Ooh, JUST when you think those smug smiles are gone...

... Pathan gets out.

Wow, Yusuf Pathan, why don't you do this more often for, say, I don't know, the national team, maybe?

Nice match, some great batting all around - most of which I've forgotten because Pathan was so awesome. I was just thinking about how this whole thing was a done-deal at RR being 69/4 after 10 chasing 213, and how much I hated poor Ali Murtaza because he has a very close resemblance to a particular Tamil VJ I loathe on sight (seriously, it's Pavlovian), when Yusuf Pathan said, "Screw this", and hit three sixes in a row.

Then everything his bat touched scurried to the boundary. Can wood get scabies?

And yeah, I was hoping for those smug smiles to be blasted to smithereens - the Mumbai Indians, that is.

Did you see them grinning everywhere after the match? Dudes, next time you defend like this, you ain't gonna be as lucky. What if next time you score 120, huh? Huh?

Hi, IPL, it's not good for my digestion when you have me so actively against Sachin Tendulkar so close on the heels of loving him for his double-century super-awesomeness.

Just saying.

We are not entertained.

... except by one teensy little insignificant thing called cricket, but we'll get to that later, shall we?

Look. I haven't watched cricket in a long while, OK? And I've been looking forward to this IPL. So while sitting down to watch the opening ceremony yesterday, I did not expect an absolutely unpalatable hodge-podge of poorly executed amateur gimmicks. Hi, people! 2010! Billions of rupees! Internet! International access to the best around the globe! Creative heads!

You can do better!

So it starts off with.... silence. The ceremony took the longest time to kick off, and meanwhile the camera kept panning over the crowd in the weirdest headgear. Weird headgear only = awesome when they're funny, people. These... were not funny.

I was reduced to watching reruns of Psych I'd already watched twice before when I heard that the ceremony had started. Eagerly I flicked channels. And seriously, Psych was helluva lot more entertaining.

There is this huge... cloth cuboid tent thingamajig that's slowly lifted off the stage in the centre of the ground, revealing... okay, the performers, I guess. The guy in front starts singing, and dude. It's the most boring song ever. Look, I'm as big an Abba fan as anybody, but, really? For this ceremony? For this tournament?

Indian Premier League! I.n.d.i.a.n.

Get a few local artistes, belt out some pop B'wood tracks, get the crowd on their feet, and everybody wins. What is this goshdarned obsession with foreigners? Look, if you're going to get foreigners, you might as well get Lady Gaga or somebody. Not some washed-out band that's decades old (no offence meant). The singers were the ones jumping about on the stage, shaking their made-up manes, trying to infuse some non-existent energy. The crowd? Maybe just slightly bewildered.

Then these people with the white dresses standing around the boundary came filing in.

Whoever came up with that idea, please fire him.

They were... look, I don't know. My brother suggested, "chefs" while my grandmother was pretty insistent they were "hospice nurses" or maybe "nuns". Personally, when some built in lights in their dresses started glowing, I was going for extras from a hybrid of Star Wars and The Omen (don't ask me why).

These lights were of different colours, and a lot of them didn't even work. They were scrambling about, ostensibly trying to get into some kind of formation, but I don't know. They were just going about with confused, embarrassed smiles on their faces. It was like slow torture, having to watch this (until I realised that, you know, I didn't have to watch it).

Then came Deepika Padukone and her ultra-short dance routine, with support dancers who were dressed in costumes so grotesque I can't even snark about them. The song selection started off great (I gotta feeling, by Black Eyed Peas) and quickly devolved into lameassery. And the dance moves? Were not even fit for exhibition on a Filmfare awards show.

When I came back again, they were showing a laser show on the big white tent, a sort of 'nostalgic' recap of the first two IPLs. And people, I was ready to lose it. Hello, you are only two years old! We haven't got short term memory loss, you know! We remember (like you ever let us forget)! Look ahead! Do something new and flamboyant and stop wasting our time!

And then came Lionel Ritchie and some song and some fireworks, but by that time I was tired and pissed off and wishing really hard for some cricket.

The cricket turned out to be actually kind of awesome (KKR def DC! That makes me happy) but it turns out there was one more annoyance lurking in the bushes:

In between balls of an over, the camera would shift to the digital board, which would blare out an ad in full volume.

And, listening to Akshay Kumar's inane, loony laughter while 'advertising' Micromax mobile for the umpteeth time, I really lost it.

I HATE THIS. I REALLY, REALLY DO. SHUT UP, PEOPLE. THIS EXCESS IS PISSING ME OFF SO BAD, I DON'T HAVE THE WORDS.

Either that, or I'm getting cynical in my old age.

EDIT: Oh, it would be amiss of me to not mention the match preview show. Navjot Singh Sidhu is back, with all of his metaphors and gesticulations, a hilarious counterpoint to the anchor's style.

So he's waxing poetic about "music as a language" and Mr. Kocchar decides to take a brave step beyond saying "Indeed" and adds "Music is really bubbly, it gets all the batsmen bubbled up" and somewhere I was dying out of laughter.

Now that's entertainment.

The height of audacity

... is Sangakkara electing to bat first after winning the toss.

I'm sure a lot of us have already taken an India v Sri Lanka final for granted, but you didn't have to show it like that! This was not a dead-rubber! Don't you want to make things just that a little harder for India? You even went in with a full-strength team - against one that decided to rest its best opening batsman, its frontline spinner, and a senior pacer!

And after being trampled over by India, the man admits, "I don't think we learnt much by batting first."

All I can say to that?

It started with a century...

... and ended with a misfield.

Thanks, Zaheer.

Never did get much out of catching half a dozen buses across the city to get to a TV showing the match, did I.

Oh well.

Do not want.

They hate us. They really, really hate us!

India Darcy'd

Perhaps the contrasting performances of the two captains playing at number three best described the proceedings in the Twenty20 played between India and Sri Lanka on Thursday.

Sangakkara, suave, authoritative and just as articulate with the bat as he is with the English language, blasted 60-odd off 20-odd, while Dhoni left with a failed attempt at (once again) transcribing his ODI game into his Twenty20 one.

While not as big an Austen fan as some of my contemporaries, I've been very fond of Leela's "brown Mr. Darcy" assessment of Kumara Sangakkara.

India's problems probably started before the match itself.

For one, it's bowling "attack". Nehra, Dinda, Ishant Sharma. Yusuf Pathan.

... What?

Ishant Sharma has been dropped from the ODI and Test teams. So why was he in the Twenty20 team? Has he confidence or recent good performances in the shorter versions of the game on his side? Was he successful in the IPL? Hell, was he even part of a successful team in the IPL?

And what was with Zaheer Khan being treated like a giant pista and rested for the Twenty20s?

The less said about the fielding, the better.

The last time India -- the same India that's ostensibly deriding the highest echelons of the game, ruthlessly promoting Twenty20 to the point of blatant exploitation -- won a Twenty20 international convincingly was October 2007.

India falling prey to a lack of seriousness in Twenty20 that used to characterise its opponents in the past?

I don't know, but then again, I don't know how else to explain the selection of the likes of Ishant, Dinda, Yusuf Pathan, Rohit Sharma.

Who's awesome?

Why, Badri, of course.

And Vijay... is the captain? Tamil Nadu obviously now follows the last-person-to-have-played-for-the-national-team captaincy policy.