Giles Smith has a funny take on the IPl in The Times.
People putting in the most effort at this point? That's an easy one. It's the cheerleaders. They never stop. And the cameras never stop showing them never stopping. The odd thing being, of course, that you have never seen crowds less in need of leaders for their cheering.
Meanwhile the Hindu's Nirmal Shekar doesn't seem too impressed with the shortest form of the game:
The best of sport allows for the pause. It lets us sit back and savour the has-been and dream of the still-to-come. Nothing that is breathless — and therefore leaves no room for a complex cognitive process leading to emotional fulfillment — can lay claims to sporting greatness.
Twenty20 is here to stay, and unless Test cricket and ODIs are given a subtle makeover we will be left with dessert and no main course, writes Dileep Premachandran in theGuardian.
But back to the cheerleaders (briefly). In The Telegraph, Paul Bolton writes about a beach cricket tournament that took place in Australia three months ago that has just now being shown on Sky. There is an inevitable comparison to the IPL, but what may also interest readers is our observation that the IPL was not the first to employ cheerleaders: the XXXX Angels set the trend by giving it some in the tournament, much to the unsurprising delight of the crowds.
The Guardian's Mike Selvey is excited about Allen Stanford's plans in the Caribbean.
How much would it cost him to take over the central contracts of the top players and up their wages to the sort of stratospheric levels that would prevent them from seeking greener grass elsewhere?
