Some thrills,many spills

The tournament started with Bruno the police dog hogging the limelight on Day 1,but the attention quickly moved away. IPL2s Player of the Tournament,by some distance,was the one who didnt even play a match. After all Fake IPL Player,the mystery blogger who claimed to be a perennial benchwarmer in the Kolkata dug-out and became an overnight Internet sensation,provided the tournament with the much-needed spark after its insipid start. From the tug-of-war within the most glamorous team to players escapades,FIP gave a keyhole through which fans could peep into the behind-the-scenes lives of cricketers and film stars.

And while not everything he said turned out to be correct,some of it actually did. Funnily,a few journalists,too,fell for the bait which resulted in frantic attempts at establishing the bloggers identity. Then there were cynics,who thought it was another of Shah Rukh Khans/IPLs publicity gimmicks. Buoyed by speculation,FIP announced he was going to reveal his identity. But though he did upload a video as his signing off entry,it hid more than it revealed.

Entertainment aside,FIP will be best remembered for giving comic names to his dramatis personae some obscene,some imaginative and a few that achieved cult status.

As the glossed-over month-long exercise,which strives to be taken seriously without much success,draws to a close,there is a temptation to believe FIP was real. But even if he wasnt,to quote Charlie Chaplin,In the end,its all a gag.

Sling isnt king

It was a storm that wasnt preceded by the proverbial lull. In fact,days before the first ball was bowled in the IPL,Shane Wane created quite a buzz with his forecast of the imminent arrival of the Tornado. And Kamran Khan justified the tag. In his second match against Kolkata,Khan took three wickets and bowled a tight final over,setting up a memorable win for the defending champions. Unfortunately,his promising outing in the IPL was cut short by an injury and a suspect action. Oddly enough,the season more or less panned out in a similar way for most slinger bowlers in the tournament they started with a bang and ended with a whimper. Khan,though,is reportedly being chased by a couple of Ranji teams.

Lasith Malinga was virtually unplayable as he hurled lethal yorkers at the batsmen. For the first couple of weeks,his average was lower than the economy rate of most bowlers. Gradually,he ran out of steam,and when Mumbai took on Delhi in their last league match,he might well have been an impostor as an out-of-form Virender Sehwag took him to the cleaners.

Games up

On the face of it,6UP was an innovative idea,aimed at making bucks for the promoters and viewers alike. The workings: predict the runs per over and how they spread over the six balls,send an SMS and win prizes. Just that in this game of prediction,what the company,or for that matter the IPL,couldnt foresee was the obvious allegations of promoting betting that would follow. Sports minister MS Gill criticised the League,sparking reactions from across the cricketing fraternity,for promoting betting in cricket. As is common,the IPL were in denial mode initially. However,as the pressure mounted from all sides,they finally decided to pull the plug on the game. If only they had seen it coming,the IPL could have avoided this faux pas.

Knightmare

This story could very easily have been on 10 reasons why the Knight Riderss campaign will not be forgotten in a hurry,such was the intensity with which bad luck and controversy followed the team around. Once John Buchanans snigger-sparking,multiple-captain theory went off the news radar,there was the inexplicable bidding war over Mashrafe Mortaza,who played one match. Shah Rukh Khan,omnipresent at the Eden Gardens last year,disappeared as his team staggered from loss to loss. There were a few last-over finishes,but Ganguly went on record saying none of them were close.

Ajay Jadeja alleged that Indian players were being mistreated by the foreigners in the team management,while mentions of match-fixing,too,knocked on their doors. As if this wasnt enough,there was Fake IPL Player blogging his way to stardom from inside the KKR camp. When they lost their eighth game on the trot while defending 21 off the last over it seemed the Knight Riders could not buy a win if they wanted to. And then,triggered perhaps by the weeks of frustration,they won two in a row to finish off results that took their points tally to a respectable seven. Kolkatas run in the tournament went: L,W,NR,L,L,L,L,L,L,L,L,L,W,W.

Overthrows

In a format where bowlers sport concentric circles with a bulls-eye dot in the middle,the provocation to bend the arm and chuck the ball with all their might at their willow-wielding tormentors can be an understandable emotion. But unlike the free hit perk the batsmen enjoy after a no-ball,the bowlers arent yet allowed a free throw after a dropped catch. So umpires with geometry honours went into an elbow charge at a couple of bowlers in Season Two. Shane Warnes bowling talent scouts,it seems,didnt travel with that good old D-shaped protractor as the suspects Amit Singh and Kamran Khan committed the alleged crime wearing the Royalss blues. Amit,the pacer whose slow off-breaks had put him on BCCIs blacklist for a couple of years,however,got an okay from the IPL officials. He finally played five games,same as Brett Lee,but had more wickets and gave away less runs than the Aussie great.

The reason for Khans early flight home was injury,but the action question mark almost spoiled the only feel-good story of this edition. A couple more players with suspect pasts continued to raise eyebrows. Offies Yogesh Nagar and Johan Botha dont quite have the kind of actions that coaches would ask their young wards to emulate. Nagar played one game,Botha many more. Nagar played for the Delhi Daredevils,Botha believe it or not for the Rajasthan Royals.

Low and tight in vogue

Considering that 900 runs were scored during a one-dayer in South Africa once,IPLs Season Two was on fertile ground for truck-loads of runs. But somehow that was not to be. If there were 10 scores of 200-plus during the league phase of 2008,this time there was just one. The obvious reasons could be the bouncy tracks,seaming conditions and chilly evenings. But there is more to the story. Lessons learnt in the first season had made bowlers wiser and coaches shrewder. With the best cricketing brains available in the world working towards checking the run flow,success was expected. Bowlers like Lasith Malinga and Fidel Edwards proved that six straight perfect yorkers was a reality. Low scores translated into several last ball,last over finishes. But when nails get chewed every other day,excitement loses its novelty. Interestingly,Rajasthan Royals,who started with 58 all out,went on to record the league phases highest score of 211.

Minimum,please

Till not long ago,when a batsman cleared the ropes it was referred to as a six. But something happened during the last 35 days and cricket terminology would never be the same again. While in the beginning a bowler was being smashed for a DLF Maximum,as the tournament progressed,he was simply being DLFed or being hit for a DLFer. After being DLFed for so long,even the days of Sidhuism-suffering seemed less harrowing. And if things werent going out of hand already,in walked Ramiz Raja mid-way through the tournament. If one of his gems,all this action has been sponsored by the sponsors wasnt profound enough,he even indulged in poetry as he described RP Singhs unsuccessful chase to the boundary fence with a Chase,chase and the ball wins the race8230; RP falls on his face. IPL2 also gave birth to the concept of a boundary commentator,who because of his obvious proximity to the dug-outs and the ground conditions was expected to throw light on the mood in the respective camps. At the same time he also had to entertain himself and his colleagues by either indulging in childish banter with them or embarrassing himself on a slide. Never before has a cricket viewer been so enticed to scamper for the mute button on his remote.

Dropzone

Maybe it was because the tournament wasnt providing enough big scores in the beginning,or simply the fact that they never quite managed to get accustomed to the cold,but fielders across all eight teams managed to shoot themselves and their bowlers in the foot regularly. The IPLs second edition witnessed an inexplicable number of dropped catches. Almost everyone,regardless of nationality,ability or experience,caught the bug,with AB de Villiers,Sachin Tendulkar,Rahul Dravid and Rohit Sharma spilling chances. The Knight Riders suffered the most as their players developed such an aversion to catching they would have struggled to catch even the proverbial cold despite the freezing temperatures in South Africa. It was RP Singh,though,who provided the biggest blotch of them all in the last league game of IPL2 as he ran in from the third-man fence to take what seemed like a regulation catch,only to see the ball completely miss his hands and cross the boundary ropes.

Hammered8230; off the field

One of their players,Sreesanth,found himself at the wrong end of a Harbhajan Singh slap during the first edition of the IPL. In the second season,it was Kings XI Punjab co-owners,Mohit Burman and Ness Wadia,who were involved in a scuffle. While Punjab were in the process of pulling off an unlikely victory against the Deccan Chargers in Johannesburg,it was reported that a drunken Burman misbehaved with a female spectator. Unfortunately for him,the woman turned out to be the daughter-in-law of Ajay Gupta,an influential South African businessman with the right links,and she called in her guards. Both Burman and Wadia,who tried intervening on his partners behalf,were allegedly beaten up by the womans private security staff and the police,leaving them with black eyes and bruised egos. And if last years issue ended with Sreesanth embracing his tormentor and calling him bhaiyya,Burman and Wadia,too,brought about a melodramatic end as they visited Gupta at his residence and apologised.

Hayden rides the wave

He would sit on his haunches in the middle of the pitch and meditate on the Test-match eves. As far as Twenty20 cricket goes though,Matthew Haydens preparations have been quite the opposite. Hayden has a simple formula for the success he has enjoyed over the last six weeks dont think too much about it. Here in South Africa,Ive spent more time in the water than on land, he said midway through the tournament. I love kayaking and surfing and then if I find time,I like doing some fishing. And then came the connection behind that and the run of form. It gives me an edge because when matches are played over half a day and are scheduled every other day,there is a lot of time spent on thinking cricket. You need to have a balance in life and surfing gives me that.

Haydens tribe the relaxed retirees have made their presence felt. Anil Kumble was outstanding for Bangalore,while Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist shone for Rajasthan and Hyderabad respectively. Had they not announced their squad before the IPL,Australias selectors might just have been tempted to include the legends for the world T20 championship.