The two counties sit cheek by jowl on the map of England while Mumbai and Delhi are 1000 kilometres apart, leading to a divergence in culture and mindset that can only be experienced, not explained. Let’s just say that Mumbai is Mumbai, and Delhi is Delhi and never have the twain met.For more than six decades, players from the two cities have hissed and growled at each other behind the façade of fair play on the field; occasionally they dropped the façade to come to blows even though they played for the same India team! The venerated Wisden Almanack reveals that India lost the 1974 to England 0-3, but the root of that whitewash could be traced to Mumbai versus Delhi.
You might wonder why and how all this has relevance in the IPL which has players drawn from all over the world, as indeed local cross-over players. Like Delhi lad Shikhar Dhawan who plays for Mumbai Indians and Mumbai’s Avishkar Salvi who assists Delhi Daredevils. Of course there is no relevance, but why should that matter? In the hype around the IPL, anything that adds to the hoopla goes.
So much so that Kieron Pollard, the 22-year-old giant from Jamaica who set the cricket world abuzz by being sold to Mumbai Indians for an undisclosed sum in a secret tie-breaker after several franchises had been deadlocked over the maximum permissible pay-out of $750000, was sucked into the Mumbai-Delhi tug-o-war shortly after he landed. “Huh! What? Yes, big deal,” he said – or words to that effect – looking bewildered when asked how he felt about this celebrated rivalry.
Pollard was the cynosure of all eyes when he took the field, and by the end of the evening, his franchise owners, India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, may have been convinced that the money had been well spent even if he did not quite rattle the Qutb Minar with either bat or ball. There have been several high priced-duds in the IPL yet – Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff, at upwards of 1.5 million USD per year among the more notable – but Pollard just might be able to even things out a bit because he comes with no prima donna baggage.
But to get back to the match, For the second time in succession, Mumbai topped 200, this time exceeding it by 18 runs to make Delhi’s task of running down the target seem like running up a 218-storey New York skyscraper in one breath. The breath, alas broke, when Tillekratne Dilshan was bowled by a swinging Yorker from his teammate `Slinga’ Malinga, and when Sehwag fell shortly after, Delhi were not just broken for breath, but had gone bust, losing by a whopping 98 runs.
Mumbai’s total was built around a masterly 63 from Sachin Tendulkar, with useful support from young tyros Saurabh Tiwary and Ambati Rayudu. If these names don’t ring a bell now, remember you read them here first when they become stars. Nobody, of course, was a patch on Tendulkar who didn’t hit a single six in the innings, yet had the best strike rate of all, showing that mere big hits is no substitute for genius.
Even Delhi’s partisan crowd went into raptures at this performance from the Little Master, who must remain the only cricketer from Mumbai to be accepted wholeheartedly in Delhi. In that sense, Tendulkar unites India like perhaps nobody before.
Since I am also from Mumbai, I would have liked to end this piece with a hurrah, except for one niggling worry. There have been four major casualties already in the IPL. Graeme Smith and Dmitri Mascarenhas have gone home because of injury, M S Dhoni and Gautam Gambhir could be out of commission for a week and more. And there are still six more weeks remaining in the tournament. The workload on cricketers and the frequency of injuries must alert administrators that itineraries need to be better planned.
The funny part, of course, is that within a fortnight of the IPL finishing the T20 World Championship starts in the West Indies. This was supposed to take place once every two years, but this will be the third edition since the first one in South Africa in September 2007.
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