I know of one Australian batsman who just hates playing in India. Very simple - he just can't seem to make runs when he's here. No, that batsman isn't called Ricky Ponting.

During Australia's tour of India in 2007 where they played 7 ODIs and a Twenty20 game, Brad Hodge scored 61 runs from 7 innings.

Now he's kicked off his IPL career with 1 & 1. Is he looking forward to the rest of the series, or what?!

At least the Kolkata Knight Riders will be smiling, since they can now get Shoaib Akhar to play for them, after a committee ruled that his ban was only effective from June 4 2008.

One team that's not going to smile for a while, least of all their captain, is the Bangalore Royal Challengers side. Even if Geoffrey Boycott's moom and her friends bowled to them, they'd contrive to lose. The running between the wickets today against the Punjab Kings XI was downright pathetic. The side has just three major problems - nothing serious. They just can't bat, bowl or field in a manner that Twenty20 requires them to. Here's hoping that Dravid's team turn it around, in just the same manner as England had in the 1987 Ashes in Australia, on the back of Martin Johnson's write-up in 'The Independent' while covering that tour.

Graeme Smith's catch off Ganguly was looking perfectly right to me. It was as fair as you can get and I was baffled when the third umpire ruled it not out. Also, Ganguly should not have asked the on-field umpire to check with the third umpire. I expected a few words to be exchanged, knowing Ganguly, Smith & Warne and that did happen.

But, what I saw on news channels this morning was atrocious. They were trying to make it yet another India v Australia issue. There were even clips of the Sydney test where Australia clearly played foul. But, for heaven's sake, let's not mix the IPL with international cricket.

Everyone should learn to see IPL as a stand-alone league and it will definitely help the game in all ways. Let's not drag in issues in international cricket and extend the verbal warfare to IPL as well.

I have started to love IPL and I'm not particularly concerned about all the talk of Bollywood, cheergirls and too much glamour, as I love the cricket that's being played and it's extremely nice to see McGrath and Sehwag celebrating Dravid's dismissal or Afridi knocking fists with Rohit Sharma after the latter's sixer or Sohail Tanvir getting ecstatic after dismissing Salman Butt and being hugged by a lesser known Indian cricketer or Laxman, along with Symonds and Gilchrist, plotting ways to dismiss Watson.

To me, instances like these make IPL very interesting though I still like international cricket and Test cricket is definitely my first love. IPL is superb cricket entertainment without the international boundaries. Let's keep it that way and not create unnecessary controversies. Things are bad as it is with two Indian cricketers having a go at each other. Let's not make it worse by bringing international cricket's enmity into IPL.

Let IPL live for long and forever as I definitely feel that it would reduce animosity among players and it would be carried over to international games as well which is eventually what we are all looking for, in the best interests of the game.

Jayasurya leads the charge

Live Socpast link

Sachin Tendulkar must be injured, like he was in 2006 and 2003.

The Indian Premier League got underway last week. While I haven't been able to watch games in their entirety, I've been able to watch some significant portions, which included some brilliant performances.

I think the jury is still out on whether spectators (and TV audiences) will root for a specific city-based team. There're only 8 cities (and states) represented. So which team does a cricket fan in Kerala support? Will he/she go for the team with the maximum number of Malayalis? What about folks in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh? I'd come close to having dual allegiance, to the Chennai Super Kings and the Bangalore Royal Challengers. Yet, I find it hard to support only these teams and none else. Maybe there're several other people like me, who're more than happy to enjoy every game (as long as it is rivetting stuff), regardless of the teams in action.

I'd anticipated that Hyderabad, Delhi and Punjab would be the 3 teams to beat, but turns out that Hyderabad's bowling resources are pretty scarce & unidimensional and Punjab isn't firing either. It's not as though the points table will continue to remain the way it is. There're bound to be changes as players move in & out and as the squads 'gel' better.

In contrast to a lot of people who're hopping mad about this format of the game and the blurring line between sport and entertainment, I find it hard to be condescending of Twenty20! If anything, I am quite excited about it. I'm more than willing to give it a chance, including the cheer-leaders and film star appearances. I don't expect the film stars to turn out for every single game their team features in.

Yes, there're definite ways to tweak it to make it a more level playing field between bat and ball, but that's a problem that exists in the 50-over format anyway. On this blog, we've touched on some suggestions earlier: Allowing only 6 players to bat in Twenty20 games (Steve Waugh said the same thing!) and increasing the per-bowler overs limit to 15 in ODIs or encourage wicket taking by allowing one extra over per wicket taken. Most of the ICC's rules are batsmen-oriented. Besides, what's the big deal about 11 players/batsmen or artificial stuff like 4 (or 10) overs per bowler?

The one thing I've figured out over the past 2+ decades of following cricket, especially over the last decade, is that if you don't respect a form of the game, you're unlikely to do well in that format. England's administrators, selectors and players kept disrespecting one-day internationals and they've more than paid the price. As Scyld Berry points out in his Editor's Notes in the 2008 edition of the Wisden Almanack, other than Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, England are the only Test-playing country never to have won a global one-day tournament.

The beauty of following a tournament like the IPL is watching McCullum or Sehwag play some jaw-droppingly astonishing shots, Pollock plugging away ad nauseum ad infinitum, McGrath bowl a bouncer to Symonds after Symonds smacked him over mid-wicket, Warne showing us that he's still good enough to make it to the Australian team, Asif & McGrath combining for a seam-bowling master-class, etc.

There's also the beauty of seeing people like Ganguly, Dravid, Laxman, Venugopala Rao, Sreesanth, etc. more or less appear like fish out of water in this format. I just don't understand how someone like Laxman can captain a Twenty20 side which has Afridi, Symonds, Gilchrist and Gibbs in it! If he weren't captain, his name would never be in a squad of 20!

The other thing that has struck me is the quality of the fielding, especially from the Indians in the tournament. The likes of RP Singh, Munaf, Kumble, etc. are always going to look stupid, but as was the case with the Indian Cricket League, a lot of the Indian players (who haven't yet turned out in internationals) have fielded much better than I'd expected. Perhaps the contributing factors were the support staff made available to the teams and the peer-pressure that comes with fielding alongside Ponting, Symonds, Gibbs, Afridi, de Villiers, Dilshan, Yuvraj, Kaif, Raina, Rohit Sharma, etc.

To me, there's no doubt that the IPL will be successful. What the BCCI and ICC need to do are:

• Revoke the ban on the ICL and recognize that tournament.
  
• Encourage team strategies to focus on ensuring that local players who've never played internationals (or haven't played enough of them) take upon themselves more responsibility. There are foreign players in the English county cricket system as well. The idea is that the domestic players don't just assume that the star recruit will do the job, because there maybe a few games where the star player is unavailable!
  
• I haven't yet watched the games from the stadium, but it'd be awesome if the in-stadium facilities like food, drinks, toilets, seats, etc. were revamped totally to make the stadiums far more spectator-friendly than they are right now. Since the franchisees get a share of (or all of) the gate revenue, they really have an incentive to encourage more people to watch the games from the stadiums.
  
• Figure out how on earth Sunil Gavaskar managed to get onto the SET MAX commentary team!