Cricket: From the Far End

If you are in US and have Dish you can see a lot of cricket now on the newly available Zee Sports USA channel (channel 576). They showed the Pakistan South Africa series live and are going to show the upcoming India-Pakistan test and ODI series also.

There is one problem though - you can never guess what’s going on as the menu is not synchronized with what’s going on most of the time. I haven’t done any math yet to figure out whether the program timing is for east coast or something like that, so had to just get to the channel to see whether there is any cricket on, and seems a lot of time there is. Seems a good option, if they can make it a little professional.

This one is going to generate as much reaction as was generated when Ganguly was dropped in 2005. Now Dravid has been dropped, or rested, from the team for the first two ODIs against Pakistan. Sure enough, there is already reaction from former players about how unwise this decision is.

This seems one of those “agree in principle” things about Indian cricket - yes all agree that the big three need to be phased out and one way to go for that is to rest one of the them every time. But like preparing fast pitches, removing the quota system from selection, this one is good as long as it’s not implemented. This time, even Cricinfo gets emotional. To some extent I think this reaction is because people don’t trust the selectors anymore that this is indeed a result of some rotation policy in place. The only way we will know is if Ganguly or Sachin are dropped from the other games.

Again, I am not suggesting dropping Dravid in general is fine. Before selectors conclude that he is out of form, he needs one stint as a batsman. All these reactions are perfectly valid if this is like what had happened to Ganguly in 2005, but we don’t know that yet. If he is kept out of all ODIs but brought back in tests it’s still fine as long as there is consistency in that approach with other players- mainly Sachin I guess, if and when he does go out of form again. This whole thing is only about the big three and Ganguly was already kept out of a couple of ODIs against Australia.

The thing I fear the most is whether there is something behind the scenes that we don’t know. Not only Dravid is not scoring he is suddenly having a very low profile since he resigned from captaincy. Ganguly was dropped with big accusations, then nobody was allowed to talk about it, then he came back with everybody right from coach Chappell to the players happy to have him and ordinary fans were left wondering why was he out during all that time, more so when we saw his performance in South Africa. I just hope it’s not something similar this time.

Somebody needs to tell this under-19 team from West Indies that the under-19 tag applies to the age of the players and not the team scorecard. They got all out for 18! This is a match from a domestic tournament in West Indies.