Skip to main content

One down ....three to go

So the first prediction came through (heart and head) rather more easily than I thought! The Windies were downright pathetic but I guess that shouldn't really have been a surprise. Without Dwayne Bravo and Fidel Edwards they always seem to lack a strong spirit and its a pity those two guys succumbed to injuries. Still with young kids like Barath, Bravo jr, Roach, and Russell maybe all is not lost for them.

Tomorrow's game will hopefully be a cracker and if India can sneak it, I will be overjoyed, not least because the opponents wear the baggy green :-) It will be very tough though primarily because more than half the team doesn't look in top gear. The two players India will/are missing the most are Praveen Kumar and (ironically) Dhoni himself. The latter's batting ability seems to have gone completely awol and without him the lower middle order collapses badly. And while Munaf is a steady honest trier, he doesn't have the knack of picking up wickets like Praveen and he's much worse in the field. Hopefully neither of these will prove too costly and the team can come through for a much awaited semi-final.

And finally, my fantasy team has made a decent start to the knockout stage. Not in overall terms, but at this stage am ahead of all the experts :-) Long may that last!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Much ado about a run-out

Judging by the amount that's been said and written about Ian Bell's run-out-that-wasn't at Trent Bridge, you would think that it has been the most significant occurrence of the series so far when nothing could be further from the truth. Andrew Miller  and Samir Chopra seem to be of the opinion that it was the crucial turning point in the match, which I completely disagree with (the post-tea sessions on days one and two were far more critical and momentum shifting). Andy Flower says that if Tendulkar had been run-out similarly in Bombay, it would have caused an international incident. He's clearly feeling the effects of having been in the England cricket set-up for too long given that a) its very improbable that Tendulkar would do something as daft as Bell did, and b) when a controversial run-out (but within the laws) did happen to him (against Pakistan at Eden Gardens no less), Tendulkar went out to the crowd and appealed to them to calm down and let the game proceed...

A kick up the backside

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...

First thoughts on the Ashes

The only minor surprise for me in the 2013 Australian Ashes squad announced last week was the selection of James Faulkner ahead of Moises Henriques as the second all-rounder. Minor because given  the Shane Watson shenanigans of recent times, I would have thought that Inverarity and co would have opted for a second batting all-rounder (which is what Henriques clearly is). Instead they've gone with a bowling all-rounder in Faulkner and it'll be interesting to see what happens if Watson's batting woes in Test match cricket continue in the first two Tests. As for the rest of the squad, given the way the inexperienced batting performed in India, Rogers and Haddin were always going to make it in to the team and the choice of Khawaja over Smith appears sound too given that the latter's strength is in playing spin bowling. The batting still looks as unsettled and shaky as the Indian fast bowling line-up and its here that the series will be won or lost for the Aussies. The retu...