Cricket's big jamboree comes alive with Fake IPL Player's novel

Published>Sat, Mar 20 10 07:47 AM

Where there is excess money, there is dirt, back-stabbing, and conspiracy theories galore. By all accounts, deep inside the lucrative Indian Premier League (IPL), it's all happening. Controversies have followed the immense success of the Twenty20 tournament, which was launched by the BCCI in 2008 with the backing of the International Cricket Council.

With huge money at stake, the tournament, modelled on the franchise system, has had many offshoots on and off the field. One of them was a blog by a person known only as the 'Fake IPL Player'. It became a big success on the Web during the last season of the IPL because of the way it detailed the sordid goings-on inside a franchise; the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR).

The blog gave graphic details of the rift between Sourav Ganguly (called ? Lordie? in the blog) and the then KKR coach John Buchanan (?Bookah Naan?), and the predicament of the co-owner, Shah Rukh Khan (?Sigwald Raees Kahn?).

The KKR management took the blog seriously and is believed to have suspected a few players, including Aakash Chopra, Sanjay Bangar, Anureet Singh and Ranadeb Bose, who could possibly be either writing the blog themselves or passing on inside information to the anonymous blogger. When the team sent Chopra and Bangar back to India from South Africa, people suspected them even more, though the truth hasn't been established conclusively. Another theory pointed the needle of suspicion at TV commentator Harsha Bhogle.

After the blog's immense success, the writer got ambitious, and wrote The Gamechangers for HarperCollins India, which is part of the India Today Group. The Indian Bollywood League (IBL) in the book is clearly a take-off on the real-life IPL. Although it's supposed to be a novel, the narration seems quite close to what could be happening inside an IPL franchise camp.

Rivalries between players, the one-upmanship in the dressing room, efforts by coaches to justify their salaries (remember the drama over Buchanan's four-captain theory, which clashed with Ganguly's thoughts, and led to the sacking of the successful former Australia coach last year), and the dog-eat-dog rivalry at every level.

The book also focuses the spotlight on the brain behind the IBL, Lalu Parekh, supposedly Lalit Modi- his phenomenal reach, his obsession with the Blackberry and his eagerness to control everything.

Both cricket followers and fiction lovers will enjoy the book-it combines good writing with tantalising details that will keep speculative minds busy linking the characters in the novel with the men and women who make IPL the circus that it is.

Reproduced From Mail Today. Copyright 2010. MTNPL. All rights reserved.

Source: Web Search