No 1 ranking, Dhoni and new “consultant”
Sunday, December 6th, 2009
India is the no 1 ranked test team now with this win against Sri Lanka. I guess now the tough part begins - to maintain this ranking. But if some other team takes this away soon, it will be mostly due to that team’s results. This is because India doesn’t really have many tests planned until the next world cup. There is an away series against Bangladesh early next year and then I don’t know what’s next in tests. With this win Dhoni now has gone his first 10 tests India’s captain without losing any yet. I first thought this might be a record already but then a quick search on Cricinfo Statsguru told me that Gavaskar had gone 18 matches like this when he started. Dhoni has been the main captain only for just over a year now after Kumble retired last year. Prior to that he led India as a stand-in captain a few times. A couple of amusing news. After some decisions went against Sri Lanka in the third test Murali said the ICC needed to use the Umpire Decision Review System everywhere and not leave it to mutual choice as it is right now. On an unrelated note the use of UDRS irritated umpire Mark Benson so much in the second test between Australia and West Indies that he has decided to retire after this match. Tony Cozier then wrote that the review system doesn’t work. BCCI has appointed Mike Young as a fielding consultant to the Indian team for three weeks. Mike Young is a former baseball coach. So I started wondering how he can coach the fielders to catch a ball without those mittens, whether he is going to make the fielders more efficient by asking them to not stop after running a batsman out, instead try to make the other batsman out as well (”not bother about that dead ball thing”) and whether he is going to pay any attention to the balls that are hit behind the wicket. But it seems he has been coaching the Australia team for a few years already and they turned out just fine. So we have nothing to worry about. In one of the documents referred on the Wikipedia page about him, he knows this much at least “The ball is about the same size (as the one used in Baseball) but harder…It’s been a real positive sport to be involved in and it is very popular. The players are tremendous athletes”. On the last statement there, do note that he was talking about the Australian fielders and not the Indians.