Cricket: From the Far End

Kumar Sangakkara feels Jayasuriya, Lara and Tendulkar will try to leave a mark on this World Cup as it will be most likely the last one for them. That’s only amongst batsmen and even there there are others too:

• Ganguly is surprisingly back after being nowhere in the picture two months back. At present he seems the only Indian who remembers India’s old style of handling spinners.
• Gibbs will try to re-catch the cup he dropped in 1999, despite scoring a hundred in that match.
• Inzamam will try not to be famous again for a run-out in a world cup and will hope to not demonstrate any other new way of getting run out than he has done in the last year or so. Instead, he will look to repeat his tremendous batting in the 1992 cup.
• Rahul Dravid will chase his ultimate success-meter - being in the finals of a World Cup and then winnig it, because the former is the biggest ODI achievement of earlier Ganguly-Wright combination and only by doing the latter will he and Greg Chappell be considered more successful in India, at least in one-days. He was also the highest scorer in the 1999 edition and will hope to top that here. This is his third world cup, and he is in his third “role” - he was a pure batsman in 1999, then the wicket keeper/vice-captain in 2003 and now the captain.
• After recent defeats now Australia have Hayden and Gilchrist back at the top who both are likely playing their last.
• Stephen Fleming is not that close and at nearly 34, he might make it to the next. Same applies to Kallis.

Amongst the bowlers:

• McGrath has already announced that he is retiring even from ODIs after this cup.
• Kumble will retire from ODIs after this, but will continue to play tests. And I hope his last ODI becomes a grand occasion for India.
• Shoaib Akhtar is struggling with the drug tests etc but if he makes it he will want to prove something.
• Then there is Pollock who must have seen South Africa missing the finals (1992 - although not as a team member) or the Super sixes (2003) and now that their team is in so much form, will want to do something to not end up having to score 22 in 1 ball or the confusion over how many are required before it rains.

Coming back to the three mentioned above, after leading West Indies in 1999 where they could not reach the Super Six, and skipping some ODIs in between to focus on tests, Lara is back as the captain. Jayasuriya played under the leadership of Aravinda De Silva in 1992, with Ranatunga in 1996 and 1999, then led Sri Lanka in 2003 and now he plays under Jayawardene (not in any world cup, but there was a duration when he played under Atapattu also). Tendulkar fans though will be hoping he breaks his own World Cup aggregate run record (He scored 523 in the 1996 edition and 673 in 2003) and helps India break the Aussie hat-trick just like they halted that for Windies in 1983!

Although he has helped India win quite a few ODI matches, Agarkar is not considered a match-winner like Kumble. May be people carry Kumble’s test reputation for one-days too. If we compare them just in one-days over the last 7-8 years there isn’t much difference. But the strange thing is despite this large difference in the overall impression, Agarkar continues to get a nod and has been getting it regardless of the captain - he came in during Azhar’s second captaincy innings in 1998, then kept getting selected through the leadership of Tendulkar, then Ganguly and now Dravid.

As other bowlers came up and faded away around him, he seems to be popping back in the team again and again. He played only three matches in the World Cup 1999 and didn’t play any in 2003 (he was part of the squad though). Considering the current form and fitness of other bowlers he was sure to get selected this time and is more likely to play a lot of games.

The most impressive thing about Agarkar is his ability to get crucial top order wickets and the most obviously frustrating one is feeding those “4″ balls nearly in every over. If he can bowl more like his 42/6 and 41/6, both against Australia in ODI and tests respectively, he can trouble many more openers than Gayle and Jayasuriya. What we will also be wishing for is he remembers he has had a test hundred at Lords, and now that nobody considers him an all rounder (that trouble is for Pathan and others now), he can freely try his hand at some of those through-the-line big hitting.

This particular selection is hard to understand. In the last four years since the previous world cup, Indian team management has never played Kumble consistently in any series. Since the last world cup he has played only 29 games for India. Compare that to Tendulkar who played 67 despite the long injury breaks and Ganguly who played 57 despite being out of the ODI squad for more than a year. Also, Kumble has not been there recently - neither in the recent tour nor the one in 2002. So he will be playing there after nearly 10 years.

In these 29 games he has picked only 26 wickets and only once he has got more than 2 wickets in any match. Not a strike bowler anymore, is he containing enough? He has given more than 50 runs in 11 of these 29 matches, and has done well to restrict scoring in the remaining games only.

There is no doubt about Kumble’s commitment, work ethic and fighting spirit based on what we read and see on TV. But unlike in his prime, he has not done anything lately to impact any game significantly. So why is he there? To me it looks like after doing all those experiments, now Dravid seems to have just gone the opposite way and has pushed for players “who have done it in the past and may be will do something this time too”. May be he will, but recent figures don’t indicate that. In the previous world cup he played only three games. Hope this time they start him right from the earlier matches and sustain throughout. Unless somebody suddenly had the radical idea on Feb 13th to include Kumble in the squad, I wonder why they did not make him play most games in the series against the West Indies and Sri Lanka.

The slow wickets there are probably his best hopes of repeating the Hero cup final and Titan cup final performances.