Off Stump

Despite the (or maybe because of the) immense passion for the game in the country, the average Indian cricket fan still shows a desperate lack of balance and perspective. A few victories makes the team the world's best and a few losses later, the same guys are the dumps. Now our cricketers are many things but definitely not schizophrenic! Samir Chopra raises that very question in this article and I cannot agree more. On a related note, Kadambari Murali asks the very pertinent question of why the BCCI constantly places gag orders on the players who are the end of the day mostly just young men at the beginning of their lives. Wish there more people like Samir and Kadambari getting a wider audience.

Post the inevitable and ignominious exit of the Indian team from the T20 World Cup there has been a lot of talk about how the batting, seam bowling and the IPL let the team down (an examples here , and here ). While I agree with those to a degree, a glaring factor was also the lack of effectiveness of the spinners, especially when compared to their counterparts on other teams. The table below compares the spinners of all the teams in the Super Eight. The Indian spinners bowled the most overs but gave up by far the highest runs per over and per wicket. When spinners from NZ, SA, WI do better than you its time for a re-think. Moreover, if you take out Harbhajan's figures from here things would have been much worse. But then that's what you get when you use part-time spinners to bowl eight overs in almost every game. Ravindra Jadeja and Piyush Chawla should not have even been in the squad, not just in hindsight but because Irfan Pathan would have given the squad better balance and