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January 30, 2006
Posted by Angshuman Hazra on 01/30/2006 in India-Pakistan
Date & Time: 29th Jan 2006, 8 pm PST
Location: Inside an elevator of the team hotel at Karachi
We step into the elevator and find two familiar personalities conversing.
Continue reading "Overheard at the team hotel"
Comments (9)
January 27, 2006
Posted by Chris on 01/27/2006 in Miscellaneous
Raise the subject of Twenty20 cricket and you will inevitably witness a polarisation of opinion on the scale of the Red Sea parting.
To the left hand of Moses is “Team Purist” consisting of those avid followers of the longer version of the game who immerse themselves in statistics and history and are usually fiercely protective of the years of invested time it requires to accumulate such a profound knowledge of ‘proper’ cricket.
Continue reading "Tapping into Generation X-box"
Comments (9)
January 24, 2006
Posted by Arun Kumar on 01/24/2006 in India
Ladies and Gentlemen: For those of you, who are wondering what all this ruckus about India’s new found importance in the Cricket world and its consequences are, this is what it translates into: As soon as the news was out, Kevin Pietersen applied for an Indian citizenship!, not to be left behind his Hampshire teammate & captain, Shane Warne was asking around for the mobile number of an Indian nurse!, The South African cricket board approached the Indian high commission and offered to turn over Gibbs & Boje if India included them in the cartel! And and…after the win over Sri Lanka today, Graeme Smith without battling an eyelid said “India is a one man team & that the pressure is on India”!
Continue reading "Welcome to the new world order!"
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Posted by Angshuman Hazra on 01/24/2006 in Miscellaneous
On my way to work I was self-exploring for a suitable New Year’s mantra. It was already the 2nd of January in 2006 and I simply could not delay it any further. I reached office toying with a few flamboyant options. A look at my table promptly evoked a largely acceptable though less romantic one: tidiness.
Half an hour later I was sitting at a somewhat cleaner desk (it took longer, to be honest). Now came the digital housekeeping; mostly the two and a half million e-mails. Shift-deleting through some age-old folders with scarce discretion I chanced upon this freak e-discussion about an Indo-Australian Test match at Mumbai in 2004, the one of pitch-controversy fame. The curious coincidence discussed in that string looked a bit creepier in retrospect of the horrors (on-field ones) that these Ashes held in store for the Aussies. I attempted to recompile the multiple bit contributions from participants. It shapes up roughly like this:
Continue reading "K-mystery: the little-known apparition"
Comments (3)
January 23, 2006
Posted by Chris on 01/23/2006 in Miscellaneous
That Malcolm Speed should be compared to Kofi Annan surprises me little. Both are front men for organisations intent on managing perceptions rather than outcomes. That Michael Atherton has written an unyielding article identifying the similarities between the UN and the ICC comes as little surprise either. Athers has for a long time been an astute and poignant observer of the game.
Continue reading "Move over or I’ll wag my tail"
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Posted by Scott Wickstein on 01/23/2006 in International Cricket Council
I was bemused to see ICC CEO Malcolm Speed, of all people, lecture India’s cricket board on its responsibility to cricket the other day. The cause of this lecture was India’s desire to scrap the commercially insane Future Tours Program that the ICC somehow foisted on the cricket world in 2004.
And I was even more bemused to see the normally sensible Michael Atherton accuse the Indian cricket board of being selfish and the ‘big beast’ of international cricket in the Sunday Telegraph. Atherton’s complaints reek of hypocrisy given that the ECB did not exactly give the 2004 Champion’s Trophy the prime time place on England’s cricket schedule.
Continue reading "Let's not be beastly to the Indians."
Comments (1)
Posted by Scott Wickstein on 01/23/2006 in Bowling
Brett Lee is getting quite a few mentions in despatches in the cricket world, which is not surprising. Truly fast bowlers get our attention.
Not all the attention is favourable, of course. The cricket community has long had mixed feelings about the genuine express merchants. Certainly, the thrill of sheer pace and the element of danger that the batsmen face in taking them on is part of the attraction of the game. But the resulting adrenaline, conflict, and the injuries that speed merchants inflict on batsmen conflict with cricket’s ‘gentleman’s game’ heritage.
Continue reading "A few thoughts on intimidation and express bowling"
Comments (6)
January 22, 2006
Posted by Chris on 01/22/2006 in Miscellaneous
Okay, so I picked the particular year as a lame Monday morning pun, but my point is to try and take a peek at what the game might look like fifteen or twenty years from now.
Continue reading "Cricket in the year 2020"
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Posted by Krishna Kumar on 01/22/2006 in India
They say sport is a great teacher. So then, what is it that strikes you most when you look at the current Indian middle order? From a purely cricketing sense, there is the stoic artistry of Dravid, the measured genius of Tendulkar, and the wispy, dreamy rhythms of VVS. This, bookended by the remorseless aggression of Sehwag, and the moody, feisty strokeplay of Ganguly or at times the muscular timing and presence of Yuvraj. We'll focus on the middle three for now, because they happen to share very similar personality traits. And, that's more or less the topic at hand.
Continue reading "A middle order nicety"
Comments (4)
January 20, 2006
Posted by Chris on 01/20/2006 in Miscellaneous
When the cricket equipment manufacturer Kookaburra, describes the composition of their cricket balls, you can almost taste the century of history the company has behind it. “Five layers of cork and worsted yarn” is a phrase that conjures images of Alfred Grace Thompson, a migrant harness maker and Kookaburra’s founder, carefully crafting a cricket ball with the help of his two sons. Add a touch of “first grade alum tanned steer hide cover with finest linen stitching” and you can almost hear the sound of the ball connecting with a cricket bat. (A sound that Kookaburra lay a tongue in cheek claim to patenting.)
Kookaburra provides these wonderful descriptions of its entire range of cricket balls for all surfaces and in all colours and according to the manufacturer there is no discernible difference between the red and white variety of its products. Both are lovingly crafted from identical materials in a mirror image process. The difference, they say is only in the colour applied to the hide of the unfortunate steer.
However, place a white ball in the right hand of Brett Lee and you could be forgiven for thinking that Alfred Thompson had left a bottle of fairy dust in his factory with instructions to add a few drops to each white ball that gently plopped off his Kookaburra production line.
Continue reading "The white ball wonder"
Comments (5)
January 19, 2006
Posted by Lahar Appaiah on 01/19/2006 in Miscellaneous
Bishen Singh Bedi, that gruff and wonderfully entertaining doyen of classical spin bowling in India, sounded almost gleeful in this morning's papers, when commenting about how the world record for the highest opening stand in cricket is still intact.
His article contains a brief line on how Sehwag was not aware of who Vinoo Mankad and Pankaj Roy were. Perhaps therein, he concludes, "lies justice well delivered". True, true. Or, wait a minute- did he just say that one's ability to break records should be directly linked to one's knowledge of the Game's Great and Glorious Past???
Continue reading "The Gods of All Things??"
Comments (6)
January 17, 2006
Posted by Anantha on 01/17/2006 in India
Jamie Alter's piece on India's sorry trend of making the most unlikely of batsmen open the innings kinda set me off today. A couple of weeks ago, when the Indian team to Pakistan was to be announced, I wondered whether the possible exclusion of Gambhir from the squad was going to be another notch in the "drop them like a hot brick" attitude that seems to have plagued the Indian selectors. And using Cricinfo's Statsguru as a reference, I came up with this analysis.
Continue reading "Opening for India"
Comments (11)
January 15, 2006
Posted by Angshuman Hazra on 01/15/2006 in Miscellaneous
Movie connoisseurs may please return to other websites for there can be nothing but disappointment for them in this post if it showed up on their google search. This is not a review of the classic Fellini movie going by the same name.
That figure in the header is the simple answer to a simple question asked in various formats over the last couple of days by journalists, commentators, cricket viewers and cricketers alike:
After how many years are we seeing as batsman-friendly a cricket pitch as the one being used for the ongoing 1st Indo-Pak Test at Lahore?
Continue reading "Eight and a half: A bit about Lahore pitch and Indian bowling"
Comments (0)
Posted by Angshuman Hazra on 01/15/2006 in Bowling
This is a post that reacts to a view expressed in the Different Strokes post mentioned in the topic.
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Zainub, as far as highlighting Afridi's one-point approach to the game is concerned the piece is fine. We are all fortunate that Woolmer is so far quite unable to ‘rectify’ Afridi and rob us of such entertainment in the process. Shahid Afridi is unique in cricket and should be spared the conventions.
However your last paragraph indicates that just like most others who write about that Miandad six in the print media on either side of the Indus River you too think more from the point of view of a batsman than that of a bowler - least of all an attacking bowler like Harbhajan. Batsmen love to think that they ‘scar’ bowlers. Natural, as they would like to get even after being shaken by certain dismissals. That is why the Gavaskars, the Ramizes and others of their ilk – all batsmen - would invariably impress the thought (of an over-boundary being a mental injury to the bowler) on young followers of the game whenever a bowler is hit for a relatively big six.
Continue reading "Spirit of a bowler: A comment on "The power of a six""
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Posted by Gaurav Sabnis on 01/15/2006 in India-Pakistan
This wasn't entirely unexpected. After crowing and crowing about preparing "greentops" and "pacy pitches", the Pakistanis at Lahore turned out a track so placid that school-kids could survive against a test attack on it.
Continue reading "The Self-Image of Pakistan's Pace Bowling"
Comments (22)
January 14, 2006
Posted by Zainub Razvi on 01/14/2006 in Mavericks
Rodney Cavalier is chairman of the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust; he once said that cricket is one of the few sports where intensity has its own reward for the spectators. “Each delivery” he said, “has an intrinsic significance which melts into the narrative of the over, the over takes its place in that session, the session becomes a chapter in that day, each day is a volume in the story of a Test, the Test stands alone as a part of the unfolding pageant of the history of the game”. “There is no such thing as a pattern, one moment of glory can fox the compass of rhythm”, sometimes we as fans get lucky enough to witness some of these moments. And then they live on with you for the rest of your life, like cricket tattoos.
During the second day’s play at Gadaffi, a run fest was underway. There is no point in trying to tell you all that happened, too much of it took place at once, if yesterday some one had let the dogs lose, today the whole zoo must have been exposed. This wasn’t, in other words, the kind of day where you would expect any such marvel moments that Rodney Cavalier spoke of. But one over from Harbajjan Singh to Shahid Afridi was something special. 27 came of it, the first 24 off the first four balls; it was the second most expensive over in test cricket history. It’s become a cricket tattoo that’s etched in my mind now; it’s unlikely I’ll ever forget it.
Continue reading "The power of a six"
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January 13, 2006
Posted by Angshuman Hazra on 01/13/2006 in India-Pakistan
After a hopelessly one-sided Test-One-Day-One, Indian backs are nearing the wall and The Wall is undergoing a crushing test of limit. If I must mention the scoreline,
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India in Pakistan, 2005-06, 1st Test
Pakistan v India
Gaddafi Stadium, Lahore
Day 1: Pakistan 326/2 (Younis Khan 147*, Mohammad Yousuf 95*; 85 overs)
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Let’s get down to foreseeing Day 2 straightaway.
Continue reading "Lahore Test, 2006: 2nd day preview"
Comments (1)
January 12, 2006
Posted by Angshuman Hazra on 01/12/2006 in Miscellaneous
Rahul Bhatia has a point about the television rights row here. The 3rd paragraph was especially hard-hitting and warns about the consequences of whetting the wrong appetites. It is dreadful short-sightedness on part of the state to even insist on such a thing. No compromises possible there indeed.
Reading through the column though, I had mixed feelings. Mainly from a realisation that in some ways this particular topic is far touchier than the regular commercial issue of rights invasion of some private business houses by a new state policy.
Continue reading "To see or not to see live"
Comments (4)
January 11, 2006
Posted by Zainub Razvi on 01/11/2006 in India-Pakistan
As I’m beginning to type, the first test at Gadaffi between India and Pakistan is less then 30 hours away. You can really sense that it’s that close now. Why? Well that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Previews, reviews, predictions, so-called expert analysis, and all the other stuff that acts as good space fillers for the media have been flying in from left, right and centre, like bees running after some one who’s tampered their hive.
Every Tom, Dick and Harry has been consulted, from the players, to the ex-players, to the groundsmen, to the board chiefs, journalists have left very few un-interviewed. In short, not one pre-series ritual has been left unaccomplished. Frankly, it’s all been rather dreary and predictable. So, what I’ll do is try and not bore you with all that’s been said already, and instead hopefully give you a slightly different, if not totally relevant, perspective.
Continue reading "A slightly different perspective"
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Posted by Angshuman Hazra on 01/11/2006 in Bowling
Right, we are talking about the England v Pakistan 1992 series, the benchmark event for all subsequent official usage of reverse swing in international cricket.
14 years is a long time in evolution of this eternally self-enriching game and these days it is passé to link the doosra of swing with ball doctoring. Back then though, the return of swerve in the ragged red ball was greeted with an apprehension distinctly reminiscent of the medieval times when likening an unknown craft to black magic and evil powers was preferred to assigning logical explanation to it.
The cricket world outside Pakistan was as much prepared to appreciate this still-obscure bowling skill as the australopithecus would be for invention of the wheel or a 14 year old Lancashire kid going by the name of Andrew Flintoff would be for the 1993 Ashes. ‘Orangutans’, rather than ‘fast bowlers’, would be an expected answer if people were to be asked to link banana with swing.
Continue reading "When WWW stood for Wasim Waqar and Wreckages…."
Comments (3)
January 10, 2006
Posted by Chris on 01/10/2006 in New Zealand
New Zealand Cricket uncovered a rare gem the day they unleashed a Canterbury policeman on batsmen of the world. Bond……Shane Bond, demonstrated an ability to deliver a cricket ball with extreme pace and accuracy, instantly claiming rights to be named as one of the three fastest bowlers in the world. The Kiwis had a front-man capable of keeping world class batsmen on the back foot and the entire team looked better for it.
But Bond has been only a fleeting name on the Black Caps team sheet since his Test debut at Hobart in 2001. The back injury he sustained during a one day game in Pakistan in 2003 (after taking 2 wickets for 7 runs in 5 overs) ruled Bond out of all cricket for two years. His propensity for attracting serious injury has resulted in the unassuming paceman playing in only 12 out of the 35 Tests played by New Zealand since his debut.
Continue reading "Shaken and stirred but licensed to thrill"
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January 6, 2006
Posted by Angshuman Hazra on 01/06/2006 in The Players
(continued from earlier post)
Let us now leave aside the organisational worries of Rahul Dravid the team administrator and analyse Dravid the batsman in a larger context: his claim to the ‘world’s best batsman’ spot.
In his recent piece for The Courier Mail, Jon Pierik nominates Ponting as the best batsman in the world based on his recent form at the toughest batting position, no. 3. Not many can grudge Pierik his views on the Australian all-time great or debate the uncertainties associated with batting one-down. Some impressive career stats on the phenomenal consistency and all-conquering nature of Ponting’s form were quite awe-inspiring. The sole non-negotiable disappointment, however, regarding the point-wise comparison of Ponting with other greats in that story was the glaring absence of Rahul Dravid in the piece.
A look at Rahul’s career summary in Tests can help showcase the Indian's undeniable gems one by one in a familiar manner reminiscent of Dravid’s varied skills embellishing themselves over a typical long innings. To borrow Pierik’s words, any doubters who believe that Dravid should not be in contention for the top batsman’s slot should try a potion of these for a gulp:
Continue reading "Rahul Dravid: too"
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Posted by Angshuman Hazra on 01/06/2006 in India
If an avid follower of cricket were to be asked to sum up 2005 in the context of Indian cricket he would perhaps look into the distance for a few moments, tautly curved eyebrows accentuating his silence, and return with an honest answer: “Hard work.” The reasons require no further elaboration. Uneasiness surrounds the cricket lovers in this country who have been suddenly split into a number of camps. And this time it is an unprecedented split, quite unlike the ‘who’s right between Kapil & Sunil’ or ‘who’s better between Ganguly & Dravid’ squabbles from the past.
Assuming (1) the average Indian cricket fan to reserve an opinion on each of the six key characters – Ganguly, Dravid, Chappell, Kiran More, Dalmiya and Pawar - in the drama unfolding since appointment of the new Indian cricket coach, and (2) three types of opinions to be possible against each name (‘he is right’, ‘he is wrong’ and ‘he is not party to this’), the mad statistician can jolly well claim a possible 729 opinion sets resulting on the issue.
Continue reading "The importance of being Rahul Dravid: part one"
Comments (1)
January 3, 2006
Posted by Angshuman Hazra on 01/03/2006 in The Players
Ashwell Prince has generally projected himself well on most outings since the first we saw of him. He was initiated to international cricket during a much-awaited Test series in 2001-02 when South Africa were nightmarishly hammered at home by Adam Gilchrist and Australia. Amid the rubble of demolished reputations Prince managed to stay up to portray the part of this doughty newcomer not born with the silver spoon of phenomenal talent yet prepared to take the hard route to the next level.
Since that debut of his, Prince has done only moderate justice to the opportunities offered to him by the UCBSA. He has looked a better batsman than his average of 32 in Test cricket suggests. His batsmanship, though, is quite a loud shout away from that other Prince of world cricket, Brian Lara. Ashwell is, in some ways, a fill-in for the retired Gary Kirsten at another batting position. An analogy with the pre-2001 Justin Langer would perhaps be as appropriate.
Continue reading "Prince makes the grade"
Comments (3)
January 1, 2006
Posted by Krishna Kumar on 01/01/2006 in Miscellaneous
Aqib Javed in the exquisitely written Rahul Bhattacharya book, Pundits from Pakistan, talks at length about the effects of taped ball games on cricket in Pakistan. It's a topic a few of us used to talk a lot about, in intense post-match discussions in Ottawa. Aqib makes a bunch of interesting points in the course of his treatise. Those will be taken up shortly. But, let me try building up some context first.
Like a lot of other cricket-mad, homesick sub-continental graduate students stuck on North American campuses, we used to play a fair amount of club cricket in Montreal. Which, surprisingly has (or had, I've heard it's down to two now) three divisions of around 10 teams each. Each team had a first division team and then a second division one. The games were played on weekends and on matting. Cricket was fairly intense, with occasional visits by some West Indian second rung first class players. We used to have a West Indian ex-under-20s team player as captain for a while. Methuen Isaac, very talented, I'm sure if he'd kept at cricket, rather than focus on Chemistry, he'd have come very close to senior West Indian team selection. He used to refer to Hooper and Lara as Carl and Brian, and I remember feeling an odd lump in the throat bowling to him. Back to taped ball cricket however.
Continue reading "Taped ball cricket musings and then a bit more"
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