Off Stump

Given that I'm a cricket tragic, it won't be a surprise for me to state that I find the beginning of a new season exciting. Notwithstanding that, the upcoming season for India is one I'm particularly looking forward to. For one, I can't recall India having played as many Test matches as they are going to between July and March next year. 17 Tests against a wide variety of opponents will be a true test of what this team is shaping up to be and of Virat Kohli's next stage as captain. Granted that the fact that 13 of these are at home means that the team won't be tested condition wise as much as they might have been. It will however show how much depth Indian cricket really has and who the next generation of match definers (I don't like the term match-winners in Test cricket given how much of a team game it is) will be. The most important questions in my view are - Who are India's best openers? (my current view is M Vijay and KL Rahul) Should Chetes...

July 21st feels like a different age now but in actual fact it was less than half a year back. For Cook and Clarke it must seem like an eon and more given how their respective positions as captains has reversed. One thing that has not changed though is their batting form. Clarke had a blip in those first two games in England but came roaring back to form in the third Test of the summer and has continued the good work with two more hundreds since. Cook's scores on the other hand (since the third Test of the summer) read 62, 0, 51, 22, 25, 34, 13, 65, 3, and 1. Hardly what you'd expect from a man who averages 47.2 and scores a hundred every seven innings. Its hard enough to be out of form as captain (and the team's main batsman) when your team is winning. But when you're down 0-2 and on the brink of losing the Ashes, and your senior players are not performing, the weight of personal failure must seem crushing. Cook though has always come across as someone who could bear ...

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 ...

There are few things in this world that seem to polarise people more than statistics. Mark Twain's famous quote (from which this series takes its name as well) is probably the best example of the school of thought that derides the field and its use to explain things whereas most people of a scientific mind or training will almost always look at the statistics first. The truth as always probably lies somewhere in between. My own more simplistic view on statistics is closer to what a character in one of Rex Stout's innumerable Nero Wolfe books says, "There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up". I was never particularly strong on the higher mathematics side (= the kind you make up) of the statistics coin but when it came to numbers in sports (especially cricket), my thirst for looking up has been like a glass with no bottom. Poring over lists and numbers and comparing players across eras (often on meaningless parameters) has cumu...