The day it all started

Date: 18th April, 2008,Saturday 6:30 pm. That was the official time for the start of first ever IPL opening ceremony. As soon as the cricinfo commentator wrote “Hello and welcome to the first .......” , I was shouting “Abe samir(alias mardi,alias chotu),IPL start hone wala hain chalo chalo common room” while running towards the stairs of our wing. I got my favourite seat in the common room as there were hardly 4 guys in that room. Then it all started.

Chinnaswamy stadium was already full before even the toss happened. The match was scheduled at 8 pm and already the chinnaswamy was full by 7pm.Wow.Then there was some bollywood music by shankar’s team and dances by some bollywood stars then came as Shastri invited Rahul Dravid captain of Bangalore Royal challengers and Sourav Ganguly captain of Kolkata Night Riders onto the stage. Crowd response was amazing. Shastri’s voice was hardly heard. Then came all other captains on to the stage and there were some speeches and etc. In all these speeches the one which was notable was “A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.” From Lalit Modi which was actually quoted by Nehru in 1947. No comments here.

Now everybody was gone off the stage and some gymnastics were going which I was not at all interested in. Then I saw around to notice that the common room where our TV is present is already full. Atleast 20 ppl were standing. The IPL fever has just started in KGP,I thought. Time was 7 30 pm, our dinner time and as usual I didn’t have my dinner. I got an egg puff and a frappe from Nescafe which was just outside our common room. By the time I came back somebody occupied my seat and I had to stand till the end of first innings.

Then toss happened Knight Riders batted first. By the way I was cheering for Royal challengers because 1.I am a big fan of Rahul Dravid 2. I strongly believe that whoever does well in test cricket can easily adapt to any situation. Everybody was saying royal challengers are fielding a test team. There was only me who was cheering for them because KGP is in Bengal.

In Kingfisher airlines colour jersey the royal challengers entered the field and then came Knight Rider’s batsmen in golden and black jersey. I was expecting early wickets as Praveen kumar started bowling because batsmen are just gonna try to hit every ball out of the ground. After the first over by Praveen kumar which yielded only 1 run, I clapped for him and everyone was staring at me. Wow, bongs were really serious about their team. But when McCullum hit 18 runs of the second over by zaheer khan , all my expectations were gone. Man, McCullum was hitting the ball like a tennis ball. I forgot whom I was cheering; I was just cheering “Go McCullum Go”. Finally Knight Riders won by more than 100 runs I guess. I was disappointed that there was no real contest there but I thoroughly enjoyed the batting by McCullum who scored century.

And the day it all started finally ended when I started my bittorrent client to download the highlights of the match and gone to sleep thinking that “If Knight Riders can get such a big score then what will happen when deccan chargers (the team which I thought would take the trophy) batsmen take the field which boasts of Afridi, Gibbs, Symonds, Gilchrist etc in their ranks”.