 IPL will be remembered for the triumph of the underdogs
2nd Jun 2008 23:01 IST
Agencies
The razzmatazz notwithstanding, not all was hunky-dory with the tournament and some ugly on-field and off-field spats made as many headlines as the cricketing action.
The ugliest perhaps was the Harbhajan Singh-S Sreesanth slapping row. Playing for rival teams Mumbai Indians and King XI Punjab, Harbhajan slapped Sreesanth after losing a match and ended up incurring a Rs 3 crore fine and a ban from the entire tournament.
The episode threatened to snowball into a crisis and there were whispers that it may end up spoiling the dressing room environs of Team India, but the players involved in the row made sure that it did not go out of hand by letting bygones be bygones and embracing each other publicly after a disciplinary hearing.
No less bad was Vijay Mallya's feud with his own team -- Royal Challengers Bangalore -- after it began to be ridiculed as a Test team following loss after loss.
Rahul Dravid, the skipper of the team, maintained a stoic silence even as Mallya went about sacking the team's CEO Charu Sharma and lambasting Dravid for recruiting players who were not suited to the Twenty20 format of the game.
It is another matter that at the start of the tournament, Mallya had said he was satisfied with the choices made.
Then there were embarrassing reports of the ill-treatment of fringe players in Kings XI and Kolkata.
While, Kings XI asked theirs to vacate five-star hotels to accommodate more high-profile friends of their Bollywood star owner, Kolkata told theirs to go back home after they failed to fit into the scheme of things of coach John Buchanan.
In another controversy, the scantily clad cheerleaders invited the ire of the moral brigade in Mumbai and Kolkata, which threatened to disrupt matches if the girls did not cover up.
The ladies were only too willing to oblige and were happy to put on more clothes to respect the local sentiments and perhaps also escape some nasty comments thrown at them during their performances.
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