Yuvraj Singh, new balls and waking up Daniel Vettori: my latest week at the IPL

Last Thursday at Supersport Park, Centurion, something most unusual happened. Yuvraj Singh hit the biggest six of the tournament and in doing so, lost the match for his team. In a rain reduced match against the Chennai Super Kings, the Punjab Kings XI were chasing 185 runs in 18 overs, a daunting 10.3 runs per over. After a couple of wickets and a slow start, the asking rate shot up to 13 runs per over.

And then the fireworks began. Simon Katich hit three consecutive sixes before holing out on the boundary. Yuvraj Singh was joined by Mahela Jayawardene at the crease and their partnership quickly mushroomed as they continued to keep up with the intimidating asking rate. But when Yuvraj hit the monster of all sixes, measuring 119 metres, he lost the slippery wet ball that was coming so readily onto the bat and over the boundary.

The replacement dry ball allowed Chennai captain, MS Dhoni, to put spinners Muralitharan and Suresh Raina on for a few economical overs, thereby winning the game. As in any other form of cricket, the prevailing conditions are never in one’s control.

As Shilpa Shetty, the Bollywood megastar and co-owner of the Rajasthan Royals outfit said in Cape Town at the start of the IPL, “It is the unpredictability of cricket that makes it the best game there is.”

East London, nicknamed “slummies” for obvious reasons, is a coastal city in the Eastern Cape. I went to boarding school 100 miles away in the far smaller town of Grahamstown. Bunking out to the big lights of East London ten years ago offered such great excitement and I hadn’t been back to “slummies” since those exciting weekends away from school, where I remember seeing such fantastic things as indoor laser games for the first time.

And so I decided to visit East London last Friday for an IPL cricket match. On arrival I couldn’t help realise what a small and sleepy town it really is. Not much happens in EL and when it does, it happens slowly. The Xhosas, who make up most of the Eastern Cape population, are a very laid-back people and schedules run on the quintessential African time.

There are no taxis at the airport and the airport to hotel shuttle minibus stopped seven times during an hour and a half journey before dropping me at my hotel, just 15 miles from the airport. To their credit, Neil Mckenzie and Ramiz Raja, didn’t complain once as our driver stopped to run errands and wave at his girlfriends. One of five Wisden cricketers of the year in 2008, Mckenzie, helped a wheel-chaired lady in and out of the minibus and then carried her grandson’s bag to the foyer of their hotel. Mckenzie, who is commentating on the IPL, hadn’t been recognised by the couple, he’s just a great guy.

I had a few hours to kill before watching the Delhi Daredevils thrash the Mumbai Indians so I enjoyed a delicious fillet steak and a pint of castle draught at the Blue Lagoon hotel deck. I shared the deck with a pair of dassies (rock rabbits), who moved slower than the Xhosas as they soaked up the sun. I was contemplating the fact that this obscure animal’s closest living relative is the elephant when a charming Xhosa brought me my bill.

The total damage was R49, roughly a third of the price of the equivalent meal in a Johannesburg or Cape Town hotel. No wonder Lalit Modi and the BCCI chose cities like East London over the original London town when the Indian government decided it would be unable to provide the appropriate levels of security for the tournament.

The cricket ground, Buffalo Park, is only 150 yards from the sea, without a stand in between, and boasts the largest grass bank I have ever seen. Stretching hundreds of yards up a hill at an awkward angle, the bank affords spectators an awful long range view from which to watch the cricket as the offshore wind blows their picnics away. I guess the locals don’t know any better.

Not that many aeroplanes come and go from East London and when I boarded my plane the following morning I found that my aisle seat was next to Mr Daniel Vettori’s. His wife and two month old son, James, were by the window. He recognised me from my asking lots of questions at press conferences and he congenially said hello but he clearly wasn’t after a good old chinwag.

I guess the New Zealand captain and highly economical spin bowler, who is ranked number four in the world ODI bowler’s rankings, didn’t want me to ask him why he played in only the first few matches this season. He has sat out of the next seven matches.

When I looked up the Reliance Rankings, as they are now named, I saw another Kiwi’s name at number two. Kyle Mills is apparently fit as a fiddle and desperate to play for the Mumbai Indians but he is yet to be given a game.

The amount of money wasted on cricket player’s salaries for this tournament would be enough to put a dent inn the battle against world hunger. Consider the fact that Mashrafe Mortaza from Bangladesh receives a salary of 600 000 US dollars per season from the Kolkata Knight Riders and has never even played a match for them.

So I was sitting next to Vettori when I thought I would stretch across his sleeping body and lift up the blanket covering his son’s face to get a good look at the little tiger, only to find the baby breastfeeding. Vettori senior awoke at this delicate point in procedings and I quickly looked the other way.

However East London is a bustling metropolis when compared to Kimberley. The stark beauty of the North Eastern Cape landscape surrounds the airstrip where my 40-seater twin-propeller South African Airways plane landed on Monday. My father calls it mamfa – miles and miles of fuck all!.

The old diamond town was a British stronghold where rogues like Barney Barnato and Cecil John Rhodes found their fortune was famously besieged by the Boers for 124 days over the turn of the 20th Century, during the Boer War. The town is famous for the big hole; a seriously deep crater dug by hand that yielded 15 million carats of diamonds.

I arrived at the De Beers Oval nice and early for the match and mine was the fourth car in the queue to enter the media car park. Amazingly it took forty minutes – the same amount of time Bangalore yesterday took to score 110 runs – to enter the car park. Each car and bag inside it was thoroughly searched and then searched again before it could progress up a ramp so that my car’s underside could be checked for explosives. Fifteen policemen handled the operation and I missed the toss.

The Deccan Chargers posted a formidable 166 runs with newcomer Andrew Symonds making runs for the second time in as many matches at that ground. But it was the Calypso batting of West Indian Dwayne Smith that earned the player of the match (what was wrong with saying man of the match?) award.

The Rajasthan Royals put up a poor fight as they were bowled out for 113 runs. But their biggest potential loss of the evening was that their captain, Shane Warne, pulled a hamstring and may spend the final ten days of the tournament on the sidelines. Warne would prefer to be in the thick of the action but it would allow him more time to play poker and womanise.

The first impressive performance this season by a New Zealander took place last night as the under pressure Kolkata captain, Brendon McCullum, smashed 84 runs from 64 balls to help his side post 173 at Centurion. It looked a winning total but could the side that has won one match from eleven defend it on a pitch that offered assistance to both swing and spin bowlers?

Of course they could not. John Buchanan, who coached Australia in their glory years, is an awful T20 coach and McCullum is a pathetic T20 captain. The relatively unknown Sri Lankan, Angelo Matthews was preferred to Charl Langeveldt, probably the best death bowler in South Africa and Mccullum’s bowling changes were inexplicable.

Mystery spinner, Ajentha Mendis was given the second over when the ball was swinging like a banana. David Hussey was given only one over and that over was during the powerplay. Ganguly, the most economical bowler of last year’s tournament and a bowler that is most effective when the ball is swinging wasn’t given even one over.

Bangalore required 14 runs an over with four overs to go when another Kiwi, Ross Taylor launched his assault on Ishant Sharma, aged Ajit Agarkar and inexperienced Angelo Matthews. Taylor’s 81 came from 33 balls – an astonishing strike rate of 245.45 runs per 100 balls – as he struck seven fours and five sixes and outdid his fellow Kiwi, McCullum, winning the match with four balls to spare.

The Kolkata Knight Riders are the only team of eight that cannot qualify for the semi-finals. Delhi looks safe at the top of the table and Chennai and Deccan look relatively safe just behind. So it looks most likely that Mumbai, Bangalore, Rajasthan and Punjab fight it out for that highly coveted fourth spot. But, of course, it’s not yet as clear cut as that!