The 7th and 8th teams of IPL-1 are in the finals of this year’s version. Who would have thought that? Kumble, at the time of announcing his retirement, said that he will represent RCB this year to satisfy the terms of his contract. Rahul Dravid and Jacques Kallis have not been the selectors’ choices in the limited version of the game for their respective countries. Add to the mix, two exciting talents in Manish Pandey and Virat Kohli and you have a winning team this year. It will be interesting to see if an Indian will lift the DLF-IPL this year or will it be an Australian again. I wanted to take a crack at identify the overhyped players of this IPL-2 (both financially and otherwise) who have been total disappointments and, at the same time, list the expected underperformers who showed otherwise.
The Overhype X1
Robin Uthappa
Graeme Smith
Kevin Pieterson
Jacob Oram
Albie Morkel
Andrew Flintoff
Brendon McCullum
Jesse Ryder
Tyron Henderson
Ishant Sharma
Sreesanth
While Sehwag and Gambhir were probably the biggest disappointment as a comination, they did have a couple of decent outings to miss the above X1. I am sure there are a few more like Mashrafe Mortaza who could be part of the list but may not have played as many games. I have included Tyron Henderson because Rajasthan paid 650,000 for him and he hardly played a game. You could add some poor performers to the list such as Sanath Jayasuriya, Manpreet Gony, L. Balaji etc.
Now, how about the unexpected.
“Under”hype X1
Manish Pandey
Jacques Kallis
Brad Hodge
Rahul Dravid
T. Suman
D. Karthik
Roef Van der Merwe
R. Vinay Kumar
A. Kumble
D. Nannes
Shadab Jakati
Other names that come to mind include Fidel Edwards, Naman Ojha, B. Akhil etc.
Looking forward to a final with a beer and a newspaper in hand!
- Srikanth
