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.

Dhoni is happy to draw the match against England!!!

If Indian Captain Mahendar Singh Dhoni feels it’s OK to be drawn the match against England in their second league matches in ICC World Cup; then he has got some serious mental problem! Dude, your team scored 338 runs, yourself and millions of Indian cricket fans around the world were all expecting nothing less than a win! This time around you don’t even have a Sreesanth to blame, damn it!

No more hide and seek game here guys, Indian bowling sucks big time, England were scoring freely like a domestic match, just remember they have everything against them, toss, ground, crowd support. Under the flood light they should be struggling to score! At one stage it was like a certain win for England, they were cruising like a new Bugatti Veyron, till something suddenly happened to Zaheer Kan, was it an exorcism? Out of blue he came out and took 3 wickets! Twist in the tale. If there is no six in that last over of Munaf Patel, India would have been well home. Or there was no sixes in previous over of Piush Chawla….. OK, I am not going to count all the overs here.

It seems like England captain was quite happy with the result, he looked so relived and relaxed after drawing the match. He even shook hand with Peterson and other colleagues with a smile on his face, yet he said he was not happy about the result in post presentation talk, Nasser Hussain asked the same question to MS Dhoni, and Indian captain answered YES! He is OK with the draw! So Indians have no more potential to improve! That’s what he said right? They touched the limit!

This match showed even referring system is not error free. Yuvraj clearly got out Cambell in front of the wicket; Yuvraaj thought it is out, all spectators in the gallery, millions of viewers in front of TV sets thought the same, what more; Cambell himself thought he was out! Referral System came to play and it had a different go about it. Now we have to have 2^nd referring umpire to monitor the first one, if the first one fails the 2^nd one take charge, well… what if the second one too fail? J

ICC World Cup 2011 Snippets – Part 1

2011 ICC World Cup kick started with a beautiful boundary from India’s Virendar Sehwag. His survival as a batsman in the crease for the first 5 overs are running on 80% of pure luck. Next 5 overs 60% of luck, after 25 overs it is 100% talent with little or no luck!

Look at his game against England on their second match in world cup. First ball he faced turned into streaky four, well, he wasn’t teasing the team England with those half chances, he was hell nervous out there and Bangalore crowd was aesthetic!

Match between Pakistan and Srilanka too was a good entertainment. But wait…, a young Pakistan batsman jumped on the pitch while batting, apparently spoiling the pitch according to the umpire. Umpire called the batsman immediately and tried to explain not to jump on the pitch, poor Pak player didn’t understand a thing what umpire was trying to convey. Umpire jumped hard on the same surface to show the batsman not to do that!! Srilankan captain Sangakkara was pulling his hair out and finally pleaded to the umpire let it be, if he got it or not. Don’t show it on the pitch sir, we got to bat after this!

Sachin Tendulkar is a living legend, but he is not bigger than team India. Every tom dick and harry says India should win this year’s world cup for Sachin Tendulkar. What about the country? What about millions of Indian fans around the world? Less fortunate street ass riding on Tendulkar’s popularity is not new. Started by one time Sachin’s good pal Vinod Kambli, and it was like a domino effect everyone including Harbhajan Singh backing up the presupposition. Harbhajan Singh is well known friend of Sachin Paji, or Harbhajan created this impression about him and Sachin in media smartly responding on anything about Sachin, in return he gained so much of popularity, a lot of money from the ads and a place in Mumbai Indians in Indian Premier League, even his own state team Punjab Super Kings didn’t rate him so much!

Indian pacer Sree Sranth was very upset initially when he was left out of the World Cup team. He cried on the rooftop to pick up some sympathy (not exactly like how he reacted after getting slapped) Indian Cricket team chief selector Krishnamachari Srikanth compelled to answer the media questions when he visited Kerala; the speedster’s home state. In fact Srikanth was struggling to find a convincing answer. Praveen Kumar’s ill timed injury became blessing for Sri Shant, he played against Bangladesh in opening match and showed the world why he wasn’t picked in playing eleven initially. Now Srikanth is thanking Srisanth for clearing the cloud!