Shane Warne’s midas touch to minnows Rajasthan Royals in the inaugural IPL season may be a part of cricketing folklore but a new book reveals that the Australian spin legend was not the original choice for captaincy.

In their book ‘IPL – an inside story’, Alam Srinivas and T R Vivek say Jaipur owner Manoj Badale was “saddled with Warne” by chance in the first players’ auction.

“In fact, Warne was never the over-riding original choice for the captaincy of the Jaipur team. Badale made it clear during an exclusive e-mail interview with us. ‘Warne’s views

could only be factored in after the first (players’) auction and it is clear given the choice of Graeme Smith, that we did not build a team around Warne. But rather we picked a team based on individual roles and records”.

The book gave an eyewitness version, by a franchise CEO, of the first auction where Jaipur just happened to buy Warne because no one else was buying him and the auction appeared to be in disaster.

“Warne’s was the first name that came up as the 78 players’ names were picked up. But no one was willing to pick him up at the reserve price. The auction was headed for disaster within the first few minutes.

“Since (Lalit) Modi has some interest in the Jaipur team he made an eye contact with Badale and Co. and nudged them to start bidding. Jaipur raised the placard… hoping other teams would jump into the fray… But no other team bid for Warne. Jaipur, it seemed, was saddle with Warne.”

The authors also wrote that the legendary spinner was “not a strategist” but someone who can just goad people to give 100 per cent on the field.

They said Warne was an “insecure” person who feels “compelled to be liked by others” and is greedy for praise.

“…It is his ability to earn respect and love of his teammates. Warne can goad people to give 100 per cent on the field,” the authors wrote.

“Excuse me, you would say, but isn’t that what captaincy is all about? Isn’t that how Ganguly and Ponting became great captains?… please read our words carefully. We never said that Warne is not a good leader. All we said was that he is not a strategist,” they argued.

“Even his trait to extract the best out of his players, to make them die rather than fail only proves it,” they added.

The book also attempted to justify their point with Warne’s coach Terry Jenner’s view on the bowler’s behaviour. “He (Jenner) could see something else too, behind the bravado, that many people missed, and this was the insecurity that is so obvious in Warne today. He desperately wanted people to like him, to praise him, to say how good he was,” the book quoted from Paul Barry’s biography on Warne.

“Warne will only listen to people that he thinks can help him go somewhere. He shies away from control, authority or demands for rational behaviour. In its extreme form this syndrome is a mental illness called narcissistic personality disorder; Warne appears to be suffering from milder version,” the book added from Warne’s biography.

The authors observed: “Therefore, throughout the IPL, one witnessed this twin emotions in Warne’s captaincy. He went out of his way to be loved by his teammates and rejected anything that did not fit his scheme of things.”
Source – cricket.expressindia.com

With last year’s player of the tournament absent due to national commitments, and two others who’re among the highest-paid stars also missing, Australia’s contingent at the start of the second IPL season will be more notable for who’s not playing than those who make the trip to South Africa

There’ll still be retired spin bowling great Shane Warne leading the way as captain and coach of the defending champion Rajasthan Royals, but Warne will be missing a key ingredient from last year, player of the inaugural Indian Premier League Twenty20 season Shane Watson.

The 26-year-old Watson, who scored 472 runs at an average of 42 in the IPL last year, has returned from injury and was named in the Australian limited-overs squad for a series against Pakistan in Dubai and Abu Dhabi beginning next Wednesday _ four days after the IPL starts.

Also missing will be troubled allrounder Andrew Symonds, who was been out of the Australian lineup for several months until his recall for the Pakistan series, and fast bowler Brett Lee, who was initially named in squad to play Pakistan but was later ruled out and replaced by Doug Bollinger.

Lee, at least, will continue to train in South Africa with his Indian Premier League franchise, Kings XI Punjab, to further his rehabilitation from ankle and foot operations. But if he’s cleared to play, it’s expected that will be for Australia before he sees any action for his IPL franchise.

Symonds would have been the fourth-highest salary earner at $1.35 million with Deccan Chargers in the IPL this season (behind England’s Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff and India’s Mahendra Singh Dhoni).

Lee was set to make $900,000, which would have put him at No. 10 in the 2009 earnings list.

Salaries are paid on a pro-rata basis for the foreign stars, so the more matches they play, the more they earn. The Australians on national team duties will get a chance to return to the IPL later in the tournament.

Also among the absent Australians is test skipper Ricky Ponting, who is being rested to prepare for the Ashes campaign against England in two months.

Australian Michael Hussey will also not play in this year’s IPL in order to rest for the Ashes. Hussey would have been available for only the final two weeks of the IPL, which ends with the final on May 24 in Johannesburg.

Michael Clarke, who will captain Australia in Ponting’s absence against Pakistan _ that series ends May 7 _ and pace bowler Mitchell Johnson, will also miss this year’s IPL. Clarke and Johnson did not play in the inaugural IPL and did not nominate for the player auction earlier this year.

Ponting is expected back as skipper for Twenty20 World Cup in June and the Ashes.

“Right at the moment I feel like I need to get away and have a bit of a break, so that’s the way it is,” said Ponting, who was given a release for the 2009 season by the Kolkata Knight Riders franchise which is coached by ex-Australia coach John Buchanan.

Lee, a 76-test veteran, is pushing to reclaim his place in the Australian attack for the Ashes series. So IPL’s loss might be Australia’s gain for the crucial series against England. He joined the Kings XI Punjab squad in South Africa to practice because wet whether in Sydney was limiting his time in the nets.

“Now that he’s here in South Africa with his IPL team, when he is ready to bowl again there’ll be no excuses for weather or anything,” Ponting said of Lee. “He should be able to get a lot of bowling done and when he’s fit enough and ready to play, hopefully he’ll be playing for us because that’s what he wants. We need to see him back in Australian colors.”

The eight-team, 59-match IPL tournament, switched to South Africa from India due to security concerns because of clashing dates with the general elections, begins Saturday.
Source – etaiwannews.com

The brains behind the Indian Premier League (IPL) spoke of conquering the world and turning Kolkata Knight Riders into the new Manchester United, but his attempts at gravitas were hamstrung by his announcement that he would be embracing the modern age via a beauty pageant.

Meanwhile, François Pienaar, the South Africa rugby union captain who lifted the World Cup in 1995, shared a stage with Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood star best known in Britain for being shouted at by Jade Goody, while a marketing guru quoted Malcolm X and said that it was better than working with Mickey Mouse. Tomorrow, a cricket tournament will try to break out of its spandex hotpants.

Lalit Modi, the IPL commissioner, has pulled off a minor miracle in switching the Twenty20 tournament to South Africa in the space of a month, but his football analogies invite fresh scepticism. “My only choice was to turn it into an opportunity,” he said of the bombs that prompted the move to a new continent. “Now we hope IPL teams become worldwide teams like Manchester United and Chelsea. That’s the objective and we are able to turn that into a reality now.

“Our aim is to build fanbases across the world. In England you have EPL [the Barclays Premier League] and they all have fans all over the world. My son likes Manchester United. He has never been to a game but watches religiously on television. We want people to get attached to teams and it’s a huge opportunity to build IPL as a global brand.” Modi has worked wonders, aided by Pienaar and Etienne de Villiers, whose marketing background embraces executive roles with the ATP tour and Walt Disney. The opening four matches in Cape Town, featuring the million-dollar men Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff among others, are sold out, despite an extra 5,000 seats being installed at Newlands.

The IPL knockers have poured scorn on the way eight “franchises” were contrived from an auction bankrolled by celebrities and industrialists, but South Africa is ambivalent about the mercenary machinations and is lapping it up. The emphasis is on what Shetty called an amalgam of sport and entertainment, but Modi’s claim that it has been “smooth sailing all the way” here serves only to underscore the problems elsewhere.

Pakistan’s players have threatened legal action after being excluded, protesting in Lahore under the banner “pay us or play us”, while Modi’s name is reportedly on the hitlist of an underworld gang, D Company. An intercepted telephone call allegedly suggested that Modi could be the target of an assassination attempt, but he was dancing on the top deck of the lead float at the launch parade yesterday while IPL security agents mingled with the crowd.

De Villiers cited Malcolm X’s remark that “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything” to suggest that the IPL was about modern India. Hence, the Miss Bollywood SA competition, where a fan at each match will be selected on her looks by a panel of judges. It sounds a crass anachronism but Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood heart-throb and Kolkata owner, dismissed claims of prejudice, saying: “All sexual decisions I leave to Lalit.”

Pienaar tried to push the sporting issues, saying how it would be fascinating to see enemies team up as friends and vice versa. Pietersen and Flintoff, that brace of deposed England captains, go head to head in Port Elizabeth on Monday when Royal Challengers Bangalore take on Chennai Super Kings. It is an intriguing prospect but will tell us little about their capacity for reinvention.

However, those damning the IPL might ask whether the England team’s recent past, comprising multiple captains, a mutinous pedalo and Paul Collingwood in a lap-dancing club, has been any less of a circus.

The only trouble with Modi’s plans for the new Manchester United is that, while people here are talking IPL, nobody is talking about who will win.
Source – timesonline.co.uk

The Indian Premier League will return to India next year, but the long-term vision is to turn it into a global brand, in much the same
way as the English Football Premier League, IPL chairman and commissioner Lalit Modi said here on Thursday.

“Spectators will see the world’s best players playing competitive cricket, and it’s made more compelling because of the competitive instincts of the players,” Modi told a large international media contingent at the International Convention Centre.

An important aspect of the marketing of the competition is advertising and 120 million rands has been earmarked to attract spectators to the games. The organisers are also spending time on local radio stations, introducing the players in the eight teams that are vying for the top spot.

“The heat is on” campaign with thousands of street pole posters in major cities across the country and three full-page ads in single editions of every national and regional daily and weekly newspaper is arguably the largest media spend by any sporting authority in the country’s history, and is aimed at providing a taste of India to local spectators.

A part of the ‘taste of India’ is a new initiative, which sees a Miss Bollywood SA competition, with one young woman spectator nominated from each of the 56 league matches going through to a final, where a panel will select the winner, who wins a role in a Bollywood movie and a trip to India.

Modi said he knows he made the right decision in bringing the second Twenty20 cricket competition to South Africa because of security concerns during the general elections that started off in India Thursday, though he conceded that moving the competition here was disappointing for the Indian fans, young and old.
Source – economictimes.indiatimes.com

Bollywood glitz and cricket razzmatazz combined in a colourful, star-studded parade through Cape Town on Thursday as the 2009 Indian Premier League made its high-profile brash entrance.

Nine floats, one for each of the eight teams plus one for the IPL, made their way along one of the main streets, accompanied by energetic Indian dancers and brass bands drawn from the local community.

More than 150 cricketers were in attendance, as were Bollywood stars Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty, part-owners of the Kolkata Knight Riders, Kings XI Punjab and Rajasthan Royals respectively.

Hundreds of people lined the streets to watch the parade, which launched festivities that will run until the grand final in Johannesburg on May 24.

One of the tournament’s initiatives aimed at maintaining the buoyant atmosphere is the introduction of a Miss Bollywood South Africa competition with contestants drawn from fans attending matches.

The idea came from IPL commissioner Lalit Modi, who has employed the help of the three Bollywood idols associated with the tournament.

“We’re looking for someone who has the star quality to stand out in a crowd, probably without even trying that hard,” Modi explained at the launch of the concept in Cape Town.

“It’s that special, almost indefinable, quality that makes someone a star more than a beauty queen that we are looking for.

“IPL matches with their mix of fun and excitement are an excellent environment to identify the kind of person who is a natural stand-out in a big crowd.”

One Miss Bollywood of the Day will be found at each of the 56 round-robin matches and stands a chance of winning a trip to India, a role in a Bollywood film and 5,590 dollars.

“Star searches like this are a really great way to find people who may never even have thought that they have what it takes to really make it big,” said Khan, the so-called ‘King of Bollywood’.

“The heart of our idea is to search the crowd at IPL matches for someone who has the attitude and appearance that automatically draws the eye.

“It will be the kind of person who is not necessarily showing off for the camera, but who can mesmerise even total strangers.

“The announcement of the winner will be shown during a ‘strategy break’ and will be declared Miss Bollywood of the Day.”

Source – .google.com