IPL does it again !!

The cash rich Indian Paisa League is making it a habit to stay in controversies, if it was the inadequate security arrangements last time , this time around its the treatement meted out to the pakistani players in the auctions for ipl-3, which ended up with none of the 11 pakistani players being bought by any of the franchisees, notwithstanding the fact that most of these players come from the team which won the T-20 world championship in 2009.

The pakistani government, as always was the first to react with outrage and accused the indian government outright of conspiring against their players and himiliating them in front of the whole world.There was a huge outcry among the Pakistani players and the media as well. To this our very own minister of external affairs SM Krishna; retaliated saying that pakistan should learn to draw the line between sports and politics and should realize that this is a petty issue and cannot be taken up at the diplomatic level.Ealier the indian government had said in its defence that it has done a good deal to ensure that the pakistani players are issued visas to participate in the IPL and that the visas were in fact issued in record time.The Franchisee owners,when asked as to what was the reason for not picking the pakistani players, said , it was their availability. What availability are they talking about ?? do they not know that pakistan has been playing very little cricket since last year??..are they trying to tell us that young players like pollard, kemar roach and eoin morgan will be available all the time?? Furthermore, they can't even present any cricketing logic for the snub, for who would want pick a Damien martyn over Shadid Afridi, who arguably is the best twenty-20 player in the world today or Umar Gul over Kemar Roach, or Umar Akmal over Eoin Morgan for that matter.But still, a few franchisee owners like Ness Wadia supported their actions and went on to say that it made perfect sense..to 10 year olds perhaps.This raises another important question , if no one was interested in buying the players why were they allowed to register for the auction in the first place.

All these points suggest that the snub was deliberate and that all this was planned before hand perhaps with a little involvement from the government. Personally, I feel that it is the cricket lovers and the game that are at loss in the hands of a few business greedy men to whom ipl is all about money and nothing else... I do agree that the damage that Pakistan has done to us in the past is irrepairable but this is not how we should retaliate, this approach is not so Indian .I feel that all this could have been handled gracefully. The franchisee owners or the ipl boss himself should have spoken with the players and communicated to them that it will not be possible to allow them to participate in this season of the IPL too for security reasons or whatever.
I feel sorry for the cricketers and want to tell them that IPL is not representative of our country and our people and that we will be miss them in the IPL.

Cheers!!
Yousuf