IPL T20 – I came, I saw, I had a blast!

First up: A confession. I’m not a cricket fan. I hardly ever watch it. Tests or ODI’s, it doesn’t matter, I’d probably watch an over or two, and then just flip channels. Over the past couple of weeks, IPL has been a huge event here in India, and a new source of entertainment for Indians - I mean, never have we had anything like this - Stars owning teams, Franchises, foreign superstars, previously never thought of players playing together and oh yes, cheerleaders. Even with huge hype of IPL Twenty20 cricket, I’d never seen a single match here in Chennai - mainly because of CAS which meas that all the “goody” channels are available on a subscription basis, and since I stay in a lodge these aren’t available to me.

Also, it’s been a long cherished dream of mine to watch any event Live at a stadium. Last Saturday, my desire to watch a T20 match, and long cherished dream to watch a Live event was fulfilled. My roommate, told me that him and couple of others would be going for the match(the fixture being Chennai Super Kings V/S Rajasthan Royals) and asked me if I was interested. Me naturally said yes! So me and 7 others picked up the Rs. 500 tickets. The match was scheduled to begin at 16:00, we left our rooms at 13:30, had our lunch and were at the Chepauk M A Chidambaram Stadium at 14:00 (our room is just a 5 minute walk from the stadium). By 14:30 the rest of the people had assembled at the stadium and were waiting for the gates to open. By 15:00 we were inside the stadium, and I was just awestruck. I mean the atmosphere in the stdium was ELECTRIFYING, AWESOME and something unexplainable - YOU just have to be there to know what I’m speaking about.

We got seats RIGHT under the commentary box, which is pretty good considering the price we paid for our tickets, and the view was just fantastic. In the commentary box we could see Rameez Raja, Kris Srikkanth(was being apllied make-up more number of times than he was avtually doing the commentary), Robin Jackman, AJay Jadeja and L Sivaramakrishnan. The match was a fantastic one, with Kamran Akmal and Morne Morkel scoring the 4th and 3rd fastest half-centuries in IPL. Along with the action on pitch, there were some moments in the stands which made me go =)) - such as these couple of idiots yelling out to Kris Srikkanth ‘Cheeka, Cheeka’(Cheeka being Srikkanth’s nickname), with an intention of trying to “grab” his attention. HELLO? Airconditioned sound proof room, anyone?

Oh well. I was also live tweeting the event, but much to my surprise, no one unfollowed me! I guess my followers are used to my high volume tweets eh? 😉

It goes without saying - it was one of the best events I’d been to. Would love to goto couple more of them.

PS: You can have a look at some of the pictures and video’s I’d taken using my trusty P1i camera, over at my Flickr page.