IPL-6, Rajasthan Royals, Uttar-Dravid, Sanju...and Uttar-Process

"Manzilein unki hoti hai jinki sapnon mein jaan hoti hai
Kyonki pankhon se nahi, hauslon se udaan hoti hai"

Sidhu goes overboard to describe Dravid's achievements as player and skipper this IPL season, coming back from "packing sandwiches for kids" to powering his team towards a high scoring chase tonight against Pune Warriors.

Gavaskar had a more unique line of tribute, from a Mumbaikar to Bangalorean:
"These guys from Bangalore are underrated - they are such nice guys who achieve but have no self-promotion."

But beyond this Rahul celebration (which is every bit deserved for the old man) a little story may be emerging in Rajasthan Royals backyard for Indian cricket fans. We may be hitting upon the next big thing in batting. I can't believe a batsman, even an 18 year old in-form talent, can strike a first ball cover driven four of THAT class. This was the first I saw of Sanju Samson - and I am already hoping for more, much more.

Since he is 18, he is also the right person at the right place at the right time: playing for RR just when the team is buying Rahul's "horses for courses" theory, backed by the vision of "get the processes right and worry not of the results"....something that he developed with Chappell as his vision for 2007 world cup but could not sell to the Indian team due to "over-aggressive selling" tactics of his then coach.

This RR team, quite like RR of 1st IPL season, seems to be working to "process is king" theory this year. It shows in the lack of tension on the faces of the players. May or may not be the best / only way to win, but the journey sure becomes more enjoyable. Imran Khan used to speak of it during the later, more successful phase of his career - but can't even compare a modest team lke RR to the men Imran had at his disposal. So THIS really is the first case study of the "process + Horses for courses" theory in a sub-continent setup.

PS: In that 2005 article which predicted that Chappell-Dravid will be adopting this "horses for courses" theory in 2007 WC instead of set teams and batting orders, I had given almost all credit to Greg Chappell for the theory. But subsequent to that article, Chappell's way of handling shows that he was only the father of the idea. It is Dravid who, inspite of then failure of the concept, kept believing in it and now the man has found a perfect platform to try it out amidst a sea of youngsters. This time these guys do not have conflicting signs to confuse them as there is no Chappell around.

India Revisiting all WC champion teams in chronological order

Who won the WORLD CUP since its inception (barring 1983, which was won by India)?




1) West Indies (1975, 1979)..& defeated in India's last group league match


2) Australia (1987, 1999, 2003, 2007)..& defeated in quarter final


3) Pakistan (1992)..& defeated in semi final


4) Sri Lanka (1996)..waiting in final



India is a nation that respects history.


We undo things in the EXACT order those were done.
 
[Shared on my FB page today]

Thus ends a cheaply peddled World Cup..

..when I am down to writing a blog post away from live television even as the final stages of a game no less than a Cricket World Cup final is being played out.

Scene 1: A damp morning awaits the World Cup Final. Play starts in the morning after a 2½ hour delay. The match is reduced to 38 overs a side even before a ball is bowled.

Scene 2: Chasing Australia's mammoth total of 281, Sanath Jayasuriya falls into the vicious trap of Duckworth Lewis. He eyes the rain clouds and senses that a rain interuption, possibly the last one, is round the corner. He desires to keep his team ahead. In trying to manufacture an ugly across-the-line swipe off the last ball of a Michael Clarke over he surrenders his wicket and sets Sri Lanka further back on the D/L chart after the loss of third wicket.


Scene 3: The 5th ball of the 25th over is bowled. Fairly dense droplets of rain are pouring for quite a while now. The pitch is getting mucky and the outfield / bowling run up gets more dangerous by the minute. However the batsmen Chamara Silva and skipper Jayawardene do not budge as that could mean the last of their team's hopes to win the cherished title. Umpires Steve Bucknor and Aleem Dar had hesitated on forcing a pause of play under the exceptional circumstances but now they decide enough is enough and call out for the covers.

Scene 4: The play resumes soon with two overs missing from the over quota available to Sri Lanka and the target reduced to 269. For the last few overs a couple of new-to-the-crease batsmen of a brave team making a valiant attempt to chase a steep target against the world's best side in the biggest and most watched cricket match of all have had the small additional worry of looking at the skies after every delivery as well as the 'parallel' scoreboard of M/s D/L for playing to two different game plans at the same time. One game plan is to win the game over the full distance, the other to stay ahead if rain interrupts the match.


All of this is actually taking place even though the tournament rules provide for a reserve day for EACH of the matches of the tournament. Unbelievable! When I first heard of the extra day during the group league matches I failed to appreciate the cricketing logic behind curtailing rain affected matches by more than 10 overs at any time earlier than the 2nd day. I still cannot reckon just how they could allow a final to be played under that same set of rules.

Perhaps remaining true to their ever-greedy selves that owe allegiance only to the telemedia & their sponsors, an all important group of entities that naturally want the matches to end on scheduled days, the rulemakers of International Cricket Council have decreed that:

(i) the reserve day is to be used "only if we have a match with any unfinished innings of less than 20 overs" for any of the sides; and that
(ii) the match starts afresh on the next day instead of the simple matter of completing an interrupted but full 50 over match over two separate days.

And who on earth would prefer that sort of painfully obnoxious enforcement of the word "one day" in "One Day Internationals" in exchange of a proper game of cricket? Who would refuse to even spare the Big Final that crap? Of course the self styled 'keepers of the game', the International Cricket Council.

As indicated in the previous mid-match post I had reckoned Sri Lanka to be overwhelmed by the concession of 30 odd extra runs to sublime big hitting skills of the Aussie wicketkeeper, runs that Adam Gilchrist had no business getting against a bowling side as good as the Lankans, runs that turned a potential nail biter into an expectedly one-sided affair barring an improbable 2nd miracle. However the speculation about the final margin - a fair one - is destined to remain just that as Sri Lanka, who unlike Australia had to suffer mid-innings downpours and consequently let a few crucial mid overs go by while they were helplessly torn between the two game plans, have been as badly hit by the ICC's rule makers as by that blinder from Adam Gilchrist.

Shame on you, ICC. Can you not just do us cricket lovers a favour by disappearing from the face of cricket? The game cannot seriously go on any worse by itself than it is doing at present under your central regime.

Update: These excerpts from cricinfo's text commentary sums the sad end to the people's World Cup aptly. Read on:

6.12pm The light's been offered and Sri Lanka have taken it - meaning Australia have won the World Cup again. They certainly deserve it and are huddling in celebration. A bit of a damp squib of an ending, which is of course fitting.

Now what's this? Aleem Dar is having a word with Australia, telling them they can't yet celebrate. Officially this match isn't over. You couldn't make it up. You don't have to.

And the farce continues! Now the stands for the ceremony have been brought on... and are off again, as the umpires shoo them away. My word.

6.17pm It's what is traditionally known as night. It is so dark but the umpires are now saying the match will continue. Heads should roll for this. The man is out putting the 30-yard circles back out. He needs a torch to do so. The batsmen are heading out to the middle accompanied by a guide dog.

6.30pm Congratulations to Australia who were the best team from the first match and maintained their relentlessly high standard throughout. Sri Lanka gave them a game but on the day came up just short.

There's a certain irony that cricket's four-yearly showcase ended in farce ... Australia, Sri Lanka, the Caribbean and millions of spectators deserved more but given what has gone before today, it was almost inevitable. You can spin it all you like, this tournament has not done the game any favours and people at the top, if they had any decency, would be contemplating their futures. But we all know that won't happen.

[cross posted on Desicritics]

Adam Gilchrist's Green Mile

We are into the lunch break of the 2007 Cricket World Cup final. Even if the break were to be of 10 hours instead of ten minutes I would be groping for words to describe that innings. I have decided that I will rather let this collage of images from various points of the Gilchrist innings. These can narrate what transpired till the 31st over of the Australian innings of The Final better than words ever would.

10.2 (ov): The first powerplay is over. Sri Lanka have restricted the Aussies to a rather low 1st Powerplay score of 47 in a 38-overs-a-side winner takes all encounter. Dilhara Fernando smiles ruefully as he failed a collect a very low c&b chance from Adam Craig Gilchrist, then batting on 31. The next three balls disappear for 4, 4 & 6.

22.2 (ov): Malinga bowls an inswinging near-yorker (outswinging for Gilly) that pitches on leg-n-middle and threatens to split the gap between bat and pad through late movement to hit off stump until Gilly, already predetermined for a big hit, still manages to make a little adjustment to middle the ball for a straight four over the bowler’s head. An international batsman on another day or even another international batsman on this day would be mighty pleased just to survive that one. [cricinfo text commentary: “Where did that come from?”]

30.3 (ov): Adam Gilchrist skies a riser from Dilhara and Chamara Silva take the catch at mid on. Gilchrist departs for 149 off 104 balls. It makes the incident from 10.2 the turning point of the match.

If you are about to write off the Sri Lankan bowlers for having conceded 281 in 38 overs think again. A mere 109 runs were scored off the 129 balls faced by other Australian batsmen. That is very good against this batting side in a 38 over match. Add an Andrew Symonds coming in at the slog and scoring just 2 boundaries in nearly eight overs of stay and you’ll think that the Australians finally met their match. It all, however, came to nought because Gilly rattled up 149 runs from the 104 deliveries he faced.

Just how special was it? I reckon that return of 149 to be at least 30 runs more than what any Australian batsman in prime form (including Gilchrist himself, perhaps) could have recorded against this bowling. Gilchrist hit no less than 8 sixes and 13 fours and yet so many of the shots went in and around the ‘V’.

From whatever we know of the man, Adam Gilchrist will be speculating hard during the lunch break on announcing his ODI retirement today in the event of Australia pocketing their third successive World Cup title.

My vote is on a ‘yes’. And so it should be.

Quote of the day: Adam Gilchrist hit his seventh six off the first ball of Sanath’s 27th over and took a single off the next ball. Ricky Ponting played out two dot balls and then another one. Michael Holding observed: “That’s a nice ploy by Sri Lankans, to keep Ricky Ponting on strike. You never thought you would ever hear it, did you?”

[cross posted on Desicritics]

Cricinfo's Magnificent Six

What do you do when the Biggest Cricket Match in four years starts off 2½ hours late? Regale yourself with gems from cricinfo text commentary. Today the Cream of Cricinfo are doing the star turn at live text commentary and already they are off to a better start than the match itself:

8.30am Good morning and welcome to our coverage of the ninth World Cup final. Teams, toss and all that stuff to follow shortly. We have all our commentary team in action today, so it will be a mix of me, Martin Williamson, Sriram Veera, Will Luke, George Binnoy, Jenny Thompson and Siddhartha Vaidyanathan. If this was a group stage match we would outnumber the crowd.

The delay is apparently no good for the ICC either. The tele channels have found the easiest and most acceptable way of biding the intervening time.

10.20am Sadly for the ICC, the delay is giving several TV stations the chance to savage the format of the competition. And they are really piling in. Back at the ground, the crowd are being pretty patient. Lots of beach-balls bouncing around the Aussie contingent. They are probably seeking asylum from the Gabba fun police.

47 days were clearly not enough. If you are an avid reader of the hugely popular blog The Corridor run by Will Luke you will learn today about the reason behind its McGrathesque, restrictive (or economical) name:

11.10am "I don't like cricket," sings Jenny. " I really hate it." Not quite what 10CC (or the ICC) had in mind, but she has a point. We have eaten the entire day's biscuit supply already. The covers, meanwhile, are as stuck in place as Will's hand in his pocket when it comes to buying a drink. "I'm not tight," objects Will, before admitting that he has not bought anyone a beer since Sri Lanka last held the World Cup.

I'm expecting more from the Sexy Six at cricinfo's commentary box all along.

The Final Match-up

Since waking in the morning I wanted to carry out a stats study of the three best bowlers and four best batsmen from each of the finalists to guess what to expect from the World Cup final. The match is going to start in a few minutes from now (7 pm IST) and I finally get the time to do it. The cricinfo folks have done some job on Australia-Sri Lanka encounters from the past. Their study firmly reiterates that Sri Lankans have a dismal record against Australians, particularly so in the World Cup.

But then so much has changed in the last year or two. We have a Sri Lanka that has played exceedingly well outside Sri Lanka for one year now, one that has the best depth and width in bowling resources. Equally we have an Australian side that has shown over the last 11 matches that their batsmen can go the extra yards and even dwarf their already lofty standards to cover up for any perceived weakness in bowling.

I have a simple plan for comparative measurement of bowling and batting strengths of the two sides. We sample them from their last 15 matches. Since 70% of those have been played in the World Cup, the current form of these players gets adequately reflected in this sample. At the same time the temporary troughs and exceptional circumstances facing a few players (e.g. Mike Hussey never got a decent opportunity to express himself this Cup) get slightly evened out by extending the sample a few games prior to the World Cup.

The prime criteria of judgement for bowlers is, as always, wickets. Runs, for batsmen. However to get a fairer picture of the player performances we would modify the wicket tallies of bowlers with a factor inversely proportional to their economy rates. For the batsmen we will modify the run aggregates with the factor of their batting strike rates. So here are the basic rules:

Bowling: We take the top three bowlers of one side. We divide the wickets taken by each in the last 15 matches with his economy rate (expressed in ratio of six – i.e. an economy rate of five will be 0.833 and so on) for the period and add the resulting modified figures for the three. We do the same for the other side and compare them.

Batting: We take the top three batsmen of one side. We multiply the runs made by each in the last 15 matches with his CAREER strike rate on date (expressed in ratio of hundred – i.e. a strike rate of 80 will be 0.8 and so on) and add the resulting modified figures for the four. We do the same for the other side and compare them.

[Filtered strike rates of players for recent matches are not readily available. We are therefore forced to make do with career strike rates]

We are not taking up a fielding comparison. In pre world cup previews I rated these two as comparable fielding sides and their performances from the world Cup indicate as much.

---------------
SL – bowling

Lasith Malinga: 28wkts @ 5.17 ~ 32.5
Chaminda Vaas: 23 wkts @ 3.35 ~ 41.2
M Muralitharan: 31 wkts @ 3.80 ~ 48.9
Total: 122.6

Aus – bowling

Glenn McGrath: 29 wkts @ 4.57 ~ 38.1
Nathan Bracken: 22 wkts @ 4.11 ~ 32.1
Shaun Tait*: 28 wkts @ 5.47 ~ 30.7
Total: 100.9

[*played only 14 matches so far]


Bowling Strength Analysis: The Sri Lankans are holding a slight edge there, 21.5% precisely. The Aussies do have an in-form left arm slow bowler (Brad Hogg) as their 4th bowler but Sri Lanka are equal to it. Their crisis man is Sanath Jayasuriya of the left arm slow-medium-fast variety.

------------

SL – batting

Sanath Jayasuriya: 500 runs @ 90.73 ~ 454
Mahela Jayawardene: 570 runs @ 76.07 ~ 434
Chamara Silva: 501 @ 72.70 ~ 364
Kumara Sangakkara: 419 @ 74.3 ~ 311
Total: 1563

Aus – batting

Matthew Hayden: 927 runs @ 78.6 ~ 729
Ricky Ponting: 850 runs @ 80.24 ~ 682
Andrew Symonds: 340 runs @ 92.23 ~ 314
Adam Gilchrist: 371 runs @ 96.12 ~ 357
Total: 2082

Batting Strength Analysis: Aussies hold a 33.2% edge there. This value is significantly more than the 21.5% deficit in the boeling analysis. Also these figures do not take into account the increased batting strike rates exhibited by Hayden and Ponting in the present tournament in comparison to their overall strike rates, or else the batting would have looked even more of a mismatch.

----------

If the number crunching is beginning to put you off then just dwell on this: Mike Hussey is no more amongst the top four Australian batsmen for being reduced to an unknown quantity in WC’07. However Sangakkara, also going thru a dip of form (and having no excuses of exceptional circumstances like Hussey) since the Super Eights, still qualifies amongst the top four SL players.

Sri Lanka will need one last World Cup ton from the blade of Sanath Jayasuriya to bridge that gap. For all the wizardry of Murali, he has only ten overs to bowl and Australian batsmen are quite unlike Indians and New Zealanders in that they know it.

Acknowledgements:
1) Huzaifa, for correcting me merely two days back that the final happens to be on the 28th of April and NOT 29th
2) The rain in Barbados, for letting me complete the post without missing the match!

[cross posted on Desicritics]

The Big Swim - Where My Heart Still Goes On

Disclaimer: All characters in the story are fictional. Any similarity with anyone living or dead is purely coincidental.

--------------------

April 24, 2007: It is the 43rd day of our trip. An amazing cool day awaits me on the breezy deck of the cruiser. It is an irresistible combination, always provoking a liberating sensation in the midst of the sea. You feel on top of the world, another world.

Let me introduce myself first.

On second thoughts I do not matter here. Let's say I'm a lot like The Anci.. OK, it is the third millenium so it is proper to say that I am like Jack Dawson of Titanic the movie minus his Rose. I had my Rose too but..

I walk ahead and stand near the tip where the railings from both sides of deck meet. This place floods me with memories. My Rose used to stand on this railing with both hands stretched out like wings and eyes closed, dreaming of flying like a proud albatross. A childlike joy dripped from her countenance when she emulated Titanic's Rose or the albatross - I'll never know - and I loved her for it. Fifty feet below where I stand, the cruiser is cutting through the cold seawater at a leisurely pace. It is following four guys that are swimming in the ocean for an ever-nearing destination ahead. Those guys are Oz, Kwi, LionL and SpBok, in descending order of their ranking positions in the quadrennial Big Swim.

The guys are participating in a month-and-half long swimming challenge of several rounds spread across seven seas. The Final Destination is now just five days ahead. I am holding the pre-trip prediction sheet where 90 days ago I jotted down four prospective winners from the starting lot. My heart still wants to take one last look at the piece of paper before jettisoning it with other redundant paraphernalia into the milky turbulent trail of the four valiant swimmers that is being continously devoured by our dogged vessel like a never-ending noodle.

The four names were noted down in large fonts and fourth one was later touched up in a loving red hue. A sprinkling of gold from the morning sun today makes that name look nearly as beautiful as the person herself. I had backed Oz, Green, LionL and my Rose, in that order of ranking, to remain in the hunt when the final week began. Green inexplicably got off at the first port and the other, the love of my life, sank into the depths soon thereafter. But Kwi and SpBok, two of the next three on my rating charts, managed to stay on board. (I had rated Kwi and Windz joint 5th and SpBok 7th.)

Immune to logic, I pick up the pen and circle off the two lost names on the sheet to write Kwi and SpBok above them with a strange introspection. I peep across the sheet at the four moving images challenging the wavy sea in the distance. SpBok was the crowd favourite to win the challenge at the outset. I dedicate a silent round of applause to him for doing better than I thought but his swim (so far) has been more of the seasick guy from my predictions than the prospective champ he was made out to be. Not too many people around would argue that SpBok would have been following the Big Swim on his bedroom telly this weekend if even one of Green and Rose could have stayed on for a half-decent duration instead of letting two valiant but inexperienced prize fighters called Bong and Irlos take their places in 11 of the 24 Swims in the Super Round. If..

The caressing breeze stops abruptly. Logic intervenes along with the smell of rotten fish being thrown out from the deck. My Trance of Lost Romance is broken. Soothsayer designates are not permitted any 'if's. All that reasoning and ranking counts for nothing when two of the four contestants you had backed to be swimming into the last week are out and down by Day 10 of 48. No droplets of mercy for my dead prophecy ever welled up as all the talk of 'two bad days' went around the deck. The format was circulated well ahead of the swim and I laid my bets knowing full well of the rules, the scheduled face-offs and their pitfalls.

There goes my prediction sheet into the ocean. It gets wet rather quickly and sinks. The blue embraces the red Rose and takes her home. I repent not making a boat or swan out of it like childhood days. It could have floated a while longer in the ocean and sung a final song before going down.

April 25, 2007: LionL has eliminated Kwi in the one-on-one challenge last night. The bout between Oz and SpBok is scheduled for tonight. Only one of the two winners gets to complete the swim in the swim-to-finish thereafter. In four days we'll know who gets to stand on the railing with both hands stretched out like my Rose when the ship reaches the Final Destination cheered by admiring onlookers.

The winner will no doubt have earned the applause by dint of stamina, bravado, hard work and good luck. However by then the faithful cruiser ship would have done enough to get a fair share of the applause because strangely the journey has been tougher for the lifeless ship than the living, breathing, struggling and retiring contestants in this edition of The Big Swim.

[Cross posted on Desicritics]

That's all folks - no more Lara!

You are on a week long all-expenses-paid trip to the Hawaiian islands. You wake up on the 5th morning at Honolulu only to get a message from your sponsors that your trip is aborted with immediate effect.

Or, you move out of town for five days to attend a wedding at a remote area. You come back in town and learn that the one cricketer you hated to miss even for a single game has played his last in all forms of the sport.

The former is more shocking, if only because you did not see it coming. But then it only takes a few curses and a smooth passage back home to a happy family to forget all about it. Try emptying the gallons of regret oozing from a fan’s heart when the rarest batsman - a combo version of the greatest and the most attractive in at least three decades of cricket - bids adieu without so much as giving the fan a chance to stand up and applaud his idol when he departs for the last time.

The only time I saw him from the stands of a cricket ground was way back in 1994 in a tri series final at Eden Gardens. He scored something like a blob in it. But no one can take away the memory of those few hours of live cricket watching till the wee hours inside a hotel room 1000+ miles away from home when he scored that 153 not out to win the third test against Australia in 1999. It felt unbelievable then, and it still is hard work to believe that someone – even Brian Charles Lara - actually scripted a win in those circumstances.

This is a farewell post, but one where I am going to quote someone else’s words all along. It’s not as if I am unwilling to write one of mine but fortunately Rahul Bhattacharya has already given his masterly words in this cricinfo piece published ahead of Lara's last match to most of the clumsily compiled points you would have found in an 'original' post of mine. Most exactly similar to my thoughts is this one:

I also came across a short note on the message boards of caribbeancricket.com minutes after the understated announcement of retirement. "My hero since I was a very young boy. I've followed his career since de afro days at Fatima. Missed classes to watch him bat. This is a sad day for me."

It is for me too, because Lara's batsmanship was the greatest pleasure I derived out of cricket in the last two decades along with the bowling of Wasim Akram and I could have watched the game if they alone played it in the field.

That Rahul piece has so many gems on offer that I cannot resist quoting them here.

On Lara’s relatively lesser success in one day cricket:

He bows out now in a one-day match but it was not his preferred stage. Though his magical wrists, his intuition for gaps, his talent at going aerial were all suited to one-day cricket, not so the scale. The canvas was too small. Lara was of odysseys. He liked to get in, bat one, two days, score two, three, four hundred runs. Before such calibre, the limitations of one-day cricket were too petty.

On Lara’s brilliant backlift:

Having been unlucky in that way, it is from a one-day match that I have the best memories of watching Lara live. This was in Trinidad last year. The position was carefully determined so as to find the most unfettered view of that great big glittering backlift and wind-up. We settled somewhere between wide long-off and extra cover. Till he closed the issue with triumphant sixes off Harbhajan Singh, he played an innings of hard grit. So it was an hour or two of watching him size it up and really it was all I wanted to watch.

There comes a point in the Lara wind-up when all the game seems frozen. He is bent climatically at the knees, bat, as the cliché' has it, raised like a guillotine, eyes trained down the pitch and, surely, given his knack for reading of spin and swing, at the bowler's wrist. Insofar as the life of a cricket stroke goes, this is the fatal moment, the hairline between death, glory and a day at the office.

It is perhaps not normal to think of cricket shots in those terms. Yet nobody could make the spectator more alive to these possibilities. Nobody could pack so much drama, meaning in every shot of cricket. Consequently nobody could so illuminate the point that this is a sport of such independent events, of an infinite number of worlds. Nobody, for better or for worse, could so strongly confirm that this here is the ultimate individual sport played by a team.

On ‘the’ 153 not out:

Five years ago after a fair chase I did a satisfying interview with him. He told me a little story behind the 153 not out against Australia, perhaps his defining work in a career full of defining works. You remember the scenario, pay dispute, 0-5 in South Africa, 51 all out in the first Test, and then the brilliant double hundred to level the series before the classic Test at Bridgetown. A school friend, Nicholas Gomez, had presented him a Michael Jordan book. In it Jordan had spoken about his visualisation techniques. "I remember calling Gomez at six o'clock in the morning, the last morning of the Test match, and we went about planning this innings against the best team in the world." This was Lara's focus upon arousal, and if it deserted him he always found it back, and in the waxing and waning there was something reassuringly cyclical as it was frustrating.

On Lara’s Lara:

Nobody twinkled his feet so and angled his blade so and keep hitting gaps like Lara, an intuition sharpened in childhood when he arranged pots as fielders to practise. In 2003 a man at deep midwicket was taken out and put beside another behind point. This comes from Adam Gilchrist in The Australian a couple of seasons ago. "Mistake," hissed Lara. Next ball Lara lofted to midwicket for six. Gilchrist taunted Lara to take on the two men behind point instead. Lara strung it between them for four. Next ball was straighter, Lara backed away and strung it through again. Best remain silent now, Gilchrist then decided. This was to demonstrate precision of his skill. But I particularly liked "mistake". 'You don't know what I can do?' was the strut. That is the Lara motif.

And finally this:

Nobody made the game look better and few ever played it better. So look hard on Saturday because we may not see the likes of this again and if we do we can think back to Lara and smile.

I personally thank Rahul Bhattacharya for doing this article on his idol and mine. It befits a most special cricketer. I feel no need to add any more to what he has already said except that I was denied that chance to look hard at this incomprehensible creature on Saturday. It is as if Lara ran me out.

Cricket lovers from some future era will be thankful that television technology had made reasonable progress by the time Brian Charles Lara came to the scene. For this man is far, far beyond the scope of explanation through the numbers he leaves back against his name. Batsmen unworthy of comparison to him in genius have left (and will continue to leave) better figures of career achievement. Brian Lara is virtually the sole cricketer that makes the stats-happy person in me feel ashamed of even existing.

If anyone is still interested in having a peek at Lara's story in numbers here’s a statistical career summary of Lara. Rahul finds the man in his figures:

Lara batted with sensual beauty and gluttonous appetite. To watch him move into position was to already understand the possibilities of this game. To study his figures was to marvel the scope of his conception. He made the most runs in an over, an innings, a career. Anything anyone did he did bigger.

It's all over folks. Now maybe we can stop bickering over what Prince Charles Lara of the Brian name could have been off the field and revel in the legacy of all that he chose to unravel on it.

Bangla’s conquest & a Protean heel

Main features of Bangla's win over South Africa:

1) Mohammad Ashraful holding the Bangladesh innings together without losing his own tempo. All the points that follow have a few invisible linkbacks to this one, for every one of them resulted / drew from Ashraful’s nonchalant imposition of his exceptional skills on an unsuspecting big brother.

2) The stabilising 5th wicket partnership between Aftab & Ashraful: They encashed on the Dravid-ian tactic from the South African skipper to slip in his 5th bowler instead of putting a full stop to the struggling Bangladeshis. The pair did the crucial job of stitching a steadily paced partnership in reaching the 40th over with 5 or more wickets in hand.

3) Mortaza’s tide-turning assault in the end overs: The more I see of this energetic young man the more I am impressed about him. He grabs every opportunity to make an impact in the game. He is there with the new ball making vital breaktroughs like his identically featured bowling idol. He is there to let the bowlers smell his intent of hitting a few big ones late in the innings whenever he has an outing at the crease with a bat. In between he is also there to make diving stops and cut off runs inside the circle as well as near the boundary.

4) South African batting woes against certain left arm spinners – check out on the ODI success of Jayasuriya & Sunil Joshi against them while Oz tormenter Vettori struggles. Rafique has not been too impressive against Proteans until yesterday but then that is what a cocky performance by a standout player does to people who know how to stand up and be counted.

5) The well-known monotony of South African attack and lack of slower balls / bowlers in their ranks makes them a lesser team in conditions unhelpful to seam & swing bowling. Only Nel seemed capable of bowling decent yorkers and slower balls. Pollock’s loss of sting in the major event has landed him a new role - of delaying middle overs acceleration. On current form South Africa need both Nel and Hall in the final overs; and other teams will be watching how they solve that dilemma.

6) Propensity of South African batting (and, to a lesser extent, bowling) to choke in unlikely circumstances.

We can discuss a little more on that last point. Of late Graeme Smith’s men show a remarkably wobbly streak once a few early wickets are taken. The South African top order seldom looks prepared for great blows from lesser teams. Perhaps this team bats well against the Aussies because they expect to get in bad situations against that opposition. But then Aussies have not taken early wickets against them in their last two matches – that record breaking one at Wnderers and their WC group league match last month.

While other big teams manage to stem the rot in the lower middle order after starting badly, the South African middle order often freezes upon failure of plan A. Most South African collapses generally penetrate right down to the tail. That tail is the most formidable of all – housing South African allrounders Boucher, Pollock and Hall.

Some teams have often let up or faltered in resources after bagging the first six or seven South African wickets and payed dearly. The 3rd Ind-RSA ODI at their backyard in end 2006 is a classic example. South Africa were six down for 76 even then but Indians dropped Justin Kemp twice before he reached 10 and then it all went out of hand. South Africa, batting first, reached 274 then and won by 106 runs. India never recovered and where washed out in the series.

But Shakib Al Hasan and his left arm slow mates never let off the pressure yesterday even when they were not picking wickets. When Pollock was stitching together a typical comeback partnership for the 7th wicket with Boucher, a direct hit from Tamim Iqbal put paid to South African hopes of not facing a desperate struggle to qualify for the semis.

Earlier in the tournament Bangladesh had opened up the group league matches of Group B by defeating India. Yesterday they did enough to bring global cricket audiences back to their tellies to follow Super Eights by re-igniting semi final hopes of a few other sides not excluding the home team.

Now we hope Ireland catches a big fish to turn this final phase of the Super Eights into the bitter dogfight no one expected it to be when Vaughan and Jayawardene went out for the toss on Wednesday.

Unity and Providence

Master cricket writer Rahul Bhattacharya ends his typically lucid piece on Shiv Chanderpaul's cricket and genes with this observation:

"On the television in Mr Chanderpaul's living room it appears that West Indies have just slipped to defeat against New Zealand, their second loss in three days. The thought, I'm afraid is inescapable: Unity and Providence must come together if West Indies are to win it in Guyana."

'Unity' assumes even greater significance in the upcoming SL-v-WI match tonight if we take into account the open-book West Indian infighting during the past week on team and squad selection issues. It should be a cracking game between 2 teams desperate for a Super 8 win tonight.

Here's a Rahul Bhattacharya profile of Ireland's rising speedster Boyd Rankin. He observes:

"Boyd now averages 23.5 from four matches in the World Cup; before it he was not even a certainty in the XI, just a raw talent who had impressed coaches, including former England seamer Mike Hendrick. Indeed, World Cup preparation had to be mixed with some equally pressing issues.

It is lambing season back home, and things are busy on the family farm in Londonderry in Northern Ireland. "There were a few sheep lambing," he told the Mirror, "so I was doing that whenever I came back from training." It is not quite so casual too. Wake-up time 6am, then a session of farm work, then a driving of 140 miles to practice, then back to farming chores
till midnight."

280 miles of travel each day - all for the love and joy of playing an uncelebrated but beautiful game. And to top it all with a World Cup bowling average of 23.5. That must be getting his 'ranking buoyed'. (Apologies for the two bad puns, Rahul)

I blink for eight hours and miss it again

Keeping late nights over the last week took a rather heavy toll on me last night as I fell asleep right on the floor in front of TV sometime in the lunch break of SL-v-RSA match.Being no ordinary doser I refused to part my eyelids for the next eight hours. You can bet on cricket matches featuring South Africa to explode into scarcely believable encounters whenever I miss them and sure as today's sunrise this happened while I slept.

Graeme Smith thought he aged from 26 to 40 in those pulsating final overs. A glance at the fag end of cricinfo's live commentary for that match (where Sriram Veera & co apparently did a more-than-satisfactory job of describing the indescribable) and I am ready for an hour long sermon on the absolute advantage of fishes, those magnificent eyelid-less creatures, over humans in following month-and-half long events taking place in the other half of the globe.

I was not even travelling this time.

On deserving luck

Cricinfo's S Rajesh and HR Gopalakrishna summarise Indian misfortune in yesterday's match on their stats analysis thus:

"Sri Lanka clearly outperformed India in the second half of the match, but Rahul Dravid will be justified in believing that with better luck his team would have been chasing far fewer than 255. In the first 20 overs of the Sri Lankan innings, the Indian seamers - Zaheer Khan, Ajit Agarkar and Munaf Patel - beat the bat or found the edge 39 times, which is nearly twice per over. On another day five of those near-misses might have resulted in dismissals; today, Sri Lanka had the rub of the green, and once they survived that early passage of play, India didn't have a chance."

Memories of that who-blinks-first start of play yesterday will remain forever. But as much as the stat indicates India's ill luck on the day, we need to appreciate that the stat also shows good technique exhibited by the Sri Lankan top order against the moving ball. Videos of the match will confirm that fact.

On Friday the Indian batsmen randomly picked their balls to get out even though they got none of the probing stuff their own bowlers dished out (they batted in the afternoon) but I can think of at least 4 batsmen out of the Indian top seven who would have edged quite a few of those near misses nonchalantly even in a more professional batting display.


As they say, you get 'luckier' as you try harder. The Indians would have been better at edging those by customarily poking at the ball after it moved away instead of staying committed to the original shot they played and accepting getting beaten. In yesterday's match the Sri Lankans did the latter (i.e. accepted getting beaten by not trying hard) with considerable regularity, a measure of the little but telling improvements they have made in their cricket. Unlike the Indians they have learnt that when the ball moves regularly batsmen are better off not poking at it.

The SL batsmen put up 250+ in conditions assisting swing and seam bowling without any of Jayawardene, Jayasuriya or Sangakkara firing. It was the Sri Lankan equivalent of India setting up that score without contributions from Ganguly, Dravid and Sachin in a similar setting.Sri Lanka have always fielded better than India and of late they have been bowling better than India, even outside their country.

Now gently but firmly they have shown us that they bat a lot better as well.

Trinidad, 23rd march

Time: Interval of the India-v-Sri Lanka Pool B match

When Zaheer bowls a leg-side wide to flag off the match I feel a surge of anger rushing up but I refuse to shout. It is difficult for a date-happy fan like me to forget that Zaheer Khan had yielded 15 runs in his first over on this very day four years back and started the proceedings of an Indian flop show in the final of the last World Cup. I manage to control myself nevertheless and gently utter, “You can do it Zach.”

To my boundless joy he hears it, as does his team! Admittedly he does not do it that over; he continues bowling leg side and yielding extras. But then Agarkar does something first up that millions in India will thank him for if India scrape through the ordeal and end up as the winners of this unfolding epic. He starts off as a man possessed and has Sri Lankan openers in all sorts of problems in five of his first six balls. Becalmed, Zaheer gets back his groove and with later support from Munaf they send down eighteen overs of seam bowling that I would like getting replayed back to any team with an all-seam-no-seering –pace attack as the model way to do it on a slightly helpful track.


The first Sri Lankan wicket falls in the seventh over, An all-time classic, it could have been straight out of a Test match. Six overs had gone by and Sri Lanka, after being kept quiet, had taken 9 or 10 off the last one thru Chamara Silva. An iffy Jayasuriya has survived a few close shaves. Now he faces Zaheer and is promptly struck on the pads by Zaheer. Everybody in the ground and around the world thinks Sanath is out except umpire Aleem Dar.

Now, Jayasuriya has already benefitted from an even-harder-to-believe lbw let off from Daryll Harper off Ajit Agarkar’s very first ball. This second one threatens to be the last straw for a team not renowned for its resilience in adversity. Today is a little different though. Zaheer blasts one past Sanath’s ears the very next ball. Today’s Sanath can only swing at it as an afterthought.

Zaheer makes the ball move both ways in the next two deliveries. Somehow in the space of four balls he manages to distract Sanath from his original game plan of seeing out the first spells of Indian opening bowlers. Convinced that he is only waiting for the ball to gobble him up Sanath swings at the next one outside off stump without getting to it and Ajit Agarkar gets to pouch it at 3rd man quite like the Sri Lankan dasher’s Eden 1996 dismissal. All’s well again.

Agarkar by now has seen some of his gems prove to be too good for the batsmen but then funnily enough he picks up the team’s 2nd wicket off an ‘Agarkar’ – that familiar full ball he bowls every now and then just outside the batsman’s pads. Those generally disappear into the boundary to the exasperation of Indian cricket lovers. Today is a little different here again, in that the ball disappeared into the glove of a magnificently diving Dhoni off Mahela’s faint tickle.

Agarkar and Zach only pick up two wickets in the excellent spell and Munaf remains wicketless in a relentlessly incisive spell to remind you-and-me of His Unluckiness J Srinath. I can easily recall at least six or seven other deliveries by the medium pace trio which could have got a defending batsman out for no fault of his. The bounce helped them but so did a discernable steadfastness to remain unfazed in the face of ill luck and umpiring horrors.

This period of play is almost as good Srinath’s unforgettable opening challenge in Ashish Nehra’s match from South Africa 2003 when India were defending a modest total against England. Srinath put up an unplayable spell and set the batsmen’s mind up for Ashish’s taking. [BTW that ‘no seering pace’ fails to apply to that match as Ashish was easily clocking 148 kph in it – nursing an ankle injury.]

No one takes six wickets today but things do not get too bad either. Hereafter skipper Dravid takes over and is made to look even smarter because his other three bowlers do not disappoint him. The only one to go wicketless is – once again – Harbhajan but he does not get much help from the seaming surface (contrary to the claims of commentators) and is distinctly unlucky to miss an lbw by way of another umpiring horror.

Ganguly had picked up a wicket in the last India Sri Lanka match back home and the book-ish (or studied, as you look at it) decision to make him bowl pays off rich dividends as he picks up the best Sri Lankan bat in my book, Kumar Sangakkara, in only his 2nd over. Dada bowls four on the trot and the remaining 5th bowling quota is taken over by one dunno-what-he-is bowler called Sachin Tendulkar.

Sachin has been having a ball with the ball since that Pakistan trip last year when his confidence skyrocketed after picking up Inzamam repeatedly on featherbed surfaces. On that occasion he bowled seam up. He did so not because the conditions were assisting seamers but because spinners were generally getting murdered. But then we saw the same guy turn up as the familiar leggie against West Indies two months back to play a critical role with the ball in the low scoring second one dayer on an underprepared Cuttack surface.

Today, Sachin Tendulkar puts on his preaching specs and offers a free masterclass on both varieties of conventional swing. And he does that with a 30-over old ball. He swings the cherry both ways at will like Zaheer and keeps the batsmen guessing right till his eight over by which time it is too deep into the slog overs for the batsmen to play Sachin with respect. [Besides, ICC’s Anti Corruption Unit are reportedly keeping vigil on the match; who wants to face questions for the crime of not hitting Sachin for boundaries in the 45th over….]

Rahul Dravid rotates his bowlers frequently for good results. Interestingly he is seen readily making field changes to suit the bowlers’ liking. The last three overs of the innings yields 31 runs but that is understandable as Vaas and Arnold stay put till the end. If anything the relative ease of scoring for Sri Lankan lower order bats during end overs should actually be some cause for joy to Indian players as the pitch betrays signs of easing up there.

Must say something though - Sri Lanka are certain title contenders this time. They are way too poised in all situations not to reach the semis.

The match has resumed and I must sign off.

Indian post-Bermuda worries and music therapy

India came out to defend 413 after the luncheon break, needing to bowl out Bermuda for a low total in order to keep up with the run rate. Bermuda went on to reach 110/8 on a pitch aiding swing bowling all along the day. In the light of their earlier performances this was already looking like a relatively better show by the minnows.

India could not trouble the only pro Bermudian batsman, David Hemp (he remained not out). Upto this point the Bermuda innings adequately reflected the toothlessness of Indian bowling and the skipper had little to do about it. All 3 medium pacers were bowling at speeds within a few miles at each other, with no yorkers / slower deliveries in sight. Dread to see such a unidimensional team of bowlers face the attacking batsmen of Sri Lanka in 4 days....

Soon after the team from the isles with 70,000 odd population eased themselves to 154/8. During this period Dravid kept bringing on, among others, a struggling Agarkar to finish off the innings but never did he think of summoning that 4th swing bowler in his team, Sourav Ganguly. When Dravid finally brought on a non regular bowler it had to be Sehwag, and I thought even his off spinners swung enough to remind the captain of Dada. A few overs later Dravid gave a bowl to his second non regular bowler Sachin and he promptly picked up Leverock with a leg spinner. Sach then proceeded to prodigiously swing the next two deliveries into the pads of last man Jones. When Kumble (he bowled better today but not exceptionally yet) dismissed Jones finally Bermuda had made India field for 40 overs.

Dravid has often shown this tendency of persisting too long with his main bowlers even after they have ceased to be effective. We have seen him rotating his struggling specialist bowlers when allowing a part timer to have a bowl would perhaps be saner. In the conditions prevailing in Trinidad today Dravid's decision not to employ Dada even for a single over looked like an outright shocker from a distance, especially as India needed to maximise the win margin to give themselves the best chances of qualifying in case there is a 3 way points tie with Bangla and SL in Group B.

If that - persisting with an out of form Agarkar and never trying out a part time bowler tailor-made for the conditions - was not stubbornness I do not know what is.

I hope Dravid gets rid of it (stubbornness) by the end of this match and his team management seriously considers including Pathan in the next match as a replacement for either Uthappa (5 bowlers) or Agarkar (7 batsmen).

Lovely Sidelight: Over no. 37.2 of Bermuda innings. As India are made to toil by the Bermudian lower order the television camera zooms into the Indian dressing room. It looks relaxed. Irfan Pathan is saying something to Sreesanth. No wait, Irfan is actually humming a few lines of some popular melody. Pathan's lost-in-the-song expressions and waving hands speak a lot about his involvement in the solo performance.

It does not remain a solo very long as - joy - Sreesanth in his studiously frameless glasses joins in pretty soon! Why don't they put mikes inside the dressing rooms and switch those on specifically at these tender moments? [Perhaps the main concern is switching them off before a batsman comes back dismissed off an umpiring error].

As though that is not exhilarating enough, the third guy to appear in the same frame is also a reputed dressing room singer in his own right - Harbhajan Singh. However he looks a little distracted and is probably busy reading a mag.

With the skipper making all his musically talented (remember, Dinesh Karthik is more than chirpy behind the stumps...haven't heard much of his dressing room singing though) players warm the bench, Bhajji may well have been fishing for entry coupons for the trio to musical talent hunts while the other two maestros practised for it. What do they call their band? Do rush in your suggestions.

Or did the doctor finally recommend music therapy for the grim Mr. Chappell?

Two surprises, that 'upset' two teams

Yesterday’s results

So India lost to Bangladesh and Pakistan to Ireland. India batted way below par at the two ends of their innings and Pakistan batsmen succumbed to Irish persistence in not allowing them to score. Indian bowlers were too wayward to defend 191 and Pakistan bowlers didn’t have enough to defend. India are still hoping for two wins and some winners’ luck to qualify for the next round but Pakistan are out of the world’s biggest cricket tournament by the 5th day.

We can go on and on elaborating on the surprise results of the two 17th March games in this fashion. But are we giving credit where it is due? Probably not. Yes those results were surprises, but they were not upsets in the true sense of the word. An 'upset', so far as history of such matches go, is a loss that resulted mainly (sometimes solely) from the big team playing badly. I'm not sure that was the case yesterday either at Trinidad or at Jamaica (unless we have reports of post-match upsets of a visceral kind in the Pak camp).

Bangladesh and Ireland in this World Cup

Unlike other wins of Bangladesh in other tournaments and series involving big teams these wins are no one-off shows. Their matured game and that warm up result against New Zealand indicate otherwise. Ditto for the Irish. In fact the latter deserve a bigger applause for making full use of their county exposure to make up for lack of matches against international sides.

I gladly take back the words from an earlier post of mine. Ireland and Bangla were not doing too much too soon by surprising big teams in warm up matches. They were merely serving up warnings. To then come into the World Cup and live up to the growing expectations against teams that were already aware of their shock value speaks of self-belief, meticulous game planning and talent in the ranks.

The Bangladesh game plan

I have not had much of the Irish game except in highlights. But I watched a new look Bangladesh unfurl at the biggest stage. They were slightly aided by the ever-prepared-to-choke Indians but the win belonged to only to Bangladesh.

Bangladesh remind us so much of the Sri Lankans in the 1996 tourney. They have a number of attacking batsmen with just one (Nafees) or two (Bashar) likely to get near a hundred. They have a swashbuckling opener (Tamim Iqbal) who announced himself in yesterday’s match, and looks good to score a few in the Powerplay overs whenever a loose delivery comes him way. That bevy of enticing, accurate, strangling slow bowlers in their ranks is ably supported by one very good pace bowler, Mortaza. Just what the doctor ordered for the West Indian grounds.

From their choice of bowlers I suspect restricting opposition batsmen to a low-ish total and chasing it down to be the Bangladesh game plan for the tournament. (Yesterday’s match will lead them further on that path.) They even have an interesting plan for the chase. I noticed that most of their top, experienced batsmen like Bashar and Ashraful had moved down the order to propel the finishing act in a chase, if required. It may not be the greatest plan against top sides for an anchorman like Bashar to come in so far down the order but the Ashraful move looked a good one. They will need a combination of striking ability and big match experience in case the asking rate climbs.

It will be interesting to have them bat first though. Their flashy batsmen are likely to struggle a bit. And while their spinners can expect assistance in the afternoon on drier pitches that may not always happen, as the pitches tend to hold well on the first day. On the flip side Mortaza and his medium pacer mate Rasel will be hard pressed to give those vital breakthroughs.


Indian woes and hopes

As for Indian fans hoping to see India proceed further from the Group of Death, they have to add the following to their list of daily prayers:
- no rain on India’s match days
- India bat first against Bermuda and put up 350 plus
- India win both their remaining matches (with top seven firing in both)
- either Bangladesh beat Sri Lanka, or Sri Lanka thrash Bangladesh badly
- Bangladesh Bermuda game getting washed out

The equation, as it stands now, is elaborated by cricinfo's Anand Vasu here. India have to overcome two major hitches to make the best of the controllables. [Those are besides the accepted perennial minuses of lethargic fielding, lack of consistent bowling and, increasingly, the Sehwag form problem.] Both of them reside in the Indian middle.

The Indian middle overs bowling led by Bhajji is not hot and everyone except Bermuda can expect to be let off the hook at that stage. Sri Lanka did that in three consecutive games last month and will be hoping for the same again. Also Indian middle and lower order batsmen have no plan in place to counter loss of early wickets even after so much exposure to these conditions over the last year or so. Bangladesh administered Lara’s methods to Team India and the latter demonstrated their continued ability to freeze in the face of accurate slow bowling. Ones and twos are just not their cup of cricket.

Let's hope forthe sake of Indian cricket lovers that these 'middles' are not 'upset' anytime soon. As Dr. Mardy quotes Ovid in today’s Quote of the week newsletter:

"Chance affects everything. Let your hook be always cast;
in the stream where you least expect it, there will be a fish."

PS: A few weeks back Harbhajan publicly asked his lower order mates to contribute more in West Indies. Look at Bhajji’s two innings since landing there: He casually gave catching practice to the cover fielder first ball in the Holland match, and was bowled attempting to cut a ball inside stumps yesterday. This when each of the occasions required a senior player like him to play sensibly and stay on. Perhaps that ‘contribute more’ call from Harbhajan was just a surreptitious request to Pathan, Zaheer, Munaf and Agarkar to share his quota of scoring runs.

The Sehwag question and Mortaza's visual answer

"Mashrafe Mortaza to Sehwag, OUT, Gone! Mortaza nails Sehwag! Sehwag's disastrous recent run continues. Perfect offcutter that landed outside off stump, on a good length and cut back in. Sehwag's eyes lit up at what he perceived as width and shaped to cut it. The ball jagged back in, took the inside-edge and crashed into the furniture. Bangladesh taste first blood."

That was cricinfo's Sriram Veera describing Sehwag's departure in India's opening match against Bangladesh.

Now we try to look at that dismissal from the point of view of the Indian think tank. We will not discuss the fact that this batsman was arguably picked on the insistence of the captain who believed he would strike form in the nick of time. It is immaterial now. We leave perceptions aside and concentrate on the facts.

Our man Sehwag has now got out in that fashion a good many times in the past couple of months. We can easily picture all opposition coaches and captains playing back his well documented problem with the fast incoming deliveery to their new ball bowlers ahead of an India match, helping them plan Viru's dismissal. It is the same with Viru's skipper Dravid; he too has a problem with this particular delivery.

The difference ends there though. To nail Dravid you have to bowl it fast and full - but not too full. And bowl it on a particular 3 or 4 inch wide channel just outside offstump. And have the delivery swing / jag back onto his pads. When struggling with form Dravid can often get out to lbw to this ball. But then this is a pretty handy delivery for any batsman to face.

Not so with our Viru. These days he seems to make it easy for the bowlers. We can't help thinking that the quickies start their run up against Viru with the simple aim of bowling it quick and bringing it back secure in the knowledge that Viru, like a typical 5th day pitch, will do the rest irrespective of length and width. Worse: Sehwag does it.

And he does it yet again, come next match. [It is a sad and ironically reversed usage of 'again' to his batsmanship; once upon a time the word was most accompanied by 'fours' and 'sixes'.] Sehwag does it off the full deliveries and he does it off the short ones. In the last warm up match he added variety by edging one that moved away. For a change.

Of course we need to be objective and avoid excessive criticism of his attitude ("he's reckless and needs to be dropped") considering this period of time to be the lowest ebb of this capable player. And these can be truly embarassing times. Had The Don been videotaped at such times he just might have evoked cat calls like "isn't he from the same country as McGrath" today.

Before this match started I was wondering about the adequacy of the Indian build up to the big matches, the first of which is scheduled against Sri Lanka on 23rd March. India will have played five matches in the West Indies by then (2 of them warmers) with the only big opposition in that sequence having folded for 85. i.e. Barring upsets they would have had too long a sequence of relatively soft matches to keep their alertness up.

I do not think so anymore. Part of it is because I never expected the ongoing one to be a soft match and it is looking as close a call as was my hunch yesterday. But coming from the point we were discussing, India have to sort out the Sehwag problem before facing Sri Lanka and the slingy Malingy, sorry, Malinga and they are fortunate to have another soft match before it to sort things out. Now they simply have to try out plan B in the next match against Bermuda.

With Andy Roberts warning teams that quicker surfaces await them later in the tournament, Sehwag looks set to dig the team's and his own chances of success a deeper hole if he is retained in the opening slot. The only alternative to dropping him altogether is to get him playing in the lower middle order right where his co-struggler Pathan is slotted.

On the other hand, the Team Management can back Sehwag to just do a Jayawardene on Bermuda and hit a few vital, confidence building runs from his usual opening slot. Things may never be this woeful again for the beleagured dasher once he gets into a scoring groove.

In order to tackle the Sehwag conundrum this Indian think tank has been pushed to deciding between a plan and a gamble . Whatever their choice is, there just cannot be any further postponement of that critical decision.

Nothing said in the above post discredits Mashrafe Mortaza of that Sehwag wicket and the next (he sends back Uthappa as I draft this piece). With better luck he could have scalped a few more, including his Bong neighbour Dada.

Mortaza had looked good in his early days but then he went off the radar for a while. He is now back bowling at full tilt and furiously well too, reminding us of one Mr. Waqar "You-miss-I-hit". With more bowling support and careful preservation I see Mashrafe Mortaza making it into the top bracket.

Interestingly Mortaza has also found a way to look like the great Pakistani rocket launcher in his younger days!! Mediapersons / commentators can save precious column inches / airtime seconds by not asking Mortaza who his bowling idol is, coz' these days Mashrafe prefers wearing the answer on his persona.

Thoughts on upcoming India Bangladesh match

India play Bangladesh after a long gap; 2 years and 3 months to be reasonably precise. The second last time they played a match India ended up on the losing side. Virtually everybody in this world, including people who know nothing of cricket, remembers that day for a far heavier reason. It was Boxing Day of 2004 when the killer Tsunami struck on the east facing coasts of many South Asian countries extinguishing hundreds of thousands of lives.

Two of the badly affected countries, India and Sri Lanka are group B rivals of Bangladesh this World Cup. ICC associate member Malaysia and neighbours Indonesia were the worst hit by the calamity. It is needless to repeat stuff that people know too well but the thought of so many cricketing nations tied by a second common thread of grief makes it resurface spontaneouly.

Cricinfo's enchanter-in-chief Siddharth Vaidyanathan explores a few areas of the Indian game that Bangladesh will look to assault. One of them can be an ambush with their left arm bowlers. Siddharth observes:

India are likely to face a slew of left-arm spinners in that (middle overs) period, with Mohammad Rafique's darts complemented by Abdur Razzak's loop and Saqibul's accuracy. Razzak and Saqibul arrive with economy-rates of 3.5 and 3.7 respectively and India will need to find innovative ways to manoeuvre the ball around with the field spread.

Indeed Habibul Bashar and Shahriyar Nafees hold the key to Bangla doing well in the match. Indians are in pretty decent nick but Bangladesh are at the top of their game with a warm up win over the Ashes beating (Oz and now England) Kiwis. And Mortaza, if he knows anything about latching on to good form, will be a handful for the openers.

Talking of left-arm menace, ace cricket writer Mukul Kesavan was really upset about certain aspects of the Indian think tank's vision around six months back and strung his grievances together in a piece that can make you chuckle when Indian cricket is doing well. The post (a rant really) is dated but nevertheless enjoyable for his delicious take on left handers.

My left-handed left hand says it looks forward to meeting you, Mukul.

[cross posted on Desicritics]

P&G

There's a raging topic of discussion these days: Ponting vs. SunnyG. I am not sure I want to add to it. But today I am on a forced holiday with India's cup opener nowhere in sight, so here I go:

Ponting knows that perhaps Sunny is right to an extent. Every single cricket follower on this planet carries , like his own fingerprint, an individual interpretation of "this far and no further" on the sledging issue. And yet most outside Australia agree that some of their players carry on mouthing obsceneties involving certain issues that are (rightly) considered taboo in the civilised world. Beyond a point The doctrine of "doing everything to win" takes an ugly turn and these Australian players perhaps need someone to point that out.

But Sunny, by repeating his oft-repeated criticism of Australian players' behaviour one time too many at an inappropriate time, left Ponting no option but to speak out in defence. In making the first comment in the midst of a World Cup Sunny resembled a school teacher, also a school senior, who hires a loudspeaker just outside the school gate and blares out harsh words against the roguish behaviour of students of a particular standard of that school while those students are appearing for their board exams inside.

The class representative of those students had to try and shut him up. This teacher, IMO, should have first complained to the parents, then to the school's principal before resorting to the option he chose. In any case he should not have chosen this delicate moment to enforce a long standing decision on something he has little control over. Sadly, it is an issue that the principal could have easily solved a long time before the exams had he not turned a blind eye to it.

Besides, we now suspect that the main issue, i.e. poor conduct by that particular standard, is perhaps overhyped. The class representative of the teacher's own class has made a subdued admission that they all do it.

C'mon Sunny and Punter, it doesn't look nice for record holders of the highest run aggregate and most tons in Tests - Past & Gonna-be - to lock horns instead of exchanging niceties.

Update: We thought only P&G were confusing issues. Boof jumps in the bandwagon:

"I came into the international arena a few years after he had retired," Lehmann said. "He was a player I admired. Not any more."

Yeah? And Boof I just stopped respecting your batting prowess coz' you, besides being a quintal too heavy, have been caught abusing some Sri Lankans over colour .

On second thoughts I forgive him the first offence. It is one of the two counts in which he is second only to Arjuna Ranatunga in the history of cricket. Click here for the second.

The only plausible upside of this proliferating fracas is that for once an India-Australia World Cup match will get to challenge the Indo-Pak one on viewership!

Update 2: Our Australian friend John Cook agrees with Sunny on on-field behaviour of the Aussies and the idiocy of relating it to aggressive play. John says of Ponting's first reaction to Sunny:

"...In other words, Australia might be carrying on like petulant prats but at least they win more games than India. Ponting is one of Australia's greatest batsman and has a great captaincy record. But the Australian captain's job is not just to win matches but to represent his country. With regular dummy spits, the dreaded Pawar shoving incident and now the way he handles criticism, Ponting is showing all the diplomacy and statesmanship of a George Bush."

Methinks the offending players would do well to have a chat with their own 'Mark Tubby' Taylor who was unassuming in manner without being un-aggressive in captaincy.

But Sunny is effortlessly succeeding in turning away John and other Oz supporters of his point by raising the 'bar'.

Scot free

Q: What did the Australian say after his team defended 335 against Scotland in their world Cup opener?

Clue: It is same as the West indian said after their victory against Pakistan in the tourney opener, as every cricket fan said when Sir Garfield Sobers declared the Big Carnival open on 11th March.

Ans: "Finally..."

My WC dream team

As a mark of "3 cheers" to Chris Fogarty on the occasion of his home team Ireland announcing their World Cup arrival in gallant fashion, we let Chris be the master of Dream Team scoring rules. As per his diktat scoring rules have been (over)simplified to:

Every run scored = 1 point

Every wicket taken = 25 points

Here are our teams. No substitutes are allowed.

Rusty nails were never so cherished.