Devoid of home crowd, the defending champions have a battle on their hands, but the fans are ready.

By C Venkatesh

Life in Hyderabad is quite normal these days. The city wakes up a little late in its typical 'nawabi' style.  The biggest activity of the mornings is to weed your way through the traffic jams to reach the work place. The afternoons are relatively quiet. With the mercury soaring already, people prefer to stay indoors. In the evenings, again one has to find his way through the traffic congestions and bottlenecks. Amidst all this, there is no excitement in the air on the eve of the third edition of the Indian T20 championship. Despite the fact that the city-based team is the defending champions, one finds that the mood in Hyderabad is somewhat somber.

Actually, at this time, all roads should lead to the Rajiv Gandhi Stadium. Hyderabad was the original choice to host the inaugural ceremony of the Indian T20 championship and the opening match but the cricket crazy millions of this historic city lost that great opportunity for non-cricketing reasons.

There is a deep sense of deprivation among the people of Andhra Pradesh as all the matches of have been taken away from Hyderabad and Vizag. The fans wanted to cheer their champion team for an encore. The stadiums at Hyderabad and Vizag boast of world class facilities and the pitches at both these venues are real ‘belters’. It was only late last year that India almost successfully chased a 350-plus target in the ODI against Australia at the Rajiv Gandhi Stadium and the monumental innings of 175 from the blade of the maestro is still fresh in the memory of all Hyderabadis. The ACA-VDCA stadium in Vizag takes credit for discovering ‘Dhana Dhan’ Dhoni. After a quiet start to his international career, it was in the ODI played at Vizag, which was his fifth that the Jharkhand Dynamite announced his arrival at the big stage with an explosive knock of 148 runs and the rest, as the cliché goes, is history.

The cozy comfort of watching the match sitting in your drawing room and sipping the beverage of your choice is nice indeed. But once in a while the cricket enthusiast would like to go to the actual place of action and have a real feel of it. Particularly, watching T20 matches inside the stadium can be an exhilarating experience. The music, the cheer girls and the DJs - that whole package enhances the viewing pleasure. Hyderabad was the major venue for last year’s Champions League T20 and though the Indian outfits crashed out quite early, the sports loving public of the city turned up in good numbers to watch and enjoy the heroics of Kieron Pollard. But this time they have no choice but to catch all the action on the idiot box. The political situation in the state is returning to normal now. Tempers seem to have cooled down after the Centre constituted a committee to go into the separate state issue. Apparently, now there is no hurdle for the smooth conduct of matches in Hyderabad or Vizag. But can we get at least one match back?