DANNY'S IPL RANTS SENT ME TO THE DOCTOR'S

DANNY’S IPL RANTS SENT ME TO THE DOCTOR’S 

- Martin Johnson

There’s probably a medical name for it – IPLus overdosus perhaps – but as I told my GP this week: “I just can’t take any more, Doc. Every time I turn on the telly someone hits a six, and every game appears to be between the Rajasthan Royals and Kings XI Punjab.” To which he replied: “Don’t worry, lad. You’re not alone. You’re the sixth person I’ve seen this morning with the same symptoms.”

The IPL purports to be a competition of eight teams and 60 matches, whereas it would be more accurate to describe it as a competition between two teams playing the same match 60 times. Cricket’s version of Groundhog Day. But I might conceivably have made it right through the tournament were it not for one irritant too many.

I’m not talking about the ‘pom pom’ girls, boring though it is to see them jumping up and down every time there’s a boundary, or the spectators, who also jump up and down – and wave and squeal at the same time – every time they see themselves on the big screen.

Neither is it the requirement for the cameraman to hone in on those people in T-shirts spelling out TASTY TREAT, nor is it that monotonously familiar blast from a bugle which has become the single most compelling argument for the restoration of capital punishment.

It is – as I reckon most of you have guessed already – the commentators, whose qualification for the job appears to be the ability to talk at length about the bleedin’ obvious, and at decibel levels that makes your cat arch its back and start hissing at the television screen. And nearly all of them, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, are Australian.