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Wednesday, May 21, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Chargers playing it cool

V.V. Subrahmanyam

PHOTO: P.V. SIVAKUMAR

Herschelle Gibbs at Uppal Stadium in Hyderabad on Tuesday. —

HYDERABAD: Beating the heat! Well, it is not just the Hyderabadis, who are having a harrowing time during this scorching summer. The story is the same and more understandably so with the foreign ‘recruits’ in the Deccan Chargers team for the on-going DLF Indian Premier League.

The sight of a bare-bodied South African Herschelle Gibbs slugging it out with his team at Rajiv Gandhi Stadium (Uppal) was perhaps symbolic of this on Tuesday evening. No wonder, it is said that he spent the whole of five hours yesterday in the pool at the hotel, joined by his teammate Scott Styris, to keep himself cool as part of the preparations for scripting a change in the fortunes of his side in the IPL.

Well, the franchisee officials of Chargers might take immense pride from these pictures of the likes of Gibbs, Gilchrist, who drove straight to the ground from the airport on coming back from Bangalore this evening, as they seem to be still in the mood to charge their batteries even in the wake of dismal run.

“I had not experienced such a feeling in my cricketing career of more than three decades – a team losing so badly. You can imagine the situation,” remarked a senior official of the franchisee. This was understandable considering that the hosts failed to drive in even the advantage of playing at home and losing all five game in-a-row.

Beaten they might be, but Chargers players seem to be not disgraced if the way the big guns have joined the grinding training session even today, under the supervision of chief coach Robin Singh, is any indication. The confident strides of the success stories – Rohit Sharma and Venugopala Rao – too remind that they still have plenty to give back to the team. Even the injured V.V.S. Laxman too joining them only to see and hope for a turn-around in the team’s fortunes. Clearly, the mood is not despondent as every member is strictly following the training schedule prescribed by sports scientist Dr. Bhaktiar .

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