Cover Points

King Cricket picks out the two big stars of the IPL so far, for my money. Glenn McGrath and Mohammad Asif. They're bowlers and they're way ahead of the batting contingent. The interesting thing about them is that they haven't expanded on their repertoire of deliveries. This isn't a case of adapting to Twenty20, but just doing the same old brilliant thing of bowling accurately:

So good on Glenn McGrath for taking 4-29 for Delhi Daredevils against Bangalore Royal Challengers and for doing so through skill. For all the ‘imagine Matthew Hayden and Mahendra Dhoni batting together’ fantasies, it’s been McGrath and Mohammad Asif, Delhi’s new ball attack, that’s been the most exciting pairing - mere bowlers.

It’s not that they’re the most spectacular bowlers, because they clearly aren’t. It’s that they’re of the highest quality and with flat pitches and odds loaded towards the batsmen, everyone’s wondering if there’s anything a bowler can do or whether they’re merely cannon fodder.

Meanwhile, Ducking Beamers has a brilliant as ever post on the dangers of the crickentertainment that is the IPL:

It’s a win-win for the involved stars, but it’s still opportunistic and shady, not to mention a distraction from the real match at hand. The question of “branding” cricket obscures the actual cricket as cricketers — at least the Indians — become stars first, and players second. On endorsements everywhere, Indian cricketers spill into the Indian consciousness again and again, and I worry that the link between the sport and its audience will become mediated by something other than simply viewing a player’s bat hit another player’s ball. To some extent, that’s been this blog’s thesis all along (that cricket is more than cricket), but we’re talking about more than culture and history here. We’re talking manipulation. We used to use cricket as a focal point for our cultural neuroses, but now, the process has reversed itself, with cricket deciding what’s important to us. In other words, our cricketers have become media phenomenons, rather than sportsmen.