ICC World Cup Snippets – Part 2

India sweats hard to win the match against Netherland. Intention was clear from the beginning as Sachin and Sehwag started firing from all cylinders from the word go. Indians wanted to show the world and probably bigger oppositions that how strong their batting line-up is. All went little wrong when they lost Sachin, Sehwag, Yousuf and Kholi. Yuvi and Dhoni played maturely to avoid anymore wicket slides. Because there after left was heavy weight champion Bhaji who knows to attack only Australian bowlers, Ashish Nehra, who is still under the supervision of Sunil Gavasker’s batting coaching (apparently Mr.Gavasker gave up and asked Nehra to do only bowling, his fielding coach too gave up long time ago) and Zaheer Khan who is as stiff as Arnold Schwarzenegger when it comes to batting!

Yeah, I agree, Yuvraj put up weight, but he is performing better now! Churning out fifties at will! How is he doing this, when our journalist made a way to the back door of Yuvi’s recent success we surfaced an astonishing secret. Here we go; Yuvi is banned from going out to bars, pubs and discos by his Mom and coach. What they certain were, too much of beer consumption is the reason behind his weight gain. (Rumor has it; someone convinced Yuvi, Fosters Beer can make him like an Australian) Yuvi was frustrated, seeing the aggravation on his face, coach promised Yuvi he can go to the pub every time he scores 50. Trick worked! Rest is there for everyone to see, the young lad working hard for the team and for him! He already had two nights in the pub dancing with girls! We are hoping for him to have more nights!

Having seen his career plagued by one injury after another, Australian cricketer Shane Watson has decided not to over exert himself to keep injuries at bay ahead of their remaining World Cup matches.
The injury-prone all-rounder is well aware of just how much is too much for his body. Now he is planning not to play World Cup at all to keep away from injuries. Captain Ricky Ponting trying hard to encourage Watson to participate in World Cup remaining matches, according to Ricky, injury can happen anywhere, while walking you can step on some pebbles and fall down, a vehicle can come and hit you on the road, if you are sitting in the room doing nothing and watching TV a pair of gloves can hit the Television set and the TV can fall on your head!

Pakistan Coach Waqar Younis made it clear at the press that they are not interested to win the World Cup this time. Waqar hinted that Pakistan wicket keeper Kamran Akmal could be replaced after the World Cup!

"He (Akmal) dropped catches which cost us the match. But we can't drop him in the middle of a tournament," said Waqar. "We can think about it after the tournament but he is going to be around for now. We will try to rectify his mistakes in the break that we have got. We can't fix all his flaws in such a short span but we can give it a try."

Waqar ji, World Cup supposed to be the mother of all matches; I wanted to appreciate your choice of tournament to have just a try!

Someone please remind Viru that he promised us all before the World Cup he will try to bat 50 overs! Will hair transplantation cause memory loss?

Bangladesh humiliation!

Either Bangladesh public is over ambitious or the team. Are they really thought they could win this world cup? Or they could beat every team that plays against them?

What a mismatch. What a shame. Bangladesh elected to bat, Captain Sakhib Ul Hassan probably thinking to score around 300 plus runs. Instead scored 58 (not an individual score, the whole team total) and allowed West Indies to win the match in 12 overs! Bangladesh public gone mad, they started throwing papers, towels and even jerseys to the ground. They booed so much restlessly after their team got out cheaply, the boos around the shere Bangla National stadium could still be heard even when the West Indian openers Chris Gayle and Bravo came out to bat.

Real humiliation; ruthless West Indies ripped the team Bangladesh in front of their own fans. In a way they turned their own crowd against them.

I won’t blame the crowd, they came to watch a match if not a win, they came with 4's and 6's cards, and girls came with their throat cleaned to scream, shout, and sing. Nothing happened, throughout the match they were kept silent by the performance of Bangladesh team, in fact Bangladesh fans were in a state of shock, forgot to react till the last wicket went down! When West Indies started batting they started cheering for West Indies batsmen, they cheered each and every boundary Gayle hit. OK, this is one way of enjoying the game, end of the day public is the one paid the money. Incidentally I remember a Japanese proverb “Better the beak of the hen than the tail of the horse”.

Why Indians didn’t appeal when Strauss edged?

The Indian team seems to have a “hearing problem” in addition to its bowling and fielding affliction which led to its failure to shield a strong score of 338 in the World Cup match against England on Sunday.

Much has been spoken and written about how poor bowling and fielding in addition to late batting collapse that resulted in the fall of India’s last seven wickets for 33 runs and nearly enabled England to win. I mentioned in my previous blog how happy Mr.Dhoni was to draw a match that was surely could have won hands down. I seriously think Dhoni should consult an ENT specialist before the next match for the betterment of Indian cricket. Zaheer Khan too should accompany Dhoni.

England skipper Andrew Strauss, who was the architect of India’s agony by scoring his highest score in ODI 158, should have been out when he has scored a mere 13 if wicket keeper Dhoni, Zaheer or close-in fielders had appealed for a caught behind at that point. Strauss clearly nicked a Zaheer delivery and waiting for an appeal from behind and the bowler, for his amusement there were no appeal! 98 runs later, the England captain had edged another delivery from the same bowler Zaheer with his score at 111 but none of the Indians on the field appealed! There is no excuse to blame noisy crowd. When Strauss trapped Leg before he was expecting same mute from Indians, but this time they did appeal and got him out. How sad!

Sachin Tendulkar scored 137 v Sri Lanka at Delhi on March 2, 1996,

Sachin scored 143 v Australia at Sharjah on April 22, 1998,

Sachin scored 141 v Pakistan at Rawalpindi on March 16, 2004,

Sachin scored 123 v Pakistan at Ahmedabad on April 12, 2005

Sachin scored 175 v Australia at Hyderabad on November 5, 2009

All above matches have one thing in common, no. Not only Tendulkar’s centuries. India lost in all those matches. I am not blaming the little master for those losses, he did well his part but his countrymen failed to capitalize on his contribution. They let him down most of the time when he scored heavily.

What IPL mean to Indian cricket?

Actually what IPL is doing to Indian cricket in bigger canvas?

1 - Expose the vulnerability of the local players to the foreign players.

2 - Help Chief selector Srikanth to pick few out-of-form players for national side.

3 - Provide the warm up matches along with bags of dollars to the foreign players so they can beat India when it comes to the World Cup T20!

4 - And last not least, make Mr.Lalit Modi few millions richer!

I genuinely can’t find any reason why Yuvraj has not been dropped from national team! His batting sucks, bowling stinks, only fielding has little credibility worth mentioning. Get him as a substitute fielder!

Barbados pitch is like a dancing floor for Indian players, there are dancing black beauties on the side stage in bikini (I think there are more interesting bikini figures in the crowd) and there are dancing Indians on the crease with pads and bat! Still I prefer those girls’ dances.

We should listen to Indian batsmen too before criticizing them, as they enlightened us; we can duck down and avoid the bouncing balls, but man, this is not a test match, we got to hit the ball somehow and somewhere.

I understand dude, but somewhere you are hitting should not be exactly to the fielders! I guess you guys appreciate my point.

IPL trophy goes to Chennai this time, there is a team called Cochin from the next edition, before it could set the feet Cochin had made huge impact in the IPL system and it’s functioning. Lalit Modi is out, Shasi Tharoor is out and his girl friend also out. Got in is Cochin team. Let’s wait and see!