Off Stump

Kapil Dev was probably the most magical player India has ever produced (even ahead of Tendulkar and Gavaskar), partly because it was always so unlikely that a country like India would produce a fast-bowling allrounder (as Gideon Haigh captures so eloquently in this piece ). In some ways though he is also the worst thing that could have happened to modern Indian cricket, kicking off as it did an eternal pace-bowling all-rounder hunt since he retired about twenty years ago. Often (especially when India are doing badly), it feels like the solution to all problems would be to find a new Kapil Dev. The list of players who have shown a bit of promise and been branded the new Kapil Dev is probably only a bit shorter than a similar list drawn up by English fans (and selectors) of the next Botham. First there were the 1983 World Cup men in Madan Lal and Roger Binny who despite their stellar efforts in that tournament and ample opportunities in Test cricket (39 and 27 caps respectively) never

Any list that includes a mix like Gayle, Samaraweera, Duminy, North, and Prior as part of the top ten has to be an interesting (and surprising) one. At least four of these (Gayle being the exception) are not names I would have expected to see in the top ten when doing a Statsguru query on "highest away batting averages since Jul 2008 for players who played at least ten matches (excluding games involving Zimbabwe and Bangladesh)" . And yet there they all are. The other five of the top ten comprise Amla, Cook, de Villiers, Smith, and Trott and most people who follow Test cricket would have probably expected them to be on that list. Parsing that down further, a few more interesting things crop up. Gayle had one monster innings of 333 against Sri Lanka which inflated his average by more than 17 runs without which he would have been #7 on the list instead of at the top. Similarly, Thilan Samaraweera's twin double hundreds on the ill-fated tour of Pakistan in 2009 gave his

I remember the times when I used to really look forward to the cricket coverage in mainstream newspapers like the Hindu and the Indian Express  and of course my weekly copy of Sportstar . There was so much variety in the narrative styles and the topics covered, that a young boy like me who was just becoming familiar with the game learnt a huge amount from these publications. The tremendous rise of the internet (and especially ESPNcricinfo) as means of cricket content consumption though has been accompanied by an equally precipitous decline in the standards of cricket coverage in these same publications of old. It could also be that I have learnt more about the game and hence am more critical/discerning. Or it could be that I don't bother to spend enough time looking outside Cricinfo and a few select blogs that I just don't find the other worthwhile pieces? Whatever the reasons, the current reality is that my expectations tend to be really low from Indian newspapers and so w