da wazamba： As a spectacle, Bangalore has laid down the marker for the rest of theleague
da pixbet： Cricinfo staff18-Apr-2008
The opening ceremony easily outdid any of those seen at previous World Cups (file photo) © AFP
If you needed any proof that few of the spectators saw the Indian PremierLeague as anything more than glitzy entertainment, it arrived after theseventh over of the Royal Challengers’ comically inept innings. WhileSourav Ganguly warmed up for a bowl, with the scoreboard showing a dismal33 for 4, the boom box started playing a popular Kannada tune. The crowdroared with approval. Could you think of one serious sport where a homecrowd of 55,000 would be cheering with their team being cut to pieces asthough with a sushi knife? Neither could we.So forget all the hot air about the pinnacle of sport and focus instead onthe real selling point of the league – entertainment. The cheerleadersborrowed from the Washington Redskins had made their entrance earlier inthe evening to bawdy acclaim and though they were a girl short, 11 insteadof the customary 12, the fetching yellow costumes and the red pompoms werein evidence right to the bitter Bangalore end.The opening ceremony snapped and crackled, and the organisers of the WorldCup in three years time will have quite a task to even come close tomatching it. The acrobats, four on either side of the stadium, weresensational, even if the Scottish music that accompanied them clamberingup towards the roof did seem a little incongruous.The laser show and a fireworks display that rivalled anything you mightexpect on Chinese New Year had the crowds baying for more, and the onlydiscordant note was struck when Sharad Pawar, the BCCI president, wasbooed before he began his speech. Otherwise, the band kept their feettapping and their placards waving as the decibel level inside the stadiumapproached that inside one of European football’s great amphitheatres on abig night.Brendon McCullum’s batting afterwards more than matched the previouspyrotechnics. You always knew that the ball would travel in this format ofthe game, but this was by no means the sort of pitch where you could justplonk the front foot forward and drive insouciantly. As Rahul Dravid wasto say later, his astonishing hitting was the difference between the twosides. There were a couple of edges and miscues in an innings that wasn’tquite as flawless as the cheerleaders, but how can you argue with 13 sixesand ten fours, with one hit going out of the ground?For those that came to cheer the local contingent, this was a day toforget. B Akhil, Sunil Joshi and Dravid made five runs between them, andJoshi’s three overs went for 26. In the field, Joshi looked very much likea man who’ll turn 37 in June, while Akhil too had a couple of bloopers toforget.The contrast with one of Kolkata’s local boys couldn’t have been morestark. Ashok Dinda cleaned up Virat Kohli, India’s Under-19 captain, and thenhad Wasim Jaffer caught at slip during an excellent spell. It helped ofcourse to have a mountain of runs behind him, but it was the sort ofperformance that’s needed if the stated aim of giving young domesticcricketers a fillip is to be achieved.As a spectacle, Bangalore has laid down the marker for the rest of theleague. A full Eden Gardens could conceivably match it, and hopefully thematches that follow will be more a contest, and less a one-man show. Butwhat a show it was. The US$700,000 that Shah Rukh Khan and friends forkedout is already looking like a steal.