Deccan Chargers

A last-place finish with just four points to show for a $5-million spend, heads had to roll post season.

For a team that started as favourites after the first IPL auction, things had gone horribly wrong for the Chargers in season one. A last-place finish with just four points to show for a month and a half's effort after a spend of $5 million (Dh18.35 million), heads had to roll post season. And who better to penalise than the unassuming and non-controversial VVS Laxman. Captain in season one, Laxman has now handed over the mantle to Adam Gilchrist as the Chargers are trying hard to exorcise first season's ghosts.

A cursory look back and it still appears unbelievable as to how the Chargers could collapse the way they did in season one. Adam Gilchrist, Andrew Symonds, Shahid Afridi, Herschelle Gibbs and Scott Styris failing together was like asking for a miracle during the pre season build up. Unfortunately the miracle happened with amazing alacrity in all but one of the games for the Chargers. Even Indian T-20 specialists like R.P. Singh, who had a great world cup, just couldn't fire, piling on the misery for skipper VVS Laxman.

The one player who made it a point to ensure that the Chargers remained competitive in some of the games was Rohit Sharma. His calculated hitting and lazy elegance was perhaps the only highlight for the Deccan team in season one.

Another reason why the Chargers flopped in season one was because Andrew Symonds, their highest paid player with a price tag of $1.3 million was in the throes of depression following the controversial Monkeygate controversy involving him and Harbhajan Singh. That the controversy had had a profound impact on him is evident from the following section in his autobiography, "By the end of the season, I didn't want to see another cricket ball or bat. I had had enough. I was physically tired and mentally worn down. Now, I look back and see that I was all over the place in how I felt and what I thought. Good days, bad days, in-between days sometimes all in the same 24 hours. At one point I told Kate that I was sick of cricket, sick of it for the wrong reasons. I appreciate how wild pigs feel when they get caught in a spotlight out in the paddocks - there aren't too many places to hide once you are in the crosshairs&I felt like I could snap if something went wrong, and experienced all the stuff that happens when you think you're losing control&Never a big fan of the mobile phone, I might as well have thrown it in a gully that summer, because most days I didn't want to talk to people." With his mind hardly focused on the game, it is no surprise that Symonds failed to perform to potential in the IPL in the little time that he was around in India.

This time though he has a chance to redeem himself. Undergoing rehab and out of the Australian team, the IPL is the perfect arena for him to come good again. Playing against the world's biggest stars, it may just be the perfect stage Symonds is looking for to strike form before the T-20 world cup in England and the Ashes in July 2009.

Herschelle Gibbs too would want to do something similar now that he is out of the South African side. If these two come good, the Chargers would have recharged their batteries making IPL season two a far closer contest than the inaugural edition of the competition.

Here's hoping this happens because the owners, the Deccan Chronicle group, might otherwise decide to give up the franchise in an ambience of escalating economic gloom.