Just when we thought cricket could not get more entertaining, comes another news snippet that is certainly eye catching, from a cricket perspective or not is for the audience to decide. Rakhi Sawant is extending her stint with cricket and she will now lead her very own team on to the field.
Rakhi Sawant has been roped in by the ICL (Indian Cricket League) organizers as part of their marketing campaign, “Cricket Hai Meri Life”. The figures for the overall marketing expenditure is pinned at a staggering Rs.50 crore, another kind of figures are set to descend on cricket grounds when the ICL resumes its cricket affairs in October.
Sawant’s handpicked bunch of cheerleaders, named the ICL Zeebras will form India’s own cheerleading squad, the first of its kind in the ICL, but perhaps with more oomph value than perhaps those domestic groups that represented the IPL teams such as the Mumbai Indians and the Chennai Super Kings. Count of Rakhi Sawant, India’s favorite item girl, actress and popular television host to lend her own mark and trend to the unrecognized domestic cricket league in India. Rakhi Sawant’s metamorphosis from item girl to household name came about primarily through her stay in the Bigg Boss India edition and the respectability gained out of it has enable the queen of transformation to add cricket to her illustrious resume as well as the ICL Zeebras make their way to the four venues, Panchkula, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Gurgaon, of this edition of the ICL.

While the issue of whether India, and cricket indeed, really needs cheerleaders has failed to come to a reasonable conclusion, what has been accepted is that cheerleaders are now part of the entertainment factor that cricket is looked upon as undergoing a transformation. Whether the face lift is past its novelty, only time can tell. Perhaps with the ‘desi’ version, the audiences will identify better with the Bollywood tunes that will no doubt be employed rather than the monotonous dance routines that were handed out to the foreign cheerleaders causing from teenagers in the crowd to lay on the harsh comment of ‘robots’ when instead the gimmick was perhaps meant to titillate.
Shahid Afridi will perhaps be grateful that he can watch Rakhi’s ICL Zeebras sitting down and not while playing when he said he tried not to get distracted by the cheerleaders at the boundary ropes. A couple of foreign players, some rather big names in the game, certainly held a roving eye much to the amusement of the in-stadia spectators as they were found drifting closer to the boundary line while fielding as the match wore on; we can only wonder why!325843