An IPL Experience

The hype around the Indian Premier League had caught onto me. Being born and brought up in Cuttack , I had watched a couple of one-day internationals and a Test match but the IPL promised to be bigger and better .So I with a few of my friends planned to experience what many people had called the most exciting experience in their lifetimes. We booked the tickets for the encounter between RCB and CSK on the 23rd of March.The ticket was priced at Rs 1100 which I thought was decent enough. The match was supposed to begin at 8:00 pm. However, anticipating a massive turnout and wary about standing for a long time in the queue, we reached the stadium a good 3 hours in advance. During the journey from home to the stadium I had asked friends and families to keep an eye on the television screen just in case we were captured in the lenses. We entered (at about 5:45 pm) an vacant Chinnasamy stadium with the sun beating down hard on the "Bagpiper Special View stand" where we eventually seated ourselves. The stand looked clean and a good number of the front row seats were adorned with RCB flags . So if you were a CSK supporter you would have to get your own flag in case you wanted to flutter anything up in the air.

We then posed for a few photos fit to be uploaded on Orkut or Facebook.In the mean time the sun had gone down and conditions were ideal in terms of the heat. The music which had started even before we entered the stadium was loud to the point of irritation and impeded any sort of conversation . We thought ,however, that it was only a matter of time and that it would stop once the match started. A while later RCB players came to the field cheered by their supporters that easily outnumbered those of CSK. We were busy figuring out the players from the distance. A few of them came near the boundary to an even larger roar of the crowd.We thought we had had our money's worth already but their was more in store as CSK players arrived f0llowed by a four groups of foreign cheerleaders. Incidentally one group was stationed to perform right in front of our stand and their reception upon ascending the podium where they performed after every four and at the end of every over would have left the cricketers asking "Who are the real stars?"

The match though did not turn out to be as interesting as the prologue.To start with the organizers had clearly distributed many more tickets than the capacity of the stand which meant that many in the front rows had to remain standing throughout the match . This affected the view of people seated behind .There were several arguments and verbal fights.To add to this was the incessant cheer-leading music which sounded more like noise.RCB's slow batting except for the occasional boundary didn't help at all. The last 2 overs of their innings with sixes disappearing to all corners of the ground accompanied with amazing pyrotechnics ,however, made up for the lack in entertainment in the middle overs. in the second half,much before the half way point in CSK's innings the fate of the match was decided.The chasers caved in without putting up much of a fight. To the crowd at large it wasn't much of a disappointment as all of them had religiously supported the home team right from the word go. But to neutrals like us the match wasn't something worth remembering.

We left a couple of overs before the match ended with mixed feelings about our first ever IPL match.