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I hope there’s not more to it than meets the eye but it’s hard to fathom how can the experienced honchos involved in organizing the IPL can be so flawed to hand over one team an advantage that no other team has the luxury of.
What I’m talking about here is the itinerary of the IPL; not the timing of staging it, but the eye-raising allotment of venues that has rolled the dice unreasonably in favor of Mumbai Indians (MI).
No team other than MI enjoys the advantage of playing seven of their first eight games at home. Why? With due respect to MI’s team composition and world-class players, it’s not surprising a wee bit that the team is reaping rich benefits of playing in front of a home crowd in familiar conditions. They are almost through to the semis and this unfair advantage has a role in that besides the quality cricket MI is playing.
And if you think it evens out with MI playing their last six games away, then you are wrong. They return to Mumbai after three games before moving out again to finish the last two. That’s pretty shady stuff!
Even more surprising is that I hardly see anybody bringing this up despite being a logical point. It’s okay to wriggle the tongue and go gaga over a team’s performance, but the biased nature of the schedule giving MI an unreasonable edge over others should be accentuated.
On the contrary, the resurgent Rajasthan Royals (RR) play their first 10 games away and only three at home in Jaipur. Where on earth is this called justice? All of us are aware of the antipathy between the IPL Chairman and the Rajasthan Cricket Association, which makes the allotment of just three matches to Jaipur more suspicious than justified. Introducing Ahmedabad (4 matches), Dharmsala (2 matches) and Nagpur (3 matches) was a reasonable futuristic approach to spread the tournament to more locales but that doesn’t mean you slice away four home matches of a particular team.
The Telangana issue erased Hyderabad’s name from the list of venues and we were told that Cuttack is the surrogate home of Deccan Chargers (DC) this year. But that’s not true! Cuttack gets only two games, which makes DC play 12 away fixtures. What home are we talking about here?
If matches at neutral venues are away games for both the teams involved, then the organizers once again finds themselves on a sticky wicket by not scheduling MI to play even a single match at either Ahmedabad, Dharmsala or Nagpur. Another undue advantage!
But…all is well with Mr. Modi!
Read the original Post Here: It’s an unfair IPL
Read the original Post Here: It’s an unfair IPL
