And Pragyan Ojha could never debut in Tests, not that he would not be selected. Just that he might not find 5 days in the field too interesting and economically viable.
I dont say this on any facts or basis of analysis. But on the hunch and a pattern that goes into this lads way of cricket.
Travor Baliyss
Murali
Vaas
Chris Broad
Simon Davis
Go boycott and get all this individuals banned PCB. They have said something or the other against the Pakistan cricket. So its against the interests of Pakistan cricket, even if it means some truth and has some value to it. After all the question comes, who all is Pakistan Board going to get banned ? Rather than this boycott / ban activities, the PCB should apologize to SL and the world cricket community for the unfortunate incident in Lahore and tender an apology to India for forming an image in the world that India too is unsafe for cricket. That’s not true. Cricket is safe in India. Until of course……
And those guys who are having apprehensions about playing IPL or international cricket in India should back out. They should not go ahead and place wrong facts in the media about the unfortunate bomb blasts that happened in Jaipur last year during IPL. If this individuals think that security is an issue, it’s better for them to return the money to the franchises and back out. Likes of Pieterson, Stephen Fleming, Duncan Fletcher and now Martin Crowe. Yes Jacob Oram too. Guys, do what your erstwhile generation did. Guys like Ian Botham, David Gower and Richard Hadlee hardly toured India in their playing days. Its other thing that first 2 travel for media commentary purposes now. Stephen Fleming has got a lucrative coach cum player contract with Chennai Super Kings. Yet he holds opinion that Indian leagues hamper the Kiwi cricket. Nobody forced the likes of Lou Vincent, Hamish Marshall , Daryl Tuffey and of course Shane Bond followed by retired stars like Harris and Cairns to go to ICL. They went on their own. And current Kiwi players have got lucrative representation. Dan Vettori is with Delhi, Ross Taylor is with Bangalore, Oram is with Chennai, Mcullum is with Kolkata and of course Fleming with Chennai.
And if biggies fail or don’t come to IPL, its not that the IPL would loose its sheen. Even if there was no foreign representation in IPL, the crowds would have come in. For that matter, the fiercest rivals the country has are not coming due to their own imaginary security problems. Which Pakistani player has ever been attacked in India ? On the contrary the victorious team in Chennai’ 09 got a standing ovation when they won by 12 runs despite Tendulkar classic of 136. So IPl has been a victim of inter country politics and also the victim of nonsense Indian politics where the home minister questioned the schedule and then the ruling UPA states ruled out the security to IPL in public. On the same hand Mr Modi, the Gujrat CM promised the security and may be that’s the reason, the city of Ahmedabad is hosting the IPL games. Well the Ahmedabad is Karachi of India or SSC of India where the wicket is damn flat and the most scorching draws have been earned there in this country barring the SA loss.
So the stern message is if you want to play in IPL in India for all its glitz, glamour and cash, come be part of it and win the hearts. We would give you all the adulation, love and shower flowers. But don’t speak a bit on the security issue on India cos its not an issue. 11/26 wasn’t an internal thingie, it was done by outside elements. So that doesn’t make India an unsafe country to play in. And if you don’t want to play in India for IPL, then just return the cash you got and shut your mouth off. Security situation in Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or for that matter USA is not related to India.
No Indian cricketer has ever said about the mugging events that happen in South Africa. Johannesburg and CapeTown are murder capitals of the world, yet Indians mingle with the migrant population whenever they tour the country. No Indian cricketer complained about the ethnic violence that happens in Sri Lanka. Their job is to go and play the cricket. Either they are in, or they are not in. We haven’t heard of security comments in public in full media glare from the Indian cricketers. IPL doesn’t need foreign cricketers. It’s the foreign cricketers who need IPL. So when they want to enjoy the booty, they should do it with their mouth shut. Else we will be forced to ask Ijaj Butt and Javed Miandad to go and file complaints against them in ICC and BCC!.
Whats the best way to win a test when you cant win on the basis of strength of bat or bowl ? When you have so called world class spinners looking club class whiskey pullers. Bat long and long and on and on and on and on and on and on. Never stop. Pile 600, 700, 952 and still not stop. Play a timeless test. Focus on positives and say the boys are building up in character. Hit a double and then say I quit. Kill the test cricket and win spirits of cricket award. Get thumped in ODIs and take out the frustration in Tests. Kill the viewer, kill the spectator with the torture. Bat on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Win the toss, elect to field. Gift the initiative to the opposition camp when you have 5 debutants and a bowling attack with 2 bowlers and 2 pedestals. You don’t have to be top test team. Get batting records, get winning records, lie low at ranking table. Win at home, get thumped abroad. Else don’t play Test cricket for 14 months. Play BD and Zim. Win. Sack the coach. Play WI. Play SL, lose. Sack the captain. Get new one. Get a triple. What about team spirits when selfish motives rule the roost ? Heck with them J
Australia lost a bit of their intensity this morning with madness setting in their camp. Much of that credit to Kallis the bowler and the fielder. 75 runs in to the first session and 8 wkts lost. Thanks to Haddin and Hughes, they still sit 420 runs ahead than Saffers. Yet they won’t feel secure given the ease with which Saffers chased down 415 in Perth. Amazing is the history. It gives jitters not to the team but to the supporters. SA would bat in the 4th innings and Graeme Smith is the undisputed king of 4th innings 100s. So he would still like to back himself up for the heroic innings. Few more runs from the last pair on the wicket would be a bonus and would mean more pressure on the Saffers. They would have max 4.5 – 5 sessions to save / win / lose the game. Not long back India defeated them in Jo’burg by 278 runs, now its turn of Aussies to beat them and go 1-0 up.
Aussies were touted to be the underdogs and weaker links amidst the 2 teams. Though their batting worries haven’t been resolved, the bowling attack gives them a hope. Lee and Clark would be back by Ashes. And till then if Siddle and Hilfenhaus make steady progress, the Aussies would look good for another Ashes triumph. Mitch Johnson is touted to be the next Aussie great alrounder, though that’s a bit of far stretched imagination. Alright, he is having good times. But still he needs to do that consistently. This has been a riveting test match, much to the hype and hoopla created before. However I still don’t feel that SA are deservers to upstage Aussies from # 1 throne. Its still India who deserve more than the Saffers just cos they were able to beat Australia when the later had its strengths at peak and had the best of talent which is now retired. Saffers in that era failed to win a single test match home and away, let alone win a series. India in that duration won 2, lost 2 and drew 1. No other team came close to that record. I am a chauvinistic, but then there are facts to prove. I would always rant for the support of Indian test team which for now doesn’t have the young buggers in. I don’t know how it would be when the Raina would be # 3, Sharma (if) would be # 4 and some other dude would be # 5. Yuvraj has seen it all, so its very unlikely that he would like to lose the focus and so his test spot. The young buggers who have all seen is nothing but easy money and fame would falter away when they would be put under pressure of 5 days. I don’t think so the likes of Raina and Sharma are Test class.
Meanwhile the action resumes in Jo’burg. Go Aussies.
………Pakistan and guess against whom ? The dashers and the bashers and then the dampners…….Dashers against Pakistan in Pakistan, bashers against the minnows and the dampners against stronger teams. Test of how Younis (only Y now) takes on his new role of skipper clubbed with the best batsman of the team. Test of how M&M group again after disaster against India. Test of how Mahela Jaywardhena shapes up in his final test series (as captain). And test of how Pakistan fare in the form of game they have not played in 14 months. The last test they played, was almost a miraculous escape thanks to fading Bangalore daylight. Good for them, good for us. Good for world cricket that Pakistan returns to the Test cricket albeit with the weakest team in years. No Inzy, No Yusuf, No Akhtar, no Tanveer (shocking to drop him)…New team, new skipper, new age, let them go and take a bus back to the past when Ws rocked the world and batsmen like Inzy ruled the laziness….
Lets see how SL fare against a favorite team. Amazingly they have got good record against Pakistan in Pakistan, which not many teams boast of. But then that’s SL for you. Jo baki teams nahi kar pati, Wo SL karti he. Good luck to the skippers. One who starts his journey, one who ends his journey (giving us respite)…..
BTW here is a quick look at the captains of the teams and a classification if they are the best batsmen or bowlers of their team:
India : MS Dhoni (not the best batsman in tests, but yes best finisher in the ODI in the team and perhaps the world)
SL : Mahela Jaywardhena : Best batsman of the team.
Eng: Andrew Strauss : He is the compromise man. An underrated batsman and a “miya kaptani karoge” types.
WI : Chris Gayle : Almost the best batsman
Pak : Younis Khan : Best batsman
SA : Graeme Smith : Best batsman
NZ : Dan Vettori : Best bowler
So you see except India and England, most teams are lead by the best batsman in the team in Tests and ODIs. For NZ their best bowler does the job. May be cos they aint sure who their best batsman is amongst the rookies and transitioning team.
What a test match……..
Down Under :
In the days when Aussies would have their luck, they would have won MCG and WACA test. And today rather than fighting to avoid 0-3 defeat, they would have been glaring for a 3-0 series win over the SAfs. Game of cricket is a great leveler. Just last year, the Aussies were on a rampage killing the spirits of the game in the same venue by appealing against everything and anything. Of course the recipients were Indians and the umps were Benson and Bucknor.
I have been an Aussie follower since the 1991 days when India toured them and the commentary, quality of grounds almost took me by surprise. Since then after India, I have been following them. And I want them to win the Test and go for a kill in South Africa. Perhaps all they need to do is remind the Safs of the WC 99 and 07 defeats.
Saf opening with Morkel proved to be disastrous. They should remember that there is no Smith this time. Perhaps selfish Kallis holds the key as he also needs few runs to get past 10k runs.
Neighborhood :
SL lead Bangladesh by 620+ runs and yet are batting on and on. Perhaps waiting for Kapugedra 100 and Vass 50. Inexplicable tactics this. They just play for records and figures. They feast on minnows. They boost their batting and bowling averages against the likes of BD and Zim. When they would find no other team to tour, they would happily tour BD and Zim. Set milestones and then listen the MJ blabber that they found out lot of positives and build upon the team. Only to loose against the good teams. This team for sure kills the spirits of the game. No wonder this team holds most of highest batting score records in T20, ODIs and Tests, yet don’t look to be the top on the rankings.
Perhaps 421 BD scored would have scared the insecure SL skipper. What are they going to achieve out of this ? Simple record of victory by highest margin. Few useless 100s and cheap wickets. Or rather wikats. Here are some of the reactions out of SL fans :
Hamish: "Mahela should take a leaf out of Ricky Ponting's book and make a sporting declaration. And you wonder why people are defecting to the 20/20 version of the game."
Anandha: "Mahela is a different captain. He may wants his batsmen to have some good batting practice because there will be a few back-to-back to cricket ahead for SL. I don't blame on him giving opportunities to his batsmen to have a go with the bat."
Few moments from now SA would become 1st team in 17 yrs to beat Australia in Australia. Good achievement. But a bit unfair too. This Australian team is weak, jaded, tired and unsure of its domination. The batsmen aint clicking, the senior players aint ready to go and the bowling attack looks club standard with injuries to Lee along with his marital troubles. Clark is injured, Johnson looks the only bowler who can take wickets consistently. Unfair becos it was India who ran through the Aussies close 2 times down under and were Bucknored every time in Sydney. 2004, it was Steve Waugh and Bucknor who took the test away from India and then in 2008 it was again Benson and Bucknor who with their shocking decisions closed the door on Indians.
English media cannot leave its typical attitude, the rants on the Ashes and the quality of innings of Sehwag played.
All that planning, all that concentration, all that toil. England had labored for nearly four days to force an impregnable position in the Chennai Test and then along came Virender Sehwag. In his wanton presence, all logic was lost, all outcomes were imaginable. Now anything is possible. England set India 387 to win in a notional 126 overs, a fourth-innings total far in excess of anything achieved at the Chidambaram Stadium. It should have represented absolute security, but Sehwag the batsman is consumed by disobedience. He responded with 83 from 68 balls, with 11 fours and four sixes. India, 131 for one at the close, need 256 on the final day. England's bowlers, Andrew Flintoff apart, were mugged. If Sehwag played like this at Lord's, a shirt-sleeved constable would probably stroll on and serve him an Asbo for rowdiness in a public place. Someone should have told him that the one-day series is over. Such is Sehwag 's reputation that England stationed their best fielder, Paul Collingwood, at third man for the uppish carve. On 26, he hacked through Alastair Cook's hands at gully, the place where Collingwood would normally have been standing. Over-theorizing perhaps.
Sehwag 's disorderly magnificence was entirely out of keeping with an enervating first two sessions in which England moved somberly towards a declaration. Andrew Strauss and Collingwood completed immensely worthy hundreds, all temptation was eschewed and India indulged in shameless timewasting. Harper made a few efforts to chivvy things along, but the umpires generally looked impotent.
Lord Snooty Mike Atherton in Times Online.
An Indian victory remains the least likely, given that they will have to make more runs to win in the fourth innings than anyone has made in India before, and 232 more than any team have chased successfully in Madras (Chennai). With only seven wickets falling yesterday, a draw is still a possibility, although India do not enjoy batting in a defensive manner. This may play into England's hands since wicket-taking opportunities are more likely to present themselves against batsmen taking a chance or two.
That India have been sucked into a run chase at all today is solely down to Sehwag, who blazed away in exhilarating fashion, so that by the close India had managed to reduce their deficit by 131 in a little under a session's worth of batting. Sehwag fell 17 short of what would have been one of the most brilliant of Test hundreds, but his failure to reach three figures, perishing leg-before while trying to paddle-sweep Graeme Swann to fine leg, should in no way diminish his achievement. There were two other hundreds to celebrate, but Sehwag played the innings not just of the day but of the match.
He played with glorious freedom, unconstrained by the situation, the reputation of the bowlers and the pitch, at one end of which the topsoil is completely worn away. England's batsmen had managed two boundaries throughout the afternoon; within 15 balls, Sehwag had found the rope six times. The merest hint of width outside off stump saw the ball skimming through the arc between backward point and third man, mostly along the ground, and once all the way over the rope for six. If England's plan is to bowl short and wide at Sehwag, it needs revisiting.
To restore some sanity, he acknowledges Indian crowd’s petite for the Test cricket :
Test cricket is a remarkable game because of the speed at which things can change and until the mid-afternoon slackness, England were in total control thanks to an epic performance from Strauss, who added another hundred to his burgeoning collection, and a typically doughty century from Collingwood. Strauss's second hundred of the Test occupied 394 minutes, giving him more than 12 hours at the crease in total. Without match practice for two months, he is making up for lost time. He became the tenth Englishman to score two hundreds in a Test and the seventh to do so against India. It was a feat of extreme endurance and high skill and rarely can he have played better than he did from lunchtime on the first day onwards. The “Little Master” Sachin Tendulkar thought so, too, offering a handshake in congratulation. High praise indeed
OPENING the batting in all forms of the international game has to be one of the toughest jobs around. It must take a tremendous mental toll tailoring your game to the many situations these different formats throw up and the recent emotional problems of Herschelle Gibbs and Marcus Trescothick bear testimony to this. Unsurprising, then, that there is something slightly unhinged about the way Virender Sehwag, India's 24/7 opener, goes about his business. He certainly plunged England into shock as he tore into their bowling. Sehwag has not so much pushed the envelope containing the rules on how to open the batting as punch it to shreds. His great gift is synthesis of approach. One minute he is batting as you would expect someone to bat in a Test match, the next he has flicked a switch and has gone into one-day mode, or rather one-day mood, and every ball looks set to end up in the stands.
Earlier this year, on this very ground, Sehwag spent most of the first day of a Test against South Africa batting as though he were in the first powerplay of a one-day game, and raced to the fastest triple- century in Test history. He beat the previous record by a cool 84 balls, so it was something of a Bob Beamon moment. He is also the owner of three of the seven fastest double-centuries in Tests. Like Trescothick and Gibbs, Sehwag has had his ups and downs. He went through a bad trot in one-dayers in 2004 and spent most of last year unwanted in Tests. You could pick a pretty good World XI from people who were not playing Test cricket this time last year, given that Andrew Strauss (this game's twin centurion) was left at home while England were touring Sri Lanka, and Andrew Flintoff was still in the rehab room.
Now, the idea of leaving out Sehwag seems like an act of lunacy. Apart from his huge effort against South Africa, he also made important runs in the series against Australia, but unarguably his finest innings of the year was a double-century in Galle when the rest of the Indian batsmen could make neither head nor tail of Ajantha Mendis. Sehwag 's risk-taking approach seems contrary to his modest background. Raised in Nafargarh, a satellite town of Delhi, as the son of a storekeeper, he might be forgiven for adopting a thriftier approach to his day job. Yet it is actually the likes of Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, middle-class children both, who calculate every risk three times over before taking it.
But Sehwag now deserves to be properly recognised for what he is: since the retirement of Adam Gilchrist, the most exciting batsman on the planet.
