The scoreboard is an idiot?

Click here.

But it was just Bangladesh, you will say, when you reminisce about this innings five years from now. And when Ponting stops (I am guessing, at) 2 centuries less than Sachin at the end of his career, you will ask to take Sachin’s centuries (including this) against Bangadesh out of the equation.***

But.

But this is an innings of the top order. Not the best, but a very, very good knock.

*** Why is that needed, I ask? Ponting will remain a great, albeit someone who was never comfortable against off-spin, and comfortably shy of being a legend. Whatever the record books say, in my book, the three best Australian batsmen I have seen will always be Border, then Steve Waugh, and then Ponting.

2009

All-time Bengal XI – Ranji Trophy & other domestic leagues

Pankaj Roy – of course.

Gopal Bose – poor, unlucky Mr. Bose. And he, as coach, gave the world Sourav Ganguly and a plethora of others.

Arun Lal – Heard on IPL… “a soft corner for Kolkata? Me? I am all soft for Kolkata”. Honorary Bengali. Features as walking into the Kolkata Metro Rail in ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’.

Sourav Ganguly – as captain. But he would captain the all-time India team too.

Ashok Malhotra – Not as much a Bengal man as Arun Lal, but he contributed with bucketloads of runs…

Shyam Sundar Mitra – Oft forgotten. The older ones say, he should have been a mainstay for India. A 50+ average testifies. But nobody from Bengal were taken into the India teams those days.

Probir Sen – Khokon Sen played quite a bit for India. Khokon Sen made people laugh. And Khokon Sen was, like Tim Zoehrer years later, a reasonable bowler. Sambaran Banerjee and Deep Dasgupta can stake a claim too. Saba Karim was never from Bengal.

Barun Barman – Had speed. A rare commodity.

Utpal Chatterjee – David-da was named so after Alan Davidson, when he used to be a medium pacer. Should have converted to left-arm orthodox much earlier.

Shute Banerjee – What an injustice!

Soumen Kundu – Again, the older ones say that this leggie from days of yore was quite brilliant. A sub-20 average testifies.

______________________________________

On second thoughts, how can I keep the second best Indian left arm spinner of all time out of the team?  Bye bye, David-da, welcome in, Dilip Doshi.

Zaheer Khan gets a Pfeiffer

And I am glad. I am a fan of Zaheer’s, pretty much the same way I used to be a fan of Srinath.

Take away the pretense and the glamour and the showbiz, and all you have left behind is just bat and ball. And in that game, these two, considerable-but-not-extraordinary talents both, had done good. Had done enough.

And Zaheer has a few miles more to travel. A few miles more to travel, now as the craftiest fast-medium bowler in the world.

If only he could learn to pick up tail-end wickets….

India in New Zealand 09 – Observations

Will India ever be the ruthless world champions of cricket like the West Indies were? Or like Australia was? I have my doubts. India’s team will get better, and might even be the dominant team of the world, the ‘first among equals’ if you will, but that one bane, complacency, might prevent this generation from becoming the Baggy Greens of the 2010-2020 time frame.

And do we know anybody who does not like Jesse Ryder? And Ross Taylor?

I do dislike the fact that it took his foibles to be evident to the cricketing world for me to go beyond the respect / admire and actually become a fan of Sachin.

Arun Lal! Arun Lal! I liked him when he was playing for Bengal and making a proper cricket team out of a rather tag-rag bunch.. and I like him as a commentator. Not spectacular, but solid and consistent. Just like the cricketer, the batsman he was. Will have to write a post on Arun Lal the cricketer some day.

Isn’t Iain O’Brien’s blog (click here) exactly the way you always expected a New Zealand cricketer’s blog to be like?

Can I request all Indian cricket fans to not troll the abovementioned blog?

Dhoni is really the heartbeat of the Indian cricket team.

Sourav Ganguly…

Unfair? Yes. Not the sacking, but the way the matter was dealt with. I wonder why they fuck it up every single time!

Will he make it back to the Indian team, if he tries a comeback? Yes he will.

Or no he won’t, if the selectors have their way, but that will be the death-knoll for Rohit Sharma, Badrinath or Tiwary or whoever replaces Ganguly. Ganguly will perform a few heroics in the domestic scene…. and for every time the newbie underperforms, the vultures in the media will be let loose on them. Remember Mohammed Kaif?

What would one give to have the Australian system, where a Mark Waugh is told well in advance that he has one year left to his international career… and that’s all. And what would one give to ensure that Dravid is given that flexibility…

Zaheer Khan and Sehwag

Isn’t Zaheer Khan extremely similar to Sehwag?

They will both do nothing for a while (and people will start calling for their heads), but then there will be one match where they will get a stellar performance, and will be single-handed match-winners…

Genuine match-winners both. And are now at the peak of their powers…

The greatest Test innings by an Indian…

happened a few days ago, when Sehwag scored his double hundred against Sri Lanka.

Have I got your attention yet?

And did you scream Sachin? And did you scream Rahul? Or Sunny, did you say, old-timer?

And then you shook your head and said Laxman’s 281 of course.

And yes, Laxman’s 281 was special. Was very, very special. And I am proud to have seen it.

But this was better.

Let’s try the checkboxes, shall we?

Won India the match? Check.

Was a big, big hundred? Check.

Were the opposition of a high quality? Check.

Was the highest score, by a long shot, of the two sides? Check.

Was strokeful and a joy to watch? Check.

Was he the only real batting success in the match? Check.

Okay, yes, greatest ever by an Indian.

Of gods and demi-gods; and angels and demons…

Ah, Indian cricket fans!

Ah, us Indian cricket fans! We don’t watch cricket, we indeed pray at the altar of the gods of cricket… cricket is our raison d’etre; and all this, while we find it impossible to make a rational argument on the game at any point in time.

We aren’t ignorant about the game, mind you. We know the scientific machinations behind bowling the doosra and the reverse swinging yorker, we appreciate the difference between setting the 6-3 versus the 7-2 field, and our analysis of non-Indian players and matches where India is not involved, is well nigh as precise as you can find it out of any general mass of people.

The confusion’s only when we discuss our own. And that is when our logical reasons (reasonably precise and accurate otherwise) go haywire in the face of a full-frontal attack by our cliques and cabals and me-and-my-tribe instincts. We don’t remain base cricket fans anymore, appreciating and analyzing the game like we tend to do so well otherwise. We become men (and women) of religion, be that religion that of Sachin-god, or Very-Very-Special-Laxman-god, or the Namma-Rahul-god or the immaculately named Bangalir-Gourob-Sourav-god.

And we are pulled from different directions, the primary one indeed being from the country-within-country that we belong to. So the Bihar-country boy and the Tamilnadu-country boy will not see eye-to-eye in discussions over who the greater god is among Dhoni-god and Karthik-god, and merits a place in the pantheon that is the team. And of course Sachin-god is the biggest god of them all, but does the Jat-country boy take kindly to Sehwag-god being any lesser?

And then there is continental pride, whereby the East-continent rises up in fury at any indignation, perceived or otherwise, at the great Sourav-god. Or the old very-Very-Special-god being vilified by the north-continent for keeping their devoted Yuvraj-god out of the pantheon, and the vice-versa by the south-continent for a perceived Damocles’ Sword perennially hanging on the Very-Very-Special-god’s head, even though he has played nearly a hundred tests now. (I’m not kidding about the Damocles’-sword quote, I have actually read it in some reputed newspapers and forms of Internet media).

Really, I remember in college, when I was discussing the merits and demerits of including L Balaji in the team, a classmate, visibly in disagreement with me over my perceived slight of his beloved Balaji-god, tried to end the debate by suggesting that ‘Ganguly is a bastard anyway’, knowing that I, indeed, have my base at Bengal-country***.

Oh and then there are those other invisible strings…

• The genteel gentleman cannot appreciate the modern cut-throat no-quarters-given version of cricket that is perpetrated by the teams under Sourav-god and Rahul-god, and would suggest repeatedly how the gentleman’s game is not what it used to be. (Even the ‘How dare he make the white man wait’ ideas have been bandied about).
• The old-timer has his own gods, whereby Kumble-god (if I weren’t a cricketing atheist, I would have prayed to him ##) is never given the credit he so deserves, because there are, in his mind and heart, already Prasanna-god and Chandra-god and Venkat-god and Bedi-god. So they call him a glorified medium pacer, completely disregarding whatever logic would have suggested otherwise.
• The polished gentleman (and lady) cannot appreciate the bucolic allure of a Sehwag-god or the heartland vibrancy of a Dhoni-god, like he/she couldn’t the unpolished charms of one Kapil-god.
• Why, there can even be, say for example, my evil boss (or say my ex-girlfriend) is an Andhra-country person, so I will berate the Very-Very-Special-god come whatever may (who, of course, is the Not-THAT-Special-god to the rest of the country).

And yes, I did hear your question. And I was indeed trying to dodge it all this while. Who do I support in the Ranji trophy? Sly fella, you, no? Well put. So here’s the answer. Bengal. Karnataka. Delhi. In that order.

 

*** What could I have answered? Well, having no definite locational root apart from that of language, the affront did not affect me. So I mentioned that I haven’t ever had the good fortune of meeting Ganguly or his parents and discussed this specific case of parenthood. Has he?

## As for Kumble-god, I will agree that (apart from his being so worshippable) my worshipping would have had some basis to my tribal heritage; he indeed is a senior alumnus from my college.

Sanjay Manjrekar was pragmatic once…

but has, these days, taken up the role of being the rebel-without-a-cause among the media. In the belief that he is pulling down sacred cows, in reality, all that he is managing is mistaking an aberration for a trend. And therefore sensationalizing non-issues (or rather, as-of-yet non-issues). And thereby, making a fool of himself. Remember the ‘Sachin should be dropped‘ gaffe? Well, here’s another. Just on dint of today’s (and yesterday’s) performance, he proclaims that Indian batsmen are no more the masters of spin…. (click here for more)

After 2002-03 our batsmen haven’t shown much improvement against the spinners as they have against the faster men. So this is a changing trend in Indian batting where we cannot confidently assert that we are the best players of spin. We used to be, but now good spinners are starting to bother the Indian batsmen.

Ahem, improvement? we have had the same four players in the middle order, and their averages against pacers, nor spinners have changed much in recent times. Have they? Statistics, please…. Sehwag, if he gets to the spinners, will generally rip them apart. His problems have been short, into-the-body stuff. So is it that Manjrekar makes all his assumptions from just observing Gautam Gambhir getting dismissed twice (and being one of the top scorers in both cases) to the Sri Lankan spinners? And that too, just in one match? When did we have the great opening batsman against spinners? The last one I remember retired in 1987… The ones in the interim did not quite survive on the crease long enough get to spinners anyway

Murali is brilliant and a one-off; a mystery-spinner tends to trouble batsmen for a while before he is found out…. Let’s not be too early in denouncing what has been the greatest middle order Indian cricket has ever had. And believe me, this is a regular cricket-gods basher writing.

Sanjay Manjrekar, you really are blabbering, sir.