Simplifying The Daily Existence

The third season of IPL is about to begin and I just want to know one thing—how many people actually follow this league? Yes, there are the occasional viewers like me how just like to keep in touch regarding the final score or the match result but how about the hardcore IPL fans, I mean if there are any around? For starters, the matches are scheduled at a time that was supposed to facilitate the viewership in terms of post-working hours but then after a day’s work or even if you aren’t in a back-breaking employment like mine, do you really get excited by the prospect of international players overloaded with huge sums of money playing in a league wherein club rivalries are yet an unknown quantity and besides the trophy winner’s prize booty there seems to be no other motivating factor?

To make matters worse, Modi has schedules close to 60 matches this time with each franchise playing more than 10 matches—how many non-international games can an average, no matter how avid, cricket follower digest?

If you recall, the entry of South Africa during the 1992 World Cup heralded a new fashion of setting-up decent scores in ODI without taking too many risks — the idea was to take as many quick singles and secures the wickets for the slog overs. Before this, the Australians were regarded as the best team in terms of running, seemingly-risky but actually, safe singles and running the opposition teams, ragged. Yes, there were some players from the sub-continent like Miandad who had created a niche for themselves by being canny single seekers but beyond a few names, this approach was limited to Australia. After the 1992 season, Hansie Cronje’s South Africa gave a new definition to this approach wherein under the coaching of Bob Woolmer, the team started believing that if you could take a single off every ball, a score of around 300 was easily achievable and that too when a score of ODI game was within the realm of 225 – 250. Those who have a good cricket memory would recall that one of South Africa keenest followers of this approach and a dedicated innings architect for nearly a decade was India’s preset coach, Gary Kirsten. The man literally grew upon the opposition not through magnanimous shots that are played by the likes of Sehewag or Hayden, but through this, singles approach. It seems that the current Indian team is beginning to understand the virtue of this noble approach. For starters, for the first time in probably a decade, the team looks hungry to rotate the strike and their batting appetite is being satiated through taking a boundary but along with preceding and following the boundary shot by placing the ball into gaps and running lots of ones/twos.
I personally believe that this is a direct effect of Kirsten’s presence in the squad. He has somehow managed to appeal to the senses of the boundary-and-sixes hitters in the team that the entire idea is to keep the game moving even if it means sacrificing your ‘glory’ shots and running a lot, for the team’s cause. The result is very evident — batsmen like Gambhir and Sehewag are becoming more comprehensive batters, learning how to mix-up their innings which previously, often bordered on being one-way traffic. The idea was introduced by Greg Chappell also but somehow his much-maligned approach didn’t work with the team.

I remember some commentator saying that Peter Siddle was built like a small horse but his bowling performances are far better than to be horsing about the issue. He has incredible bouts of energy and seeing him bowl, almost makes you wish you were so athletic, packed with so much stamina and could do what he does best — constantly bowl at 142 + km/hr without showing any signs of drop in intensity or energy. Siddle reminds a bit of the young Ntini from SA who had started out in a very similar style but then eventually the workload of the balling probably slowed him down. Hillfenhaus, the other recently introduced Aussie bowler too is impressive but he is more of the McGrath type with a measured length and line being his main thing. Siddle is a bit like Brett Lee and Waqar Younis rolled into though his wickets tally usually don’t match the wicket-taking fame of these two ultra-quick bowlers.

They aren’t Hayden & Gilchrist by a long shot, but still, the Aussie opening pair of Shane Watson and Shaun Marsh could the opening solution that Australia had been searching for some time. While Watson has impressed everyone with his graduation into a mainstream batsman, Marsh was always considered the next big thing to arrive from the competitive Aussie domestic circuit. I first saw him in the first season of IPL and he still looks as impressive he did when I first saw him straight-lift bowlers over their heads, making the ball often step over the boundary ropes. Both the batsmen don’t have any particular vulnerability to spin or pace and with Watson having proven himself in the test match arena recently, this could well be the opening pair that will be uniformly used in T20s, tests and ODIs. The only unsightly thing—that absolutely ridiculous dance cum hopping routine that Watson bursts into while bowling.

It is very difficult to decipher whether Lalit Modi means business or he is just obsessing with his baby—the IPL. According to him and some financial analysts, the TV rights for IPL3 have actually been under-valued and marketed at nearly 90% less than its actual worth. This announcement came on top of the fact that in the next few seasons, one IPL team would be worth around $300 million and that is just a conservative estimation, if Mr. Modi is to be believed! What I still cannot fathom is how the IPL is making so much cash considering that I have rarely seen someone truly emphatic about the fate of IPL matches and just cannot recall even person who is a real follower of this league. Do these figures represent any kind of facts whatsoever or is this another one of Modi’s brainwaves to engage some more media attention towards the IPL, may be even at the cause of raising curiosity among folks for no apparent cause?

For those who are tuned into Neo Sports, the cricketing channel controlled by the BCCI, would know that for the last few days, the channel has been advertising the upcoming test series between South African and India 2010. as the world’s test championship series. What they are essentially referring to is the fact that while India currently occupies the number test ranking, SA are at number two and the competition among these two teams to be called the top-ranked
test team is going to be intense. However, if you try to be very precise about things, it really isn’t a test championship in any way, is it? For starters, even after repeated demands from many present and ex cricketers, there is no league format for a dedicated championship tournament to decide the world’s top, test match team. Secondly, unless Australia is a part of the mix, no test championship tournament can be complete, simply because they are the biggest threat at the moment, consistently winning at home and away, with a renewed vigor. It would have been much better hand India, SA and Australia would have been made to play some sort of a triangular test championship and the eventual prize — the baton and the rightful, unargued status as the world’s best test team of 2010!!

A lot of people in India, particularly the over-critical media, has been voicing their disappointment about how the Indian batsmen faltered against a mediocre team like Bangladesh. However, I believe that things need to be looked at from a much larger perspective.
For starters, the Idea test series has very little to offer in terms of exciting encounters since the Bangladeshi cricket team hardly has any renowned players. With the Indian batsmen getting out to a score of less than 250 runs, the game has been set-up in a manner that at least makes it a bit engaging, at least in terms of TV viewership. And further, all these emotional outbursts about India faring so averagely after graduating to the number one test team spot is getting a bit too repetitive — India haven’t even spent two straight months at this ranking. It is just an occasional thing and one day of average batting performance is not going to sink the ship… seriously, some folks need to take things a bit less seriously!

England had just managed to escape a very evident defeat in the third test match versus South Africa and the Barmy Army would have been hoping for a better show on the first day of the final test match. However, it was their captain, Andrew Strauss who had a particularly bad day, and did nearly every thing wrong to squander away
England's chances. For starters, he chose to bat on what is essentially a typically English, green, swinging pitch. Secondly, he got himself out on the first ball of the match. Yes, Amla did take a great catch but getting out for a duck in the decider can never augur well for a team that isn’t high on experience or confidence. What confuses me is the fact that Sidebottom was chosen over Graham Onions although the latter has had a very successful series. This means that the team is depending a lot on Sidebottom’s ability to swing the ball and yet, when the chance to bowl first was served on a platter, Strauss just turned it down and the entire England team has been shot-out for less than a 200!

Some folks might call it India’s inability to deliver in crunch situations or the collective failure of their batsmen just when it mattered most but I would call it a matter of simple probability… you just cannot keep expecting your batsmen to win every game. The batsmen had been delivering in nearly every match for the past two months
and one bad game was due at some point in time and unfortunately for the Indians it happened in the final of the Bangladesh triseries. Still you would have to say that the batsmen delivered to some extent but as usual, the bowling was below par and it never looked like India would put-up a fierce competition in terms of defending what looked like a low but midway-kind of score.

Parnell came and went without doing much, but in the short while that he played for the South African team, the young left-armer showed a lot of promise and in a cricketing nation that hasn’t traditionally produced left-arm seam bowlers, Parnell was rated highly and counted upon to be a big, name in the near future. Now, he is on the verge of making a comeback and if early comments are to be believed, his pace and his penetrative ability have
only improved. He would add more fuel to a bowling attack that is slowly but steadily getting back to its old glory days. With Ntini aging and Pollock no longer able to horse-carry the bowling attack, things were getting a bit difficult for Graeme Smith. However, with Mornie Morkel and Dale Steyn rising to the challenge and the young De Wet being added to the mix, things are improving very quickly. Further, all these bowlers are very young, quick, well-built and seem to have it in them to present a dependable pool at Graeme Smith’s disposal. I dare say that the Aussies might be beaming a lot about their own bench of bowlers but the SA bowlers look at par and they are a lot younger and devoid of those painfully repetitive Aussie on-field antics.

I must have heard it wrong or there is something even more wrong with Pakistani cricket than I had imagined until now. If reports are to be believed some folks in the PCB are planning to make Shahid Afridi as Pakistan’s permanent skipper. I don’t have anything personal about the guy — that might be the general impression since I am a hardcore Indian cricket fan, but I don’t think he is even close to having the temperament that international skippers are supposed to have. For starters, I doubt his presence in all formats of the game not because he isn’t a decent player but simply because it just doesn’t look that he is pushing himself to establish himself
as a comprehensive international player. He has never been seen complaining about the lack of test matches he has played or the careless manner in which he has repeatedly got out just when the team looked like winning an ODI game. Add to this, the fact that he has never been consistent at any place in the long list of batting order swaps that have been hurled at him, make him a very susceptible kind of batter… destructive yes, but consistent enough to lead by example — I very seriously doubt… at best he is a T20 captain since owing responsibility is not really emphasized upon in the T20 format.

This is the question I want to pose to some of international captains who seem to be demanding a certain type of coach, every time their respective team shows signs of lagging behind in a certain aspect of the game. Dhoni was the one who called for a full-time fielding coach along with an assistant because the pathetic fielding standards of the Indian team have now become a commonly acknowledged fact. Is it that the fielding coach is going to sprinkle some magic on 25+yr olds who have been playing this game for more than a decade and make them bend and twist along the lines of cricket’s ex-Mr. Fielding Jonty Rhodes? The Indian fielders cannot perform basic fielding actions with precision like bending down fully and collecting the ball cleanly. Is that really something for which you need a full-time, dedicated coach? Mohammed Yousuf has now demanded a batting coach because his side has stumbled twice against the average spin of Nathan Hauritz & Co. What are we supposed to believe? The Pakistani batsmen who dug out the short pitched bowling that supposed to be their nemesis but got out repeatedly to a lollypop bowler like Hauritz are going to be re-taught how to play down flighted deliveries? Seriously, we need some sense being knocked into captains who just cannot acknowledge the fact that their sides are performing badly in a certain way simply because there is lack of application. How about keeping a coach for being honest and forthright if we are already on a coach-appointing spree??

Shaun Pollock may sound a bit controversial when he says that the time has come for Ntini to hang-up his boots as far as test cricket is concerned but if you watched the first two test matches between South Africa and England, he couldn’t be more correct. Ntini was never a swing bowler and never had any real guile. His real weapon has been seemingly unending reserves of energy based upon which he could hit the deck so much that the ball would bounce awkwardly and make batsmen uncomfortable. Give him some swing or a bit of grass and these virtues become even more threatening.
However, age is beginning to creep upon South Africa’s workhorse and he is no longer the same bowler who could consistently run around the 90 mile/hr benchmark. I still recall how Ntini would literally run back to his bowling run-up even when between long, test bowling spells. Now, this pace is around the 135 km/hr mark and that isn't too great if you are wanting to take wickets simply by depending upon hitting the pitch hard. On the other hand, just like Pollock said, de Wet looks like the next big thing to have arrived on the international cricket scene. He is tall, built like a wrestler, runs up close to the stumps and even on a dead, second test match wicket, he bowled some hostile spells. He was the only South Africa bowler who looked like picking up a fiver or something close and actually troubling the English batsmen. There is just no room for sympathy in international sports and Ntini is faced with something that is applicable to all top-level sportsmen, across the world — you are only as good as your last performance!

There are two ongoing test matches and both have them proved that no matter how flat the wickets are, no matter how inventive the batsmen have become and no matter how enterprising shot-making has become, one simple, fact cannot be altered — most contemporary sides cannot handle even average-quality spin bowling if it is dished out on a sustained basis.


Just look at the Pakistani side. They were supposed to struggle against the fast, Aussie bowlers but they have fallen prey to a fiver from Hauritz. No disrespect towards Nathan Hauritz, but by no means is he a match-winning Tweaker. By no means Hauritz can be described as a big spinner of the ball. He is simply a line and length, off-spinner who has the ability to stick to a line and wait for the batsmen to commit a folly and usually that doesn’t work since the pitches are so flat these days that all sorts of strange, counter strokes can be played to negate whatever little spin he is able to generate. The same applied to Kumble for a long time when he could take buckets of wicket at home because the pitches were up and down but was redundant in overseas conditions because simply pitching the ball between the stumps didn’t make an impact. The same applies to South Africa. Graeme Swann does have the talent to make the ball dip in the air but he cannot spin it an impressive extent even if his own life dependent upon it. He simply owes his wickets against South Africa to the Proteas batsmen being apprehensive on the slight indications of some, meagre turn on a wicket that is slowly wearing out.
The final result — two average spin bowlers have delivered what are potentially match-winning spells.

Pakistan had an excellent opportunity to dent Australia's batting confidence in the first test matched but as it turns out, their bowlers just weren't up to the mark when it come to bowling, actually, wicket-taking deliveries. Most of the bowling was just too short. It seemed that the Pakistani bowlers got too excited by the lure of bowling on a bouncy track and kept on pitching it
so short that the ball just didn't make the kind of impact most experts were believing it would make. Nearly every bowler seemed obsessed with trying to bounce out the Aussie batsmen, ignoring the fact that these batsmen are more equipped than most to play the short ball and bouncers don't work if you keep bowling them with mundane regularity. I believe the real ace with the Pakistanis lies in their ability to swing the new and the old ball and that is what they should be concentrating upon rather than trying to further their speed-guns or trying to hit the helmets of the batsmen. Rauf hasn't played much cricket but he does look like a good, line & length type bowling if he can just pitch the ball, a bit further up. Even Ajmal was guilt of not floating the ball - something that has given him bucketful of wickets. The fact that even Nathan Hauritz got stuck into the Pak bowling underlines the fact that the bowlers weren't threatening. Pakistan can still bail themselves out, they do have the firepower, it just needs to get on the right radar.

This may seem too trivial to point out right now, but this question had been raised by some journalists at Kirsten, the Indian coach, and it seems that the answer to the question is a big, Yes. The thing is that Tendulkar had been plagued by many back and shoulder injuries in the last two-to-three years and many experts believed that his extremely thick bat, given his size and height limitation combined with the amount of cricket he was playing was a major reason for this. However, Tendulkar always refuted such theories and the runs kept coming-off his heavyweight bat carrying the MRF signature. It was during 2009 that Tendu had a change of sponsors and MRF exited and may be this was the reason that prompted Tendu to change his bat. He is now batting with an Adidas bat and it seems that this piece of lumber is much lighter than what he was using before. The results are evident in the way he is approaching the short-pitched ball, overcoming it with tender footwork and just dabbing upon it rather than playing those cracking, lifted off-drives. In fact, he seems to be getting more comfortable with merely pushing at the ball in vacant spots on the field and taking twos and threes, not that his boundary-scoring ability has suffered in any way, but his entire body language is more fluent than before, particularly the way he is playing delicate late-cuts around the third-man region. I feel that if he could replace those century-old pads of his, more weight would be lifted off his body, adding to his overall durability...now that such questions are bound to arise. I know, this sounds a bit too intrusive and talking about things that may seem insignificant but then cricket is 50% Tendulkar to me so obsessing over him is beyond my control.

The Indian team’s ODI performance hasn’t been the greatest in recent months and despite that the team is in reckoning to win the numero uno ranking profile, courtesy of the present point-based ICC calculation system and India’s decent performances during the first half of 2009. It should be highlighted that this recent dip in performance is deeply disturbing considering that India have been facing under-strength teams. First Australia and now SL are here without many of their star players being left due to form-based issues or due to injuries. Further, these are home series and ideally, India should be winning the series quite comfortably. However, that is not the case.
They struggled a lot against the limited bowling resources of Australia and their own bowling attack has been repeatedly put to the sword by a Sri Lankan batting line-up wherein only the top four batsman can be considered regular members and potential match-winners and among that too, Mahela Jayewardene is desperately out-of-form. So what does this say about Dhoni’s men? They are vying hard for the top ranking status but where are the ODI performances to back the claim? If the bowling cannot hold its own in a home series with nearly a full-bench with most of the regular bowlers bowling, what does this indicate for the future? Secondly, the Indian batsmen are doing pretty good but usually when they are setting-up targets. They failed miserably when trying to chase reasonable targets and it seems that if the captain, Dhoni, doesn’t fire in the middle-order, it does seem to collapse against sustained short-pitched bowling.