If the BCCI were truly concerned about cricket in India, would it foist yet another ODI tournament on the over-worked players?  India has played Sri Lanka in 26 ODIs in the past two years.  That is twice the number of ODIs that India has played against Australia in the same period, and people were complaining about overkill in that match-up.  On the other hand India have played the West Indies 5 times in ODIs in the past two years.  Clearly the frequency of playing our Southern neighbor has more to do with lining the pocket books of both the BCCI and the Lankan board than with any cricketing rationale.  The Lankan board will no doubt be grateful for the largesse and duly do the BCCI's bidding.  Money, power and politics zindabad!, to heck with the game.  No other rationale can be seen in scheduling yet another ODI tournament right at the same time as the Nation’s first class tournament was reaching its finale.

Anyway, back to the ODI tournament itself and what we saw was: "win the toss, win the match."  The formula was simple decide to bowl and you duly, or should we say “dew”ly, win the match.   In every match the team batting second, i.e. when the dew made bowling and fielding a slippery task won quite comfortably in the end.  Even when Sri Lanka, who had already booked their place in the finals, decided to bat first after winning the toss in a league match, they were duly crushed by India, losing by a whopping margin of 8 wickets with over a 100 balls to spare.     

After being hammered in the Tests and ODI series in India, and after losing many key players to injury, Kumar Sangakkara, would have been cheered with his luck with the toss in the tournament, and especially in the final.  He won the toss when it counted and inserted the opposition and duly won the cup.  In fact, if not for Suresh Raina’s uncharacteristically defiant knock, India may have collapsed in a heap and not only lost the cup, but also may have been humiliated.  As it is they stretched Lanka into the 49^th over before conceding the game.  With the huge role that dew has played in this tournament, it would be fitting if the winning captain and team celebrated with a case or two of Mountain Dew instead of the traditional bottles of Champagne.

But all kidding aside, the question that is raised by this tournament, is that does it make sense to hold day-night games in the northern part of the sub-continent during winter months?  Since the 2011 World Cup has many such games scheduled, it may not be too early to consider switching to an earlier start time.  However that really begs the question as to why should not matches in places where dew is likely to be a factor in the winter not simply be played during the day.  It would not only eliminate the dew factor, but would also save a lot of electricity, something that poor nations like India and Bangladesh don’t have a huge abundance of, and also eliminate the possibility of a Kolkata like fiasco, where the Stadium was in the dark for nearly half an hour.

All in all, given the choice of watching yet another predictable in every sense, ODI final or the final of India’s domestic first class championship, I sure would have preferred to watch the later.  That the Ranji Trophy final was played on a sporting pitch in front of large and enthusiastic  crowd in the sylvan setting of the Gangothri  Glades in Mysore, and turned into a nail biting contest with superlative bowling, batting and fielding performances, just adds to that sentiment.   Mumbai with their legendary bloody-mindedness, psyched a win by six runs, to claim the Ranji Trophy for the 39^th time, a record that even the New York Yankees cannot hope to match, deserve to be congratulated.  Karnataka, too deserve a lot of praise for the way they fought throughout, and in Manish Pandey and Abhimanyu Mithun they have two young cricketers who surely deserve to be considered for higher honors.

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