Our personal brand of IPL
Have I told you about our personal brand of cricket?
Consider the 3:2 rectangular hall in our flat with the TV placed at a corner, say A, which is the farthest corner from the front door. Let me call the front door as corner C. The batsman stands at A and the bowler at C. The bat is an empty soft drink bottle and the ball is a yellow smiley ball with it's smiley face worn off from the repeated aggressive batting. The wicket is our TV screen.
If a batsman hits the ball to the smaller & farther side BC of the rectangle ABCD, he is awarded 4 runs. If he hits it to the to the other side CD (only a small part thereof), he is awarded 2 runs. There are tricky things like a line of shoes kept across BC that the batsman has to avoid to score runs. Runs are allowed only if the ball hits the walls.
There are two ways in which a batsman can get out. Either by getting bowled i.e. the ball hits the TV screen or by getting caught. Catches after a single bounce, with both hands or not, are also legal.
Finally, there are bowling speed limits due to the small 'ground' that we play on. Speed limits are enforced on a ball-by-ball basis and decided based on how aggressively the batsman appeals against the bowler and convinces the other fielders.
Those are the rules. Now let's meet the players:
Varkey — He is the master blaster in the house. He bats and bowls well but when he has a bad day, he simply quits. He holds the record for the highest score in an innings on this pitch. His finger-flip balls are tricky too! But did I say he throws in the towel too quickly when things turn sour for him? Total sport, he is!
Sree — The most technically correct batsman, with his role model being Rahul Dravid, scores runs brilliantly on some days. On the other days, he just dozes off.
Ari — Sure, he might not know the difference between leg spin and leg bye but he is as good a batsman as a Ping Pong player can be. Our Forrest Gump's forehands sure do come in handy! He is also everyone's favourite bowler; especially Varkey's, who scores runs merrily on Ari's balls (no pun intended).
Myself — I'm the worst best worst player here. I'm a spin bowler and enjoyed tremendous success early on (if you ignore the fact that 50% of the balls were outrageously wide) until the others figured out my tricks. However, I've recently developed a yorker and an aim-for-the-leg ball that nobody has quite figured out yet. When it comes to batting, even though I do play a brilliant innings here and there, I score runs in single digits mostly.
So, that's our indoor cricket. We play it almost every night; sometimes we stay up to 2:00AM. Since it's DLF IPL season, the TV is on during the play. We take "strategic time-outs" every time a four/six is hit or a wicket falls down in IPL to watch the replays. Thus, it's a double dhamaka for us. While most people are just watching IPL on TV and getting bored during those umpteen number of commercial breaks, strategic time-outs and Ganguly's frantic blinking of eyes, we play to our hearts' content. Heck, this is our own IPL — Indoor Pillaarude League.
We have, of course, chucked out DLF Maximums, Karbonn Kamaaler, Citi Moment of Success, Maxx Mobile... err... whatever.
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