The White Elephants of the IPL - Part 1

It’s funny how your priorities as an IPL enthusiast keep on changing over the years. As an engineering college student with plenty of time on your hands, you crib about how the razzmatazz is taking away all the glory from the wait and watch strategies of Test cricket. As an MBA student with less but adequate time on your hands, you put your marketing fundas and case studies to good use by analysing why the IPL has been a success – Chris Gayle going ballistic or Harbhajan Singh’s balle balle on Sreesanth’s cheek.

And as a first time employee, the greatest motivation for you is probably the number of fantasy league points which a player can give you. After all, this is the only place you can go one up over your boss.

Mere mortals as we are, we often go for an impulsive decision while choosing somebody in our fantasy league team – he has scored runs in the past/he has not scored runs in the past, so the law of averages should catch up with him/he has a hot girlfriend. Keeping this in mind and based on my own mostly bitter experiences, I have come up with my team of prospective bench-warmers for the IPL. Part 1 deals with the batsmen who have come up as turkey more often than not in the IPL so far.

Parthiv Patel

The IPL antithesis of Chris Gayle. It is hard to believe that Parthiv Patel has been around for over a decade now. It is even harder to believe that he is still playing the IPL. He’s played for four teams (if you count the Deccan Chargers and the Sunrisers Hyderabad as two different teams) and in six editions has a highest score of 57. His 14 sixes are the lowest for a batsman who has crossed 1000 runs in the IPL. Add to that a batting average below 20, a strike rate just above 100 and seven ducks. His dismissals per innings rate for a wicket-keeper is the lowest for anyone who has kept more than 30 times.

Yet, he continues to open the batting and keep for his franchise. He has yet to cross 100 runs in this year’s edition so far, despite having played six innings. Bad habits die hard. More so in the IPL.

Naman Ojha

He was expected to be MS Dhoni‘s understudy – at least for the shortest version of the game. Instead, Naman Ojha now finds himself out of the Delhi Daredevils team and rightly so. It may be noted that he lost his place to another India prospect (Kedar Jadhav), so the writing is slowly starting to form on the wall for Ojha.

Three seasons back, things were far more different. A swashbuckling 94 in his second IPL game in a high-scoring defeat for Rajasthan against Chennai had catapulted him straight into the Indian team. A couple of insipid performances later, he was still hot property in the next IPL auctions, where he was snapped up by Delhi. He was the only full-time keeper Delhi had and would go on to play most of the matches for the franchise over the next two seasons.

He was competent behind the stumps most of the time, but awkward in front of them. Barring a couple of innings, his tenure had all the symbols of the malaise which often accompanies promise – inconsistency. As a result, he has gone straight from national reckoning to domestic second lead.

Venugopal Rao

A product of the Greg Chappell school of learning, Yalaka Venugopal Rao had everything most young Hyderabadi batsmen do, but lacked two things – those magical wrists and a power of resolve. The fact that he and Suresh Raina started their international careers together puts the above statement into perspective.

Nevertheless, Venu was an integral part of the blow-hot-blow-cold campaign of the Deccan Chargers for the first three years of the IPL. He was bought by the Daredevils in the 2011 auction, who seem to have either an eye for local talents going inept, or a mechanism for doing so. He played about half of their matches last season and was shunted out for the likes of Manprit Juneja this season. He did not get a chance to bat in the only game he got – against the Mumbai Indians – and was promptly dropped for the next match. The closest he can get to a permanent slot in the team is as a mascot – after all, the only game he played was the only one Delhi has won this season.

Manish Pandey

A criminal loss of talent. When Manish Pandey hit the first century by an Indian batsman in the IPL and that too in South African conditions, many wondered why he wasn’t fast-tracked into the Indian side for the 2009 World T20. Four years later, most of them are wondering how he makes the Pune first XI as often as he does.

Pandey had everything going for him – a fat IPL contract, a guaranteed place in the Karnataka Ranji team and a bright future ahead. Probably everything was going too fast, as since that century he has made just a couple of fifties along with 8 ducks in 41 innings. The likes of Ajinkya Rahane and Cheteshwar Pujara have gone past him in the race to the Indian team and Pandey is on the verge of being an also-ran.

Neither the middle order nor the top order has worked for him so far this year, as a grand total of 31 runs in 4 innings would testify. With great talent comes responsibility – at 23, it is not a bad time for Pandey to start realizing the same.

Saurabh Tiwary

Let’s face it – Saurabh Tiwary was never meant to play Test cricket and more talented individuals (including his erstwhile Mumbai Indians comrade Ambati Rayudu) have not had a chance to lay their hands on a India cap. But you cannot fault him for this – 2010 was the year when he and Rayudu almost took Mumbai to the trophy. The India cap did not last too long on his head, as it was the World Cup year and there were already too many contenders for the number 6 slot.

His performances hadn’t gone unnoticed and Bangalore splashed out quite a bit of money to get their hands on him. Since then, it has all gone downhill. Tiwary had 3 half-centuries in his first 15 appearances in the IPL – since then he has turned out 31 times for Bangalore for a best of 42. As of now, injury and bad forms means he is not even guaranteed of a starting place.

All this is a far cry for someone who was hailed to be the left-handed Dhoni. Unlike his statemate, Tiwary lacks the tenacity to hold on to his chances. As a result, he has slipped far away from national reckoning, and with his lack of natural talent as compared to the likes of Rahane or Chand or even Manish Pandey, it seems highly improbable that he would make a comeback any time soon.

Footnote:- The fact that statistics are not always meant to make sense is clearly highlighted in the case of Kieron Pollard. With a batting average of 22.81 and only a fifty per 15 innings, one cannot say that he has provided enough bang for the bucks Mumbai have paid him. But I have exempted him for the sole reason that it is not his fault in this case – I doubt Chris Gayle would have been able to do much to Bangalore’s fortunes had he been forced to come in at number 5 or lower every time.