Extraaaneous Crap

I love watching cricket, as do many people all over our country. Its a national pastime, perhaps one of our only ones. There's not much you need to do to boost the ratings of cricket viewership in India, however, there are of course things you can do to reduce it. Viewers want quality broadcasting, and when you're used to the wonderful team of ESPN STAR, which includes the likes of Geoff Boycott, Sunil Ghavaskar, and Harsha Bhogle, so most of the other crap that is dished out by other channels pretty much turns you off.
One of these is Extraa Innings, the pre-game show of Set Max, which unfortunately has the rights to the big events, such as the current ICC world cup.
Now, today is India Pakistan, so I thought I'd catch a bit of the pre-game. I shouldn't have. Such inhuman torture has never been presented to cricket lovers. This is one of my pet grouses, and I am going to rant about it.

Firstly, you have the commentry team, which makes you cry. Anyone, and I mean anyone could do a better job. Lets start with the presentation team. Leading the pack is Charu Sharma, who is the only person on the team who can string together a group of sentences without screwing up, which is a really great thing, because he knows nothing about cricket. He, of course, thinks he knows a lot about cricket, so he continuously interrupts anyone else who wants to give an opinion, and when he's not doing this, he's busy flirting with:
Mandira Bedi: Look, if I want to see a broad in noodlestraps, I'll turn on FTV, they're far more revealing, and they don't talk. What I do NOT want is some broad who knows nothing at all about the game giving her two bits on how brilliant things are going to happen in todays game. If that broad happens to be an annoying one like Mandira Bedi, I am forced to chuck things in disgust at my TV screen. Can somone pleaase get her off?
Next, we have Kapil Dev, who cannot speak cohenrantly in either English, Hindi, or in fact Punjabi. He's just not a public speaker, so I don't know why he's asked to speak so much. For gods sake, there are better ways for him to serve the game than speak about it!
Next, they've turned it into some great Tamasha, to bring in god knows what demographic that enjoys crap. Why is there a tarot card and numerologist on a cricket match??? Aren't our newspapers enough for some nonsense? But no, today some Ma Maa Di comes up with her brilliant observation, that as today is the 19th, and 9+1 equals ten, and ten is Sehwag's number, he's going to do damn well today. I kid you not, this is pretty much exactly what she said.

Maybe we should just change our batsmen's numbers according to the sum of the dates of the match, THAT'll make us win for sure!
Then, you have the actual commentry team. With the sole exception of Tony Grieg, and some West Indian woman, they are all terrible. The West Indian woman unfortunately never does commentry on a decent game, thus you pretty much only have Tony Greig. The rest of them can't talk, or in the case of Kris Srikkant, make you feel like torturing them verrrry sllowly, and preferably do so by tearing our their Vocal Chords, or something of the like.

As I write, two wickets have fallen, strangely enough, Sehwag's not one of them. Maybe the numbers are all for him. Looks like its going to be a Pakistan Victory, and you know what? I blame it all on Exxtraa Innings. They've probably made the team think they're in a soap opera, rather than a cricket match, and that it'll all work out in the end.