On day two there were two matches. One between Sehwag’s Delhi Daredevils and the other between last year’s table topper (if you turned the table upside down, that is) Deccan Chargers and Kolkatta Knight Riders.

Copying from Richie Benaud (legendary Australian leg spinner and the original icon of Channel 9) two matches played on the same day was referred by the Sony Setmax presenters as a “doubleheader”. I think Richie used to refer a double header as two matches played between the same teams without a day’s gap (in one day format). Here the presenters refer to two games played between four different teams as “doubleheader”, I think it should be fourble(!) header.

I checked up Wikipedia to know the meaning of a doubleheader so that I can become levelheaded on this terminology.

I got the below enlightenment as a single-header

Doubleheader may refer to:

* Doubleheader (baseball) – Two baseball games played between the same two teams on the same day.
* Doubleheader (television) – An all-inclusive sports broadcast of two games back-to-back.
* Doubleheader, Texas – a former Czech American settlement.
* A fish of the Wrasse family Coris bulbifrons.

The original usage of the word “doubleheader” is attributed to the 1900s railway industry to refer to two locomotives pulling a particularly long and heavy train (cit. Railroad Commission of Texas, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tslac/10226/tsl-10226.html)

Irrespective of whether the two games were referred to as “doubleheader” or “fourble header”, the actual outcome of the matches showed that they were fit to be called feeble headers! Such was the performance of Kings XI Punjab and Kolkatta Knight Riders.

To be honest with you, I could not watch a major portion of the rains in the first match of the day between Kings XI Punjab and Delhi Daredevils.

I was however checking up whether the ground had dried up or not at the universal online destination for cricket, namely, www.cricinfo.com. Due to the rains, the match turned out to be damp squib with the Twenty/20 becoming 12/6 and then 12/4.5 due to Sehwag and Gambhir.

Every team in the IPL must be shuddering to think about this devastating opening pair. They can reduce the duration of more matches like a storm, even if there was no weather interruption.

Set to score a reworked target of 54 in six overs, DD scored four more than 54 with Sehwag scoring 34 of his 38 runs in boundaries – there is no boundary for the boundaries from Sehwag’s bat I am inclined to comment. DuckworthLewis needs to incorporate a Viru-Gambhir clause into it!

Since they scored all the runs in just 29 balls, I could see the full innings of DD in highlights

Coming to the second header of the doubleheader, I had reached home in time to catch SRK’s Kolkatta Knightriders struggling at 50 something for five. KKR is my second favorite team in the competition due to the presence of Dada. (Sad that he is not the captain of the team and sadder that he struggled for seven balls for scoring 1 run, saddest that he got to bowl just six balls – McCullum wanted to finish the match quickly and intelligently asked Ajit Agarkar to bowl. I don’t know how he is playing IPL, we dropped him from our street team few years back).

Even though KKR finished with just 101 runs on the board, there were a lot of people in the world, three to be precise (Shah Rukh Khan, Arun Lal and I), who thought KKR will still pull off a win. I do not know about Arun Lal and Shah Rukh Khan but I was expecting KKR to win the match on logical grounds:

a) the previous day the team batting second lost the match (Deccan Charges was playing second)
b) Rajasthan Royals, batting second, had folded up for just 58 runs
c) The inexperience of Deccan Chargers in winning a match

T20 is T20 because it defies all logic and is full of Lalit Modi and so Deccan Chargers followed the newly laid path of last year’s poor performers making amends this year. Gibbs and Rohit Sharma batted like Sehwag and Gambhir to pull of a sound victory from the jaws of win.

If Day One proved that you don’t need high scores to win matches in IPL2, Day Two proved that you don’t need low scores to win matches!

I hope John Buchanan takes further strides in the Captaincy rotation policy for KKR and makes Ajit Agarkar the Captain of KKR for the next match!

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