From Times of India:
The debt-ridden Deccan Chargers can no longer be a part of the IPL after its beleaguered owners failed to produce a Rs 100-crore bank guarantee before the Bombay high court, a condition that had been set for the struggling team’s survival in the league.
I think back to this club’s glorious history, its five years of rich tradition, and I shed a tear over what we have lost. The team’s many great heroes will long be remembered in the annals of cricket, and we will forever mark this ugly day when, many years from now, we tell our grandchildren, “I was lucky enough to have seen the Chargers take the field.”
(PS: I should quickly explain the above. One of the reasons I don’t particularly care for the IPL is that the teams are obviously fake. No matter how hard Shah Rukh Khan tries to convince me otherwise, the KKR folk could just as easily be replaced with the RR folk and so on. What’s the point of rooting for any team? What’s the logic behind the rivalry? This is a problematic position, to be sure: true cricket lovers will reply that I should like the tournament simply because it features the world’s best players playing cricket. What does authenticity matter? Are you into this game because of the game, or because of some silly nationalistic impulse?
I haven’t fully figured out how to respond to this. But when teams like the Chargers and Kerala come and go, it reminds me of the power of tradition and history. The Indian team will always endure, even if its balance sheet plummets (a dubious prospect these days, to be sure). It’s silly, but when I see IPL players, I see dollar signs running up and down. When I see international players, I see flags. I suppose I’m trading one fiction (“national authenticity”) for another, but boy, I still prefer it.)
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