Monday night's all right for fighting

It was a dull day at the ground yesterday evening. The Rajasthan Royals never looked competitive and the match petered out to a early finish. Catches were dropped again - a virus that has become a epidemic in the IPL. Some of the reasons trotted out have been really cool.

"It is a difficult catching atmosphere," the Punjab coach, Tom Moody, said earlier on the tour. "The skies are very clear and it is very hard to read the catch." Let's get back to the polluted and smoggy skies in India and the boys should start taking catches again.

And can the people who come to watch please wear uniforms? Greg Shipperd, Delhi's coach says, "It becomes very difficult for the fielders with a distracting background. There are people sitting in the stands wearing different colours..." How insensitive of them.

MS Dhoni has blamed the infrastructure. "Buffalo Park [East London] doesn't have adequate floodlights. Fielders as well as batsmen are finding it difficult to sight the ball. The floodlights at Port Elizabeth too are inadequate," he said.

The swirly wind too has been cited as a factor. And the cold.

Speaking of which, the cheergirls have really thick skins. In Kimberley on a cold evening they were stripped down to the bare essentials, swaying away merrily. Suddenly the place felt warm.

It got even hotter in the night. Some of us went to the Half-way House, a pub that has existed for ages. I'm told it's one of two pubs in South Africa which allowed people to come in their horse-drawn carriages and get served drinks seated in them.

It's a thriving modern pub now. On Saturday night it was packed with players from various teams. Preity Zinta was in there too.

It was a pleasant evening, with couples dancing and the crowd singing along to the music when it happened. Cat fight. Two girls stood and one hit the other with an ashtray full of cigarette stubs. And of course, then the men had to get involved. Wham! Biff! And other such exclamations from the Batman comics. Blood on the dance floor.

As I sauntered outside to escape the heat, the parking attendant said, "Every Saturday night we have a fight. But Monday, Awesome!" He turns into a professor of sociology: "As long as it is a fight between white and white, it's fine. Else, it could real ugly. How is it in India, pub fights?" Isn't it the same everywhere? Last week I asked Yuvraj Singh about his first pub brawl. "It was when I was 17-18. The first and the last. Fight broke out. I hit a guy and he hit me. You can see the marks still on my left wrist."