What a Thrilling Experience…

The moment my nephew told that he had bought the tickets for the RCB vs MI match at Blore – I was totally excited with the prospect of seeing the IPL match live in the stadium. Since we had bought the tickets online, we had to get the actual tickets at the venue. The million dollar question was the logistics – cos we knew that parking would be a nightmare. Since I am no longer in Wipro, we could not bank on the Wipro parking on mgrd either. After dilly dallying quite a bit, we thought we would just risk it and went in the car itself – luckily for us, we found a slot on rest house road. Btw, only people who have done extremely good karma in their previous birth have got houses on that road!!!

The crowd had already started to gather. We decided to split due cut short our waiting time. Me and nephew at the entrance queue – gate 11 while sis and hubby went to collect the tickets. All of us went through the gate without much hassle. As expected, the police were frisking all bags etc and edibles were not allowed. We could see red red red everywhere – tshirts, caps, flags, bandanas, face painting….. Slowly the players started coming out - and the screaming of the names just went on and on, till the player was forced to look at us and wave. Hats off (literally) to Utappa, who did the customary hat bow to the crowd as soon as he came to the ground. And for me it was just pure ecstasy as I saw the most handsome hunks on the ground Simon Toufel and KP as well as the local heroes Anil Kumble, Manish Pandey, Utappa, Vinay Kumar and Dravid. There was a unified scream of pure adulation when Sachin made his entry for the net practice. Just as we settled down we heard a loud blast – which we conveniently dismissed as someone doing a dry run for cracker bursting later on – how naïve!!! But the players just vanished inside within minutes and that’s when the smss started pouring in – generator burst, bomb hoax, bomb blast / blasts– variations. Siddarth Mallaya (my god, he is so fair) and senior Mallaya too did the rounds when things started getting a little chaotic. But all of us stayed put – despite the large screen proclaiming that the match was delayed. It was just as well, that they did not make an official announcement – avoided a certain stampede and loss of lives. Imagine a crowd of 30K trying to get out of the damn stadium with another 10K already there who were trying to get in!!!

Finally, when it was time for the toss, the stadium was reverberating with the shouts of RCB. And guess who got the highest decibel applause – it was the cheer leaders – 6 sets of 3 each running around the stadium waving at the crowd. The guys were just openly drooling. On the sidelines, Deepika was as ever looking stunning and again crazy screaming when she was focused on the big screen. It was truly thrilling to watch the match amidst a strong crowd of 40K. The stadium jockey – or the anchor – or MC or whatever they call him, was just superb, making the crowd go alive and bursting every now and then. The constant chant of RCB and the music and the kannada songs made the crowd go crazy. But when the play started, we realized to our dismay that there was a generous splattering of MI supporters. As well as, the RCB supporters who crossed the border and cheered the sixers and the fours from the MI team– just for the love of the game. The shoddy fielding, the dropped catches and the full toss bowling – was just too much to bear during the MI onslaught. But when our batting began and the parade of the batsmen started it was just total frustration. When Utappa left the crease, it was just a question of time before our total doom. Yes, Virat tried to do his bit – but too little too late.

After the 13th over, the exodus from the stadium started slowly though – but built up quite fast. By the time we were at AK circle, we could see reds everywhere again – very disappointed though. But all in all – it was truly a very very thrilling experience to watch the IPL match live in a stadium.