Dear cricket fans,

By the time this post is up, it would be less than a couple of hours to go for the IPL final between Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings. So this is not a match preview or analysis – those times are long gone. It is time for action now – both on the ground and off it.

While many cricket fans are calling for a ban on IPL and boycott of the final game at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata this evening, I say go out and cheer. I understand the shock, dismay, wrath and disgust at whatever has unravelled since Delhi Police arrested S Sreesanth and a couple of other Rajasthan Royals players on the night of May 15, and still I say: go out in droves, shout your hearts out for your heroes, cheer the game, but jeer the gamers.

This game is too big to be held hostage by a few hands and their crooked handiwork – matters little even if those hands are of the moneybags and the cricket board honchos. So hit the streets, march on to Eden in the Garden, fill up the stands, and if you are elsewhere, or have not managed a ticket, crowd in front of the telly. But wear a black badge. To protest all the shenanigans in the name of the game, the dirty deals in the garb of cricket and cricketer, and a few shade dirtier wheeling and dealing in the name of performance and (under)performers.

Today is the day when the cricket fan in all of us must separate the wheat from the chaff – preferably once and for all – and burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire, as the Bible puts it.

This day will not rest easy on the conscience of the cricket fan, and understandably so. Only a few minutes ago a city court in Delhi extended the police custody of Ajit Chandila Sreesanth and remanded Ankeet Chavan to judicial custody till May 28, and it’s barely hours since BCCI president said in no uncertain terms in Kolkata that he would not go on his own, come hell or high water – “I have not done anything wrong, if a relative has, let the law take its course,” he told the media, boorish and arrogant as ever. And these are the two areas that the cricket fan has to watch out wary, very wary, for the snake might hiss any moment.

Out there in the field, it’s neither Mahendra Singh Dhoni nor Rohit Sharma who deserves our sneer or jeer. Neither does Rahul Dravid, who has played the game in the only way he knows – with a straight bat – despite all the alleged crimes and misdemeanours of some of his teammates.

It is the likes of Sreesanth, Chandila and Chavan within, and the likes of Gurunath Meiyappan outside who deserve to be at the receiving end of the rage and the wrath – if they are guilty as charged, that is.

As for the likes of Srinivasan and his fellow honchos in the BCCI, who turn a blind eye to the moolah at the cost of a game that is now threatened to stand stark naked, honk that hooter as hard as you can. For, tonight is the night when what is good in the game takes on what is rank evil, and the night the good will need your support. And mine, too.

As these columns have said earlier, I am not a fan of T20, let alone IPL. But tonight I will watch it with a black badge on my arm and bat for Good against Evil – for, if I do not speak up tonight, the bookies and fixers will bat for ever, and soon we might have to move a PIL to ban not just IPL but cricket itself.

Yours truly,
A fellow cricket fan, circumspect but confident that good will bowl out googley