What’s wrong with these oldies, I ask? They are hogging the limelight in a format that almost every critic believed would sound their death knell: Kumble one day, Gilchrist the next, and then Dravid walks out to play one of the most significant innings of his glittering career to lead his team into the final, winning a crucial battle of wits against Muralitharan.
Or almost, for the veteran Sri Lankan spinner brought Chennai back into the game briefly by getting rid off Dravid just when everything seemed lost. Surely there’s something about older players and Twenty20 cricket that we still know very little about.
Of particular poignancy, of course, is Dravid’s success in the second edition of the IPL. This is not to undermine the performance of younger players like Vinay Kumar, Virat Kohli and Manish Pandey, who won his second successive man of the match award, but all three would readily accept that without Dravid’s skill and composure, Bangalore would have been sunk.
What a turnaround for a much-maligned player who a lot of people believed should have been sent out to graze. In the event, even for a genius like Murali, Chennai’s total was too low to defend. Bangalore’s victory was fantastic, to say the least, and accentuates the inherent melodrama and uncertainty of this great game.
But that is old hat. What is new is how a string of old players, several retired from international cricket, have been able to excel in Twenty20. Several of them will now be on show in Sunday’s final in which last year’s eighth ranked team plays the seventh ranked for the top two positions this year.
To me that is good enough reason to rejoice. You can take your pick.
