Cricket: From the Far End

This piece on Cricinfo says Monty emulates Bedi. No, not like Sehwag resembles Tendulkar while batting and also not because Monty wears a turban too.

May be because of the traditions they maintain, English cricket allows the statisticians to track numbers with very very specific qualifiers. Players scoring 1000 runs before May, two bowlers from Yorkshire opening the bowling for the first time and so on. This time, it’s about Monty Panesar and he emulates Bishen Singh Bedi because he is “the first spinner to take six wickets in a first innings of a Lords test since Bedi did that in 1974″! The only thing that can beat this in qualifiers is those descriptions about US landmarks (e.g. “Tallest independent standing structure on the west side of Mississippi” - said about Seattle’s space needle and Stratosphere at Las Vegas on different times)

Came across this about how cricket fans in India were angry at the telecast of the world cup. Even Steve Waugh complained about it. I thought only Doordarshan used to show five ball overs before. Why show all the balls from a boring match when you can show the same players hitting fictitious balls just the way the public wants to see, make some sales, help the sponsors? But at least Doordarshan didn’t have tigers jumping on the screen while the over was going on. It seems other channels have also caught up with the efficiency and done more.

People who subscribed to Dish network in USA at least were able to watch all the balls, not that there was much interesting going on. But ads were generally limited to the break between overs and the drinks etc. Some of the ads were pretty lame, like “The World Cup games are great, xyz is great too” or the ones where somebody hits a ball in the air and mid-air it transforms into something you want to send to India, but I used to like the ones about people waiting too long to do some thing and finding that life moved on too quickly for them (something like “life comes on fast to you…”). Overall those did not encroach the play. At times I did feel that the telecast was not synchronized with the commercial breaks but it wasn’t as bad as felt by fans in India.

For matches shown in India, I think the channels that showed it the most professionally were first Prime Sports in early 90s and then ESPN/Star Sports. You would never miss any significant event and the commentators always knew a commercial break was coming up so all comments and replays would wait until that. With Doordarshan you hoped that there wasn’t a wicket or a four or a six off the last or the first ball.

Tendulkar and Ganguly are the two main returning players for the test series after being rested for ODIs. Both have had a few good partnerships in tests before, the most memorable was against England at Leeds in 2002, when their batting on the second day presented a rare instance when the batsmen had declined the offer of bad light. But when they played yesterday both were coming from two different situations.

Tendulkar made two 50+ scores in the last test series against South Africa, but was criticised for his batting in the third test. Before that series he did not make even a fifty for nearly a year. His last test 100 was in December 2005, against Sri Lanka.

If this comparison had happened before the South Africa test series, Ganguly’s situation was much worse than Tendulkar’s. People at least had hope about Tendulkar’s getting back in form. Nobody expected Ganguly to do that, and that too against one of the toughest opposition for Indian batsmen. Moreover, prior to that series, he didn’t have much success as a batsman when he was leading the side. Then he got dropped, was again selected against Sri Lanka and Pakistan for tests, then dropped again and was recalled for the South Africa series. There, he ended up being the highest scorer for India in that. So now when he played against Bangladesh he was facing a comparatively easy task. His last test 100 was in September 2005, against Zimbabwe.

Both are in a partnership of 163 at the end of first day’s play and likely to make more.