Insert cliché about Bollywood glamour here

Tamim Iqbal: sadly not taking part in the IPL

The third edition of the Indian Premier League is kicking off tomorrow and promises to be another instalment of top entertainment, with some cricket thrown into the mix. I watched a lot of last year’s tournament, which was held in South Africa due to security issues in India to do with something along the lines of the need to police the biggest example of the democratic process ever carried out anywhere. Anyway, last year the players involved showed us brilliant hitting and canny bowling, with some pretty awesome fielding thrown into the mix too, with Deccan Chargers coming out as winners.

The whole IPL experience last year was also enlivened by an interesting website, Fake IPL Player who blogged spurious rumours and innuendo about the Kolkata Knight Riders (hilarious team name BTW). It seemed the more FIP blogged the worse Kolkata did until they imploded and finished bottom of the table.

As mentioned previously on this blog, I’m an admirer of Twenty20 as a format and I’m especially glad that this year’s IPL is being shown on free to air TV courtesy of ITV 4. It’s also nice that my ITV watching will extend beyond Jeeves and Wooster reruns, Poirot, and their excellent regional news coverage. Here’s hoping they do a good job, the Bollywood presenter they’ve brought in for it is suitably attractive so that’s a start at least.

There have been some slightly puzzling developments in the IPL this year to do with overseas players. One is that no Pakistan players have been bought up by any of the franchises, despite them being the Twenty20 world champions and boasting players such as Shahid Afridi, Sohail Tanvir and Umar Gul, all of whom have been hits in this format. I know there are extreme tensions between India and Pakistan but it does seem strange that no Pakistan players were bought up by the franchises.

Equally puzzling is the total lack of Bangladesh players in the IPL. While Bangladesh overall may not be an especially good side they boast some outstanding talents in the form of Shakib al-Hasan and most spectacularly in Tamim Iqbal, a young man who could go on to be one of the game’s great limited-over batters. While the Bangladesh v England Test series is going to be taking place for the first part of the IPL, English players such as Keven Pietersen and Eoin Morgan have been picked up, yet no Bangladeshis. It also seems daft that Kolkata, given its proximity to Bangladesh, haven’t picked up any Bangladeshi players.

This leaves the IPL relying on the talents of, well, the rest of the world really. There’s pretty much all the stars from world cricket you’d want to see play in this format (Dhoni, Murali, McCullum, Gayle) plus some over the hill Aussies and journeymen Saffers. Looks like it could be a good one. Would’ve loved to have seen Tamim Iqbal though. That boy’s a bit special.