"No, thank you" says Ford

Each time I think the BCCI can't do any worse, they prove me wrong by creating an even bigger cock-up. Graham Ford was well within his rights to turn down the job if he felt that the compensation or the tenure was inadequate. If the dumb clucks in the BCCI chose to go ahead and announce his appointment as the coach of the Indian cricket team without waiting for his official acceptance of their offer, he can hardly be blamed. The BCCI babus suffer from incurable foot-in-the-mouth disease and seem to count each day that they do not appear on the idiot box as wasted. I never thought I'd say this but these buffoons have succeeded in making Dalmia's reign look like a golden era. When he was in power at the BCCI I had no love lost for him and celebrated his exit as a new dawn for Indian cricket. But Dalmia was a hard-core Marwari businessman who at least got things done. Sharad Pawar has made the organisation a standing joke, albeit a very bad one. The BCCI now resembles nothing so much as a Tower of Babel, where each of his lackeys tries to outdo the others in shooting his mouth off without verifying anything. This latest fiasco only reinforces the popular perception of the BCCI as a bunch of arrogant,power-drunk incompetents answerable to no one. Someone got it spot-on a long time ago when he said that the only thing worse than a public sector monopoly is a private sector monopoly.Let's pray for the early birth of Zee's ICL (Indian Cricket League). Surely they can't do any worse than this lot!

Heartbreaking but hardly surprising

The result of the India-Australia match on 29th October could hardly be said to be unexpected. The Aussies, though an increasingly ageing side and no longer invincible, are still the strongest team in world cricket. The Indians, on current form, probably rank just above Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and England.
To any objective observer of the game (unfortunately that seems to rule out a huge percentage of Indian fans) the Indian team's decline in the last 8-10 months has been obvious. Yet, ostrich-like, the great Indian cricket-loving public continued, till yesterday, to bury their collective heads in the sand. After every defeat the captain would claim that 'the boys' had done their best, winning isn't everything, etc. etc. Before the start of each match he'd claim that they'd put the past behind them. Regrettably the past seems to have other ideas and is currently clinging to Dravid & co. like a limpet or a long-lost brother.
Since every cricket-loving Indian has either seen the game on the idiot-box or has read all about it in today's newspaper, I'll skip the match details. (Nobody's paying me to do a report on the match!) Rather, I'd like to put to the blogosphere at large a few questions which have been nagging me since the game ended.

1)How many members of the Indian team were actually playing for India as opposed to playing to secure a spot on the South African tour? Kaif's stubborn refusal to play shots almost certainly forced Dravid to play the horrible stroke which cost him his wicket. Dinesh Mongia's prime concern seemed to be to get to 30-40 odd at any cost, no matter how long it took him. The less said about Raina the better. And while Dhoni managed a run a ball, he seems to forgotten how to hit boundaries. This is no longer the free-spirited Dhoni who used to wield his bat like a mace.

2)Can anyone remember when was the last time Sachin Tendulkar came good when the chips were down ?

3)Why was Kaif sent in to bat ahead of Dhoni when acceleration was the need of the hour?

4)Why does the Indian team always slow down to a near crawl between the twentieth and the fortieth overs thereby frittering away any advantage a good start may have given them? A propos the same point, why does every Greg, Dick and Harry in the support staff have a laptop if they can't do simple multiplication tables to work out when the batsmen should start putting their feet on the accelerator? Rocket science it isn't.

5)Why did the Indian team walk out to field believing it had already lost? Their body language made it obvious that they were simply going through the motions.

There are many more such questions but answers, frank answers, do not seem to be forthcoming. Meanwhile Indian cricket goes round in circles losing on the swings what we'd gained on the round-abouts. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose " which translates as "The more things change, the more things stay the same"

Champions' Trophy

The Champions' Trophy is gathering steam now. Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, who owe their status as full members of the ICC purely to the value of their votes, having been bid a polite adieu, the real fights have begun.

Most of the matches so far have been keenly fought and not without their share of surprises. Pakistan, after all their recent travails, bested Sri Lanka. The New Zealanders beat the South Africans in a tense, low-scoring match. They deserved to win because they held their nerve better than the Proteas. The Australian juggernaut was halted in its tracks by a doughty West Indian performance. Despite losing four early wickets, Lara and Morton took them to a reasonable total. Their bowlers continued where these two had left off. Though the Windies do not have any bowlers who've been hyped up the media, unlike the Aussies ( if I hear any more about McGrath's 'nagging line and length' I'm going to scream!), they believed that they could win this one. Even when Gilchrist and Clarke were looking ominous, they stuck to their task manfully. And when they broke through that partnership, they broke through the Aussies' arrogant over-confidence. Taylor's hat-trick was the silver bullet that slew the werewolf.
To my mind the best feature of the matches so far has been that cricket has, once more, become an equal contest between the bat and the ball. Far, far too often these days the pitches are doctored to be dead as the dodos. The batsmen make merry and the bowlers resemble, more and more, helpless lambs who're led onto the field only to be slaughtered. It may make for a good carnival. Cricket, it isn't. Yet so used have the players got to these one-sided pitches, that as soon as they have to play on one where the bowlers have a fair chance, they start whingeing and whining, as Graeme Smith did after losing. Get real, Mr.Smith. Even in the gladiatorial arenas of ancient Rome, those thrown to the lions were given a few token weapons to defend themselves. In the ODIs the bowlers have none.

ICC's 'Hair'oics - Between a rock and a hard place

With Inboxes full of 'Hair'y puns (and SMSes galore) this is Hairdly the best time to be punny In zy humble opinion of this blogger. ( Yeah, that was a really pathetic one, wasn't it ? But, as Oscar Wilde famously said, "I can resist everything except temptation.") All right, nauseating jokes and puns aside, where do we go from here? If the ball wasn't tampered with, Hair and Doctrove made a gigantic blunder. It makes Hair's position on the Elite panel of umpires untenable. Other umpires before him have been booted off the panel for far lesser booboos. How long can the ICC continue to shield him? On the other hand, there are bound to be mutterings, especially from the Australian media and establishment, that the adjudicator and the ICC bowed to Asian money power and made Hair the scapegoat. The ICC's strange behaviour certainly lends credence to that view. It seems to want to run with the Hairs( sorry, hares) and hunt with the hounds. It wants to keep everybody happy - the Pakis and the rest of the Asians by proclaiming that there was no ball-tampering, and the white bloc by continuing to have Hair on the Elite panel. I wonder if they've heard of the phrase 'falling between two stools' ?

Cricket, Commentary, and Cliches

Perhaps, with advancing age, I'm becoming less and less tolerant. These days, everytime I watch a cricket match on the idiot box, I find myself gnashing my teeth at the 'commentary'. Commentary, my eye. It's an unending stream of cliches, delivered with monotonous, clockwork regularity by the so-called experts. A few, one can put up with. They can even serve to spice the discussion. It's when they replace the discussion that the whole mish-mash becomes intolerable. Barring a few honourable exceptions, most of these 'commentators' could be replaced with a tape-recorder.Who would know the difference ? 'The pitch looks like it may do something early on', 'Concentrate on line and length', 'He needs to play himself in for a few overs', 'Running between the wickets is the key', 'Catches win matches'...I could go on and on but I need to go and puke.
These statements may all be true but every toddler in the country knows them by heart by now.That's not what you are being paid a packet for, guys. Could we have some insight, some analysis of the state of the game, the play, the players, please ? Yes, as I mentioned earlier, there are a few exceptions, a few who stand out in this morass of mediocrity. First, Richie Benaud - he defines, for me, what television cricket commentary is, or should be, all about. Sharp, witty, analytical and to the point. Geoffrey Boycott (barring his soft corner for Saurav Ganguly) - unafraid to call a spade a spade. A typical Yorkshireman with no patience for niceties and diplomatese. Michael Holding - once one get's used to his West Indian accent, his grasp of the finer points of the game, his strength-weakness analysis of the players and his in-depth knowledge of the art and science of fast bowling is impressive. Ian Chappel - a no-holds-barred Aussie who tells it the way he sees it. A shrewd cricketing brain combined with a very Australian in-your-face attitude, no respecter of reputations. Sunil Gavaskar makes it to this list - just ! He has everything going for him - knowledge, vast experience, clarity of thought & the ability to express himself well. He suffers from two major handicaps, however. One, he never forgets that he is Sunil Gavaskar and, consciously or unconsciously, this egotism seems to permeate and colour his obiter dicta. Secondly, he has a huge blind spot where Sachin Tendulkar is concerned, a fault he shares with over 90 % of Indian cricket-lovers . While this may be acceptable in an ordinary spectator, a commentator must be able to put his personal prejudices aside. Barry Richards - I've only heard him a few times but, on those occasions, his commentary seemed as classy as his batting used to be.
Those were the Oscars. Now for the rozzies. And the winner is ( no prizes for guessing correctly, I'm afraid.) - Ravi Shastri. The unquestioned, unchallenged king of cliches. What ails the man ? He was a fairly good player ( despite the golden Audi, I refuse to rate him any higher), he understands the game well, a fact which manages to sneak through his volley of cliches sometimes, he's good-looking with a personality to match, and fluent in English with the sort of rapid-fire, error-a-minute convent-educated fluency that passes for good English in India. Yet all he can produce is cliche-laden verbal garbage masquerading as expert analysis. Could someone take him aside and tell him that verbosity is no substitute for intellectual rigour? While you're at it, please, please tell him that the correct phrase is 'Rest assured' and not 'Be rest assured' ? In fact, ask him to give that phrase a rest altogether. In each fifteen minute stint of commentary he must be using it at least ten times, if not more. Skip it, Ravi, please. Now for a few others. Arun Lal - a more colourless commentator I've yet to see. A man who has nothing new to say and says it ad nauseum.
An unctuous, oily man who has no business being where he is, who spends his time with the microphone toadying up to Pawar ("Yes Sir, Yes Sir, You're absolutely right, Sir ", So nice of you to be here, Sir",We're deeply grateful to you, Sir"...) and to his white fellow comentators. L.Sivaramakrishnan - listen to him and you get the impression that's he's speaking in BLOCK CAPITALS all the time. Lighten up ,Siva. The Lankans - to a man the Sri Lankan commentators are biased, apart from being cliched, of course. The same can be said of the Pakistanis, barring Imran Khan. Rameez Raja has his moments. The others can be safely ignored.
Finally, I would like to clarify that all the above applies and refers only to ex-cricketers who have now turned to commentating and not to professional commentators (e.g. Harsh Bhogle) who are a breed on the road to extinction anyway.

It stinks !

I watched the India-West Indies ODI yesterday and I'm still rubbing my eyes in disbelief. An incredible performance - by the West Indians! Normally I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories but this result was too much to swallow even for a die-hard India supporter. That the 'famed' Indian batting folded for 162 wasn't a surprise. Take away the media hype and there's nothing unusual about the Indian batsmen taking the day off every other match. But the West Indian capitulation stretches credibility beyond breaking point. Not to put too fine a point on it, a highly suspicious result. Two distinct possibilities spring to mind - one, that the match was fixed to ensure that India still has a chance to reach the finals ( I don't think anyone in his right mind expects them to beat Australia with a bonus point. It's going to be hard enough to defeat them anyway.) Two, that the West Indians deliberately tanked the match because they would rather face India in the finals than the Aussies. Brian Lara coming in at number nine, for God's sake! That puts even Wavell Hinds' tortoise act to shame. Sorry, Rahul and co., but this 'victory' sticks in my craw! Walter Savage Landor had said,

" I warmed both hands before the fire of life
It sinks and I am ready to depart"

My reaction to this match is to change one word from the second line :

'It stinks and I am ready to depart'

"Saurav breaks his silence"

How the mighty have fallen. The latest in a series of efforts to regain what he feels is his rightful place in the sun. The spat with Chappell, the seemingly unending run of failures with the bat, the leaked e-mail, Dalmiya at that time to busy fighting for his own survival to stick his neck out for his blue-eyed boy, the loss of captaincy and of his place in the side, ...most of us watched drama degenerate into farce. Most also felt the selectors had done the right thing, though perhaps a tad later than they should have. I guess they were probably waiting for the protective shield to go down before pouncing for the kill. Most shocking of all was Ganguly's switching of loyalty from Dalmiya to his opponents in an obvious attempt to weasel his way into the good books of the new 'Pawar'ful bosses of Indian cricket, and stabbing his long-time guardian in the back. Saurav lost then what little respect the cricketing public had left for him.
Then followed his disastrous stint in county cricket. Before leaving for England he'd declared that he wanted his bat to do the talking. Unfortunately his bat turned out to be singularly tongue-tied.This when Zaheer and Dinesh Mongia were producing creditable performances over there. The English weather proving inclement, the 'Bengal tiger' mewed disconsolately and returned to his watering-hole in Calcutta.
Unfortunately Team India had moved on and the great Indian paying public have a notoriously short memory. So, now the interview route to get back into reckoning, to remind everyone of his existence and his availability! Dylan Thomas,watching his father die of cancer, had written:
" Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light"
I've no idea if Saurav has read Thomas' poems but he certainly seems to show a marked disinclination to go gently into the night!