IPL-5 Mega-Show: Co-owner Shahrukh Khan Banned! RCB Player Arrested!

The murky affairs of the Indian Premiere League-Season Five (IPL-5) Cricket T20 continue abated. Today the Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) held a managing committee meeting in Mumbai and unanimously adopted the proposal of banning Bollywood megastar and Co-owner of Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) IPL franchise, Shahrukh Khan (SRK or King Khan), for five years from entering the Wankhede stadium in Mumbai where the movie-star allegedly misbehaved with MCA officials and security personnel. The meeting was chaired by the president of MCA, Vilasrao Deshmukh, who is also a cabinet minister in the Government of India. 

The MCA maintained that theirs is an independent body and is empowered to take binding decisions on matters directly relating to them. But as the apex body, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is also empowered to take the final decision in this matter and the expected tussle within the cricket bodies is awaited with tremendous anticipation. Apart from being an IPL co-owner Shahrukh Khan  contributes a lot to the IPL glamor and business and therefore the BCCI is most likely to find the going very tough indeed. 

The King Khan controversy has attained a hilarious political angle with Mamata Bannerji, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, coming out strongly in support of SRK and demanding 'MCA must withdraw the ban'. The ebullient and unpredictable lady must have found a regional angle in that issue since SRK happens to own Kolkata (Knight Riders), the capital from where she operates, and that the superstar has been a familiar cheering presence in the famous Eden Gardens there since the birth of IPL in 2008. Shahrukh Khan who hit back yesterday on the Wankhede brawl was yet to react to the latest development. 

Meantime Luke Pomersbach, an Australian playing for the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), was arrested last night in a Delhi five-star hotel for molesting an American woman of Indian origin and for injuring her fiance. Reports say that Pomersbach invited himself to a party in the lady's hotel room and later misbehaved with her. When her fiance tried to intervene Pomersbach attacked him violently and he had to be admitted into a hospital. While RCB regretted the incident and expelled the player from the team the IPL authorities dissociated themselves from the incident calling it a case of individuals and that there were no official IPL parties for the franchises and players. As per latest reports Luke Pomersbach got an interim bail and cried out his innocence. 

Apart from Mamata's 'regionalism' more political reactions are surfacing against the mess in IPL. Former cricketer and opposition Member of Parliament, Kirti Azad, had threatened to sit on a  fast in a Delhi stadium from May 20, 2012 if the police failed to act against the IPL. 

That the IPL-5 has come to score high on the 'cricket' aspect ultimately proves to be an aberration. Essentially, as we have maintained since its inception, it is an intoxicating cocktail of dirty money, greed, immorality, glamor, liquor and women. BCCI or IPL authorities cannot dissociate themselves from any ugly happening because only they have provided the murky environment. Players from all around the globe come to participate just for the money and fun. With the matters as of now the IPL degeneration looks set to deteriorate further in near future. 

Long live cricket!