Cricket: From the Far End

Sachin scored 99 in 143 balls in the first game against South Africa. It was a slow innings played in a manner where many critics felt that Tendulkar was not comfortable against short pitched bowling and although he did play some strokes it wasn’t quite like the old Tendulkar. India, incidentally lost that match.

In the next game he scored 93 off 106 balls, an innings full of strokeplay and of counter-attacking nature. His famous pull was back too. Moreover it was played while chasing, resulting in a 134 run opening partnership with his old partner Ganguly (which incidentally reclaimed the opening partnership record that was first held by Greenidge and Haynes, then these two for quite a long time and for the last two months or so by Gilchrist and Hayden: Sachin and Saurav now share 17 century partnerships. And I think these two have a couple of them for other wickets too) and won India the match. Another piece of stats is that Tendulkar went past 15000 runs, the first one to do so in ODIs.

Now where does Tendulkar go from here? Is he preparing for the English summer? When he played like this against Sri Lanka in late 2005 it looked like his form was back. But then he went in his shell again. Don’t know what will happen this time. But I hope Dravid and the team management has shown him the difference it makes when he plays aggressive knocks like that. He may fail at times but I think overall his success rate will only be better than that when he plays conservatively. That will result in a better team success rate due to the impact such attacking innings by Tendulkar has on the team.

If nothing else, fans like me will feel happy he can still take on top bowlers like Ntini, Nel etc. To me, this was one of the best knocks of Tendulkar in recent times because it was played outside the subcontinent, against top quality fast bowling and while chasing.

The third match is tomorrow.

India starts the season with a win, against Ireland. Ganguly and Gambhir scored 50s. Ireland play South Africa tomorrow and then India play three against South Africa. In a strange coincidence all these teams share a qualification that they have never lost to Pakistan in a world cup match.

As if dropping from the team is not enough, now players have to endure public announcements about their being “demoted”. Don’t know what exactly Laxman did to deserve this.

Michael Vaughan returned and with him the huge series wins returned for England, thumping West Indies 3-0 after winning the last test. May be it wouldn’t have mattered, but I somehow think it would have been interesting if he was fit for the Ashes last year. In case we don’t recollect it was Vaughan who beat Aussies in the 2005 Ashes. As an Indian fan, I hope the series wins for England are limited to only the latest one, at least for this summer.

Vaughan though stepped down as their ODI captain. Now Paul Collingwood has been selected to lead the ODI side. Vaughan continues as the test captain. Collingwood has promised aggressive cricket. Vaughan joins Lara and Inzamam as ODI captains to resign after the World cup.

Bedi called Gavaskar a destructive influence, after the Ford fiasco. Sunny has not responded, at least in public.

ICC has finally taken action on the handling of the World Cup final, especially the things happened after the chasing Lankans accepted the bad light offer and walked out. More than 20 overs had already been bowled, and at that time they needed 63 of 18 balls. The umpires then made everybody stop the preparations for the ceremony and asked the players to walk back to play out some more overs. Now ICC has suspended most officials in charge in that match. Okay, all they will stand out for is the Twenty-20 World cup in South Africa, but still at least there is some action.

If you look carefully at this scorecard and the players’ lists in there, you will see a Richards there. No, that’s not some Richards pulled in there to scare England just on the name. He is Mali Richards, son of Vivian Richards.

Hasn’t India been playing too much cricket already? Even against Pakistan? May be not. Pak board wants India to reconsider playing off-shore cricket again. Were they not playing those? Last year they played two games at Abu Dhabi and early next month they are playing one at Glasgow. If they do this while deciding not to play off-shore, I wonder what will happen when they do “reconsider”.