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!
