The show began with the regular festivities of calling the cricketers on stage and getting them to sign the ceremonial bat and disclosing the trophy. Nothing seemed fine from the very beginning. If rain delayed the event Rohit Sharma and Saif Ali Khan were the first to kickstar this bloopers galore! And the Bollywood brigade’s acts on stage only took it further down.

First up was Shahid Kapoor, who did a dhamakedaar entry with a performance that was meant to be an ode to Mithun Chakraborty’s I am a disco dancer. His tribute to the disco king was great. However, he started fumbling with the dance steps and even before that almost crashed his bike on a podium set up on the mega stage. To be honest, this fumbling performance by Shahid was the best act of this night!

Then came in Anushka Sharma, who made a good enough entry, but her performances lacked the punch. And just for the record, even if your film PK was the highest grossing film ever you don’t dance on songs like that onstage, not unless you’ve Virat Kohli for company. These are all soft romantic numbers and for an event like IPL one expects a power-packed act, which will get the audience grooving or at least get them to tap their foot.

Up next was our desi rockstar Farhan Akhtar. He performed along with his band. Trust me, it would have been better had he just lip synced to the popular Rock On songs rather than actually trying to sing them. He did have some rocking songs in his kitty for the audience but sadly his cracking voice and even worse sound systems made us feel that he could just choke midway through this performance.

Finally it was Hrithik Roshan’s turn, people were expecting him to give a great performance. He did. But he performed to songs from Kaho Naa Pyar Hai, Koi Mil Gaya and Dhoom 2, movies that came over a decade ago. Hrithik did have some great dance numbers in Bang Bang and could have easily performed to them rather than sticking to songs which most of us have gotten used to seeing at every other do. Also, the background dancers were completely out of sync, which only went on to make this strictly average act extremely poor!

Above all Saif Ali Khan, who hosted the show was big flop. He fumbled like 20 times throughout the ceremony. It seemed that he either didn’t know what he was to do onstage or maybe the production team was murmuring too many details into the Nawab’s ear piece There were moments when the camera would stay on the actor’s face and people were expecting him to say something, but all he did was stand and stare at the roaring Kolkata crowd.

Over all a really bad show put together for the grandest cricketing event in India. A true FLOP SHOW!