragraph in the Aussie broadsheets and tabloids.
Nor was there a word on some of the thrillers and exciting performances by Kallis, Tendulkar, Raina, Pollard, Bollinger and Dhoni. Well, it’s the footy season Down Under, and editors would not have space for meaningless matches by “bought” players.
Fair enough, I thought.
But the press woke up from their cricketing slumber when there were low intensity bomb blasts in Bangalore last week. And now suddenly space is available when the Board of Control for Cricket in India suspended Lalit Modi as IPL Chairman for “alleged acts of individual misdemeanours.”
It would have got even more space had the salary cap controversy of Melbourne Storm not erupted about the same time.
We love to read about controversies – especially scandals – be it in sports, politics, music or literature. It is the same in television series, from “Number 96” to “Desperate Housewives”.
Is it because we love scandals that the media splash it on for our consumption or is it because the press highlights the unsavoury incidents that we get deeply engrossed? It is similar to what came first, the chicken or the egg?
We have barely got out of the Tiger Woods sex scandals and the Michael Clarke-Lara Bingle split and now we are once again enthralled by the Melbourne Storm and IPL irregularities.
I hope we read more about magnificent cover drives, towering sixes, rare dot balls, centuries and hat-tricks and uniquely obsolete maidens in ICC World Twenty20 starting in the West Indies on Friday rather than on unsavoury money laundering and sexual escapades.
It’s a pity four of the current most scintillating batsmen – Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist, Virender Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar – will not be there to inspire the Caribbeans to compose calypsos on them.
But they may come up with something that goes: “Day-o, day-o, daylight comes and we don’t wanna go home till we see Ricky, Gilly, Viru and Sachin perform!”
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