It's Yuvi vs Dhoni at Mohali

The colourful opening ceremony done and dusted and Dravid vs Ganguly out of the way, it's the turn of Yuvraj vs Dhoni at the PCA stadium here on Saturday. It's the second game of the Indian Premier League, but the first which starts with the sun still around and only the team batting second will bat under lights. Yes, it's a true day-and-night T20 game, unlike the opener at Bangalore which was played entirely under floodlights. The game here between Team Mohali and Team Chennai has already been dubbed as Yuvraj vs Dhoni, teammates-turned-rivals for this extravaganza. But there are a whole lot of characters who will be out to hog the limelight. The biggest and most popular among them are Brett Lee of Mohali and Muttiah Muralitharan of Chennai. Lee is among the most popular Australian cricketers in India. He sings and plays guitar with finesse of a maestro. He also delivers the red cherry at over 150mph. That's what he is getting paid for. To knock off the rival batsmen, who will not relish chin music from him. Muralitharan, a Sri Lankan Tamil, will be at home when he plays for Chennai. Ironically, his captain Mahendra Dhoni and most of his colleagues in the team hardly know a word of Tamil but Murali will not be deterred by that, because his prime objective would be to stop the big guns in the opposition from firing. The biggest draw for the home crowd would undoubtedly be Yuvraj Singh. The crowds will go berserk when he comes to bat. They would be expecting nothing less that six sixes in an over. Maybe not that many, but surely a few. Especially off the bowling of Murali. Yuvraj may be a local darling, but Dhoni is the darling of the whole nation. The crowds here will go delirious if he goes hammer and tongs after the home bowlers. Two flamboyant cricketers leading the two sides in front of a huge crowd will surely set the pulse racing, not only at the venue but all over the country. As far as the selection of the final XI is concerned, Chennai coach Kepler Wessels has a clear mind about it. "I have my final XI ready but I will not reveal it till the toss. I am confident my boys will begin the campaign on a winnings note, which is very crucial in this round-robin double leg eight-team league. Of course, it is a long drawn-out affair, and the teams have lot of chances to come back. But the initial matches are crucial as the teams would like to try out various combinations and finally get them right." Coach Wessels's job has been made easy as two of the foreign recruits - Makhaya Ntini and Morne Morkle - are not available. So he has a smaller pool of foreign players to chose from. While Wessels may have his playing XI ready, Mohali coach Tom Moody was still undecided as he has a problem of plenty on hand. He and Yuvraj will have to sit down and pick four of the eight foreigner players that a team is allowed in the playing XI. Who among Lee, Simon Katich, James Hopes, Luke Pomersboch, Kyle Mills, Ramnaresh Sarwan, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene will be picked in the XI. Of the lot Sarwan is yet to reach the venue, but he is supposed to make it in time for the match. So the IPL T20 is not just about slam-bang, but also getting the combination right and making the best use of the foreign players available. The Mohali wicket has always had good bounce and carry and the outfield is lush green. On such a surface one can expect scintillating strokeplay and the full house will surely get their money's worth.

McCullum provides fireworks to give IPL the perfect start

On the day the Indian Premier League began amid outrageous glitz and a world-record innings from Brendon McCullum, it emerged that an English version of the competition will almost certainly be based on the 18 first-class counties plus a handful of overseas sides rather than the city/franchise system adopted by the IPL.
As the England and Wales Cricket Board continues to consider how to respond to the game's upheaval, officials were expressing concern at the financial implications of overhauling a domestic infrastructure that revolves around the counties, as well as the potential lack of support for city teams.

The ECB is looking at all options and is interested in finding out which offers the most value from a cricketing and commercial standpoint," the chief executive, David Collier, said here in India yesterday. Crucially he added: "The ECB constitution says that all 18 counties have to play in ECB competitions."
The board is not ruling out the involvement of foreign businessmen, whose investment will probably be needed in a package capable of attracting a multimillion-dollar TV deal, although next summer's Twenty20 World Cup, followed by the Ashes, means a putative English Premier League would not start until 2010.
As the ECB looks at ways of mollifying its centrally contracted players, furious to be following the IPL at home on TV rather than lining their pockets in India, it was also confirmed that England's $20m (£10.1m) winner-takes-all Twenty20 match in Antigua against the Texan billionaire Sir Allen Stanford's West Indies All-Stars may be played as early as October.
Victory in that game could net the players more in a day than most cricketers here in India are earning in over seven weeks, although a window of a fortnight might in any case now be open next April for England's players to take part in the second year of the IPL. Participation in a competition which Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, has repeatedly said is out of bounds for England's centrally contracted cricketers until 2010 at the earliest would be at the discretion of the coach, Peter Moores.
But for all the well-meaning - if belated - intentions, it was hard yesterday evening to imagine an international event in England matching the IPL for sheer unadulterated hype. The opening ceremony in itself was worth the entrance fee, the laser show and firework display providing a devastating counterpoint to the feeble efforts at Lord's at the start of the 1999 World Cup. And then McCullum thrashed a murderous undefeated 158 not out from 73 balls - the highest score in five years of Twenty20 cricket anywhere in the world - as the Kolkata Knight Riders racked up 222 for three after being asked to bat first by Rahul Dravid, the captain of the Bangalore Royal Challengers.
Not even the most outlandish pre-tournament hype could have written this script. As his team-mates - including Sourav Ganguly and Ricky Ponting - tried but failed to join in the fun at the other end, McCullum almost outdid the opening ceremony for explosiveness with a succession of pulls and drives that brought him 10 fours and 13 sixes and the Royal Challengers to their knees. By the end of the innings, which he completed with a mow for one last six over long-on off Praveen Kumar, even the locals had been won over.
"I could hardly feel my legs for the first eight or nine balls, I was so nervous," he said afterwards, and immediately signalled to Wriddhiman Saha, a 23-year-old keeper-batsman from Bengal, to take over the gloves. Barring something extra special in the next three matches, McCullum will now earn the right to wear a special orange helmet designated for the leading runscorer after each round of matches. The Tour de France's yellow jersey it is not, but cricket will have plenty of time to get used to the gimmicks.
The Challengers' reply was a non-event. Dravid lost his leg stump in the second over to India's 19-year-old pace-bowling prodigy Ishant Sharma, and when Jacques Kallis dragged Ajit Agarkar to mid-on it was 24 for three. The rest barely troubled the scorers en route to 82 all out, but McCullum had already given the IPL the start it craved.
New era: the verdict
The contest
The players cared all right. It took Zaheer Khan only one ball to give Brendon McCullum the glare. When Ashley Noffke had figures of 0.1-0-11-0 he looked like he wanted the ground to swallow him up. 7/10
The support
The stadium was packed, but the biggest cheer was when Sachin Tendulkar signed a declaration affirming the MCC's spirit of cricket. 8/10
The glitz
Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, owner of the Kolkata franchise, was joined in the crowd by fellow actor Preity Zinta, co-owner of Mohali. Washington Redskins cheerleaders danced; Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Bollywood music directors, sang. 8/10
The conclusion
Could hardly have been better. The opening ceremony and McCullum's innings will be talked about for years. 9/10