Off Stump

Its very interesting (and revealing) that so many Indian cricketers pull up their socks and become better players once they've been dropped from the side and left out in the cold for a while. The trend is even more prevalent currently when the selectors have a larger pool of good players to choose from. Dravid (from the one-day team), Kumble, Ganguly, Sehwag, Yuvraj, Zaheer, Harbhajan, the list goes on. In fact, the only people I can think of who haven't been dropped at any point in recent years are Tendulkar (in any form of the game), and Dravid (from the Test team). This article in the TOI attributes their post-drop performance improvements (at least in Yuvraj's case and a few more as well) to anger. I'm not too sure I agree. I think its more a generic Indian mentality of taking things easy and getting soft and comfortable too easily. Its a national trait and one that needs great guarding against. I've discovered the hard way how getting physically unfit or slack...

That seems to be the weird logic being followed by everyone concerned with regards to the England tour resuming. In general, the theory always seems to be that only the touring team is under threat from terrorists and not the local team. Agreed that the locals live there anyways, and so the threat to them is not any greater/lesser than any other time but surely some attention needs to be paid to their security arrangements as well? This seems to be the case even more strongly in this instance where there is such a great hullaballoo currently around security arrangements and elite commandos for the England team at the same time that more than half the Indian team is engaged in Ranji Trophy contests (in fact almost everyone apart from Tendulkar, Laxman, and Dhoni). Evidently even terrorists don't regard Ranji matches as being worth their presence! ;-) Anyways, no more cynicism. Been a long time since I posted anything, a combination of too much work and laziness at other times. Will ...