And the winner is...

The news is out everywhere. I’ve topped the IPL Cricinfo fantasy league among my college folks. And as expected, the media is after me. Instead of giving multiple interviews I just thought I’d post excerpts of the interview taken by a leading daily (name withheld due to copyright reasons)

Interviewer (I); Rahul (R)

I: So Rahul, you’ve done it. Is there something you’d like to say to our readers?

R: Oh yes. I attribute this success to a lot of people. First of all, I would like to thank my parents for having me. Without them, I would have been nothing - trust me on that.

Next, I’d like to thank all the losers for being more worthless than I could ever be. What's a winner without the losers.

And yes, a word for my fans. Whatever Rahul Saraf is today is because of all you people out there. Without your continued support I could easily have been just one of the 13 losers in the league. It’s a scary thought.

And last but not the least, I would like to thank God. He was in my team and gave me 1867 points. The message to take from here is “Do not lose faith in God. Ever.”.

I: Ok so if you would want to pick one turning point in your league, what would it be?

R: Dropping Gilchrist after two matches. Not an easy choice when you consider he had given me 408 points in those two matches and gave a whole lot of points in the last edition. I was 9th in my league at that stage and was faced with a situation similar to what Sam Worthington was in Avatar.

“Loser. Laggard. Outcast. To ever face them again, I was gonna have to change the rules. Sometimes your whole life boils down to one insane move. The way I had it figured, Gilly is the most explosive batsman in the IPL. Nothing stops him. So why would he ever fail? But that was just a theory.“

I dropped Gilchrist to accommodate some of the other expensive buys. The rest, as they say, is history.

I: The tournament saw Sachin rise as a T20 player. Any comments on that?

R: It was wonderful to watch him bat the way he did, and hardly a surprise actually. I was, of course, disheartened because he could not win it for Mumbai. Just to further show what mettle he is made of, I’ll take the example of Gilchrist and Hayden. Now most people would select them over Sachin in the shortest avatar of the game, and you can’t blame them for doing so. But both of them were woefully out of form in this tournament and the only thing they did was try to hit their way out of trouble. They kept repeating the same mistakes time and again in the hope that it would come off. Contrast this to someone named Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. In the series against Australia in 2003-04, he kept getting out caught in the slip cordon while trying play the drive. He turns up in Sydney and what does he do? He scores an unbeaten 241 at a strike rate of 55 without a single shot through covers or mid-off.

Andy Flower summed it up when he once said, “There are two kinds of batsmen in this world - Sachin Tendulkar and all the others”

I: What about the controversy surrounding the IPL? Any thoughts on that?

R: For a moment forget about what the officials have done and are doing. If Dhoni can hit a six with one hand; if Sachin can score a solid 48 with a split webbing between the fingers of his hand; then you know that Indian cricket is in safe hands.

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