Skip to main content

The big day dawns

Its a nice coincidence that Dhoni and Sangakkara are both wicket-keeper batsmen who captain their teams. The former's probably the better captain but the latter is clearly the better batsman and their keeping is roughly equally good. Which is what the two teams are as well. Just look at the line-ups - one legend on each side, two all time national greats (Sehwag, Zaheer for India and Sangakkara, Jayawardene for SL) plus a clutch who would like to be remembered as all time national greats (Dhoni, Yuvraj, Harbhajan and Gambhir for Ind, Dilshan, Malinga, Mendis and Matthews for SL). Predicting a winner is almost impossible. All I'm hoping for really is a close, evenly fought battle unlike the last 4 World Cup finals. Trouble is if you look at the matches these two teams have played over the last two years (and they've played a lot as Sidharth Monga points out flippantly :-)) there have been just 5 games (out of 34) that could be deemed close. So that plus the WC finals recent history does not augur well.

No reason not to hope though ......post tomorrow's game, I'll publish my"review" and World Cup XI, that should be some exciting time-wasting :-)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of backward selections and England's future

A couple of interesting selectorial decisions recently by England and India (and actually as its turning out Australia as well!). For once I think the England selectors didn't panic and showed the right thinking by not picking either Key or Ramprakash for the Oval Test. And luckily for them, both Bell and Trott have performed well enough to vindicate the decision. India on the other hand have actually gone the other way bringing Dravid back to the one-day squad. I'm a bit ambivalent on that one. While the decision to leave out Rohit Sharma and retain Raina was certainly the right one, bringing back Dravid is questionable. It would have been a bolder decision to pick someone like Kohli or Rahane who both played really well in the Emerging Players Trophy recently, mainly because Dravid is quite unlikely to feature in the 2011 World Cup so why bring him back now? As for the Aussies, they will certainly be regretting not picking Nathan Hauritz for the Oval. A defensive decision if...
Post a Comment
Read more

Happy New Year .....

....well almost......its only 2 months in to 2009 so I guess its not terribly late for the first post of the year :-) The end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 has been quite engrossing primarily because of the tussle for supremacy between Australia and South Africa. And its interesting how once again, the Aussies are showing that the biggest mistake 'pundits' can make is to write them off. But I am jumping way ahead. The series in Australia was a real cracker and it was great to see the Springboks actually delivering so well on their abilities for once and not choking at the big moments. And in Steyn, Amla, de Villiers, Duminy and Morkel they have some real stars in the making and should be a strong team for some time to come. Australia's struggles on the other hand were not surprising after their performance in India. The same guys, i.e. Hayden and Lee continued to underwhelm and with the inexplicable selection of Symonds made things worse for Ricky Ponting. They were a l...
Post a Comment
Read more

Et tu?

As a single sport website, I think Cricinfo has brought about a revolution and the fact that they were bought by ESPN is testament to how highly valued they've become. Their editing and approach to articles/opinion has been refreshing to say the least and even though they seem to have had a lot of editorial staff movement they've usually maintained very high standards. Off late though, both in their headline styles as well as in actual content, there seems to be an occasional slippage of standards and an inching towards the modern media sensationalism which is a bit of a pity. This piece  by Siddharth Monga is a classic example. Granted that the last two press conferences by Dhoni and Sehwag  indicated clearly that the captain and his deputy did not agree on this aspect of selection but "discord", "dissent", "public sniping" feels rather presumptuous and heavy handed. Yes, it is a team sport but there is no reason why everyone on the team needs ...
1 comment
Read more