KKR and the Tale of the fake IPL Player

IPL 2009 has not been a great season for the Kolkata Knight Riders team, now known as Knight Riders. They have become the perfect example of Murphy’s law. First, their coach pulled off a Multiple-Captain theory that held no sense. After much hungama, their team owner SRK doused the flames temporarily by supporting Dada “Ganguly”, only to dump him as captain and replace him with Brendon Mccullum immediately on reaching South Africa. Then, Brendon Mccullum, a wicketkeeper with no captainship experience, lead his sides to tremendous defeats, some actually self-inflicted by some poor bowling and pathetic fielding. Well, as they say, ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth”. A team whose coaches outnumbered the players is deemed to perform no good. And if these were not enough, there was one irritating blogger who claimed that he was an INSIDER, one playing for KKR. The blog seemed to add insult to injury everytime the team got defeated. Nobody was spared, everybody was given some very bad nicknames like Appam Chuttiya and Paedophile priest, while some were just vaguely referred, ex: Phoren Babas, Captain, Bhooka Naan, Lordie, Aila, and Shengara Patan etc.

The best example of Yellow Journalism ever: There is a belief in the press, “Controversy is king”. Our Fake IPL player is the perfect epitome of this saying.
For all those who don’t know about Fake IPL player or FIP. He is a blogger who claims to be a member of the Knight Riders cricket team in the IPL. He says he is a Bengali and can bowl and bat a bit. He claims that his blog is solely aimed to provide INSIDE STORIES of his team members. He started his blog from April and is continuing till date updating us on the SPICY events happening inside and around the team.
For example: He claims that a famous commentator has slept with a popular TV anchor and an upcoming Indian fast bowler had scored over a girl, and the captain of his team and his coach were not even in speaking terms, and issues like racism inside the dressing room etc. Some of these stuff turned out to be true indeed.

Whether he is writing the truth or not, but he sure seems to understand that people love to read controversial stuff, and that too about popular people. For instance, FIP continues to call a popular Bollywood star a DILDO and maim him at every possible opportunity. He even foresights that DILDO would sell out his team to somebody else and move on. Although FIP’s English and his sense of humor and sarcasm are impeccable, his motive seems to be dubious.
First, if he is really a KKR cricketer as he claims to be, he doesn’t have the right to criticize his peers using very foul language. Calling somebody a DILDO and CHUTTIYA may sound funny, but it is at best VULGAR. Second, if he is really a cricketer, he should rather be looking to improve his cricketing skills and perform on the field, not off the field. The last and the most important thing is that being a sportsman, you are supposed to be sportive, accept positives and negatives, not badmouth against people.


Who could the IPL player be?

Well, many people have been dying to know the identity of the Fake IPL player. People think he may be a Bengali cricketer who has either represented India or has been trying to represent India without success. From his impeccable language skills, it can be assumed that he is highly educated guy and a good writer too. Considering this information, people have come up with many guesses: Saurav Ganguly, Akash Chopra, Ranadeb Bose, Sanjay Bangar, Ajay Jadeja, Harsha Bhogle and many others. Many people also believe that this person is actually a journalist with inside information on KKR while some believe he is just a great blogger with creativity. Whoever it is, my claim is that nobody would write blog taking such risk just for fun. Whosever doing this surely has a strong motive. I am sure that this FIP is not a single person, but a group of people writing a blog taking turns. For instance, if you see the time of the posts, they are irregular and across various time zones. And morever, with the amount of technology the BCCI has, the blogger would have been easily tracked using his URL. But it is not to be.
So therefore, the person is actually employing a few of his/her friends to share the dirty work. This person may be a journalist who has some past scores to settle with SRK. He may also be a cricketer who knows a bit of Bengali but doesn’t hail from Bengal.
The last and worst case might be that this person could be from the PR team of Lalit Modi or SRK. Afterall, negative publicity is still publicity. This can be proven from the fact that KKR is still the best selling franchise in the IPL inspite of losing many matches.\

The blogger has stated to his fans that he would be revealing his name on Wednesday, 21st of May 2009, after the last KKR match. Hopefully, we get to see an ex-cricketer or a famed journalist. There may be many skeletons coming out of this blog tomorrow. So watchout.