Q puts together his Third Quarter report on the IPL:
Some people questioned that the length of the tournament, 45 days to be
exact, would be taxing on the viewers who would lose interest. Nothing
like that has happened and Q3 was witnessed with the same packed crowds
and large number of TV viewers as Q1 and Q2.
With Q4 expected to
be the most exciting quarter of the IPL, and the RACE to the Final Four
in its concluding stages, expect the interest of the viewers to remain
high, if not higher than the preceding quarters.
And the Indian Express reports on changing loyalties in Kashmir. Cricket was the site on which Kashmiri nationalism first expressed itself but the IPL and Mohammad Mudasir might be changing all that:
Mudasir was discovered during a pace hunt conducted by Javagal
Srinath and T A Sekar of the MRF pace foundation at Sher-e-Kashmir
Stadium, Srinagar in 2006. He represented the J&K under-19 team
last season and bagged 35 wickets.
Mudasir has not yet made his debut but IPL has already confused
the decades-old cricket loyalties in Kashmir which were always an
expression of separatist politics here.
The cricket pitch was, in fact, the first platform for
separatist politics. On October, 13, 1983 when West Indies came to play
India in Srinagar, the separatists dug the pitch to protest. The police
arrested Mushtaq-ul-Islam and Showkat Bakhshi — who later became
militant commanders — inside the stadium while Hurriyat leader Shabir
Shah too was charge-sheeted.
Finally, The Atheist and King Cricket write about Jacob Oram's wonderful clean hitting century that saved face for New Zealand.