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April 23, 2006
Posted by Zainub Razvi on 04/23/2006 in India-Pakistan
India and Pakistan are playing cricket! Again! But this time it’s not Rahul Dravid's Men in Blue vs. Inzi's Men in Green (thank god!). It's The Indian Veterans vs. The Pakistan Veterans and a three match series will kick start with a match at the NSK today. PTV, I imagine, are giving this live coverage, though I cannot confirm this as I haven’t bothered to tune it. Considerable controversy has been created by this series nevertheless.
Continue reading "Cat and Mouse Games & Growing Up"
Comments (1)
March 30, 2006
Posted by Angshuman Hazra on 03/30/2006 in India-Pakistan
I am quite an Afridi with the 'remote' in hand, checking out on every channel once every 15 minutes so as not to miss out on this great movie or that NatGeo / Discovery program or a cricket match that suddenly turned into a thrill-a-minute affair. You'll probably agree that it always is a sick feeling to learn next day from mocking pals with wide grins that you were in front of the television and yet missed out on 'the' event.
Continue reading "Learn from thy neighbours..."
Comments (8)
February 14, 2006
Posted by Angshuman Hazra on 02/14/2006 in India-Pakistan
What better advertisement for Indo-Pak cricket than a thrilling one-day match at a major venue? The Lahore one-dayer on 13th Feb presented exactly that. Here are a few highlights of the thriller.
Continue reading "A bird's eye view of the Lahore ODI"
Comments (11)
February 11, 2006
Posted by Chandrahas Choudhury on 02/11/2006 in India-Pakistan
A striking feature of India's cricket this season is the difference between the look of the team in one-day cricket and that in Tests. The one-day side is bursting at the seams with energy and talent, but in Test cricket the side has often appeared jaded and a little low on passion. The two areas in which the Test team has been especially woeful are in the seam bowling (Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh covered for this deficiency in the series against Sri Lanka, as they often tend to do at home), and in the ground fielding. India are not at present a very watchable Test side overall, for even some of the batsmen are beginning to look a little long in the tooth. But in the shorter game they have frequently made the pulse race.
Of the younger set of players who have made it to the one-day side two have been especially good to watch: S Sreesanth of Kerala and Suresh Raina of Uttar Pradesh.
Continue reading "On S Sreesanth and Suresh Raina"
Comments (10)
February 10, 2006
Posted by Anantha on 02/10/2006 in India-Pakistan
To me, it appears that the Indian team was desperate to win the game by hook or by crook, no matter even it came at the expense of the norms of this sport known as the gentleman's game.
Those are sane words - heard normally from one of the game's mostly misinformed greats. Which is why it is surprising when one reads the byline accompanying these words. Even though I believe that the circumstances leading to this quote could have been avoided (from both sides), let me take you back in time to the year 1999 to demonstrate why this particular comment riles me up.
Continue reading "An Argumentum Ad Hominem"
Comments (6)
February 4, 2006
Posted by Zainub Razvi on 02/04/2006 in India-Pakistan
This man is lucky, not everyone was able to get a ticket for Monday’s upcoming first one-day international between Pakistan and India. Instead, as Ashfaq Yusufzai pointed out in Dawn yesterday, some people ended up on the receiving end of a lathi charge by the local police. This is nothing unusual or new of course. Close followers of the game in the sub-continent can associate such incidents with ticket sales for most international games.
Continue reading "The perils of procrastination"
Comments (9)
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 15, 2006
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 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 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"
Comments (5)
December 2, 2005
Posted by Gaurav Sabnis on 12/02/2005 in India-Pakistan
Damn you, Inzamam-ul-Haq! Why can't you be meaner, spew venom and act hostile? You and you men are slowly killing off one of the most mouth-watering rivalry franchises in sports today. You and your men are taking the sheen off the India-Pakistan rivalry.
Remember the sentiment surrounding any India-Pakistan cricket match in the 80s and 90s? A more explosive mix of jingoism and pure hatred would be tougher to find even in the 1930s in Germany. We hated the Pakistani players and every match became a war. People cried and tore their wigs out when close matches ended in the enemy's pocket. Pakistanis celebrated India's defeat to Sri Lanka in the 1996 World Cup semi-finals, and Indians were ecstatic at Australia thrashing Pakistan in the 1999 final.
Continue reading "Damn you, Inzy!"
Comments (20)
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