From Centurion to Perth, there was plenty to savour as the long version of the game produced some thoroughly absorbing play

Did you notice how many of the “100 Top Sporting Moments” related on these pages last week occurred in Test matches? Were you absorbed from a distance by the uncertain outcomes of the simultaneous Test matches in Centurion and the Waca ground in Perth? Crowds for both games were no more than satisfactory but much of the cricket was spell-binding, proof if it were needed that Test cricket will confound those sages who fear that it is an anachronism in an age of instant gratification.

Such gratification does not come much more quickly, even in Twenty20 cricket, than it did for Chris Gayle last Friday, or for those who watched him launching a series of his trademark straight sixes on his way to a Test hundred scored from 70 balls during the third of three increasingly hard-fought games between Australia and West Indies.

He was out too quickly afterwards and West Indies lost their last six first innings wickets for 27 but they bowled Australia out cheaply and finished only 35 runs short of victory early on the last day. Since their uneven performances against England earlier this year West Indies have found a convincing fast bowler in Kemar Roach, the Barbadian who was quick enough on the Perth pitch to rough up Ricky Ponting, and an opening batsman of equal youth and promise in Adrian Barath.

While conditions at the Waca, as always, encouraged quick bowlers and buccaneering batsmen, those at Centurion rewarded patience, craft and enterprise in equal measure. On the third day in Perth 16 wickets fell for 235 runs; on the same day in Centurion seven fell for 303. Such variety is what we want; plus a proper balance between batsman and bowler; and, not least, administrators ready to keep balanced programmes without overloading the best players.

Pitches and the attitude of the players have always been the keys to interesting cricket. In India this month Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s team recovered from a turgid opening draw in Read more…

Administrator England, South Africa Adrian Barath, Ahmedabad, Andrew Strauss, Australia, Barbadian, Blogs.CMDN.com, Centurion, Chris Gayle, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, David Richardson, Duncan Fletcher, Kemar Roach, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Paul Harris, Perth, Ricky Ponting, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Twenty20, UDRS, World Cup

Sometimes we focus so much on what is wrong with Test cricket that it is easy to forget the joy it continues to provide, never more so than in this particularly frenzied period of Tests.

The recent series between India and Sri Lanka may have been too batsman-friendly but it provided some extraordinary passages of play. Who could not have wished to see Virender Sehwag’s assault in the third Test, elegant and brutal in equal measure? For Sri Lanka, Tillakaratne Dilshan’s innings were also moments when you had to bin ideas of work and focus on some ball-by-ball Test cricket. There were personal narratives too – Sreesanth, suddenly the grounded, almost geeky bowler of immaculate line and length, Murali suddenly lacking in fizz and accuracy. And Angelo Mathews – doing an Atherton when on 99 and in sight of his first Test hundred.

The Ahmedabad pitch immediately came under fire in the first Test of that series and rightly so: it failed to offer the bowlers enough on day five. But up until that point it was a good, subcontinental Test match. India will not provide the seamer-friendly conditions found elsewhere but that is the appeal of Test cricket around the world – players must adapt to different conditions and this brings a rich variety to the cricket.

Over in Australia, the prospect of a series against West Indies underwhelmed the local media, but there were things to admire about the visitors even in that first Test drubbing: Kemar Roach bowling at 150kmh, and pitching the ball up admirably (as he has done all series); Adrian Barath, a 19-year-old debutant, making an attacking hundred in the second-innings and scoring half of his side’s runs.

In the second Test the West Indies would hold the upperhand throughout. Chris Gayle, who apparently has no time for defensive shots or for Test cricket, played with fascinating constraint to set up possible victory and Dwayne Bravo, outstanding in both disciplines throughout the Test, nearly conjured a win on the final day.

The New Zealand-Pakistan series is the ace in the pack. Two sides entirely uncertain of themselves and bowler-friendly conditions have produced tumbling wickets and Read more…

Administrator Views Adrian Barath, Ahmedabad, Angelo Mathews, Australia, Blogs.CMDN.com, Chris Gayle, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Dwayne Bravo, India, Kemar Roach, Murali, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Test Cricket, Tillakaratne Dilshan, West Indies

Indian pitches are difficult to predict. Even Gods refrain from doing so simply because you never know how they will behave on D-day. Analysts and observers have made their points about the centre wicket at the historical Brabourne Stadium, but no one knows what the 22-yard strip — for the third and last Test between India and Sri Lanka beginning here on Wednesday — actually has on offer.

As usual, the curators promised ’sporting tracks’ for the first and second Tests at Ahmedabad and Kanpur respectively. The phrase has been used and abused to no end and well, neither of the wickets was even close to ’sporting’.

For the third Test match, experts have come out with different opinions. Some predict that it is going to be ’sporting’ (again!) wicket, some say it will be unpredictable and a few believe it is going to favour the likes of Muttiah Muralitharan and Harbhajan Singh.

Test cricket has returned to the picturesque venue after more than three decades and hence, it won’t be easy to predict the nature of a pitch which has been rarely used. The local or domestic matches here are played on the side pitches. During the 2006 Champions Trophy, the wickets here faced a lot of wrath for their slowness.

However, Milind Rege, CCI’s cricket-in charge, promises a sporting track calling it a “true Test wicket.”

“There will be bounce and pace at the start and as the game progresses, the spinners will get some help. Batsmen will also enjoy batting here as it is a true wicket,” the former Mumbai skipper added.

India captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni had nothing extraordinary to say on match-eve. “It looks like a normal Mumbai track with the same soil, of course. There will be a bit of bounce for the fast bowlers and as the game progresses, you will see the spinners coming into action. They Read more…

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Muttiah Muralitharan might have lingered a little too long. Watching him these days is to observe a spinner suffering from fatigue and showing signs of wear and tear.

At his peak batsmen groped as the ball dropped like a shot bird. In his pomp he could turn the ball sharply both ways and deny the batsmen time to adjust.

Now opponents can let the ball bounce, observe its movement and tuck it away at their leisure. Murali’s bowling has lost its snap, crackle and pop

All the more reason to praise his forthcoming retirement. Players of his calibre need to choose the right moment so that their memory is not tarnished.

Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne timed it to perfection. They left the field with heads held high and the Ashes regained. Last week both turned out in the 20-over match against the Australians that marks the start of the season.

Typically McGrath kept an unerring line and length to take three for 18. Warne was compelling.

Rare insight

Both talked viewers through their tactics, thereby offering a rare insight into their thinking. McGrath described a dismissal before it occurred, the set-up and the sting. Neither, though, could have lasted an entire day. Cricketers retain their minds but lose their bodies and reflexes.

By the look of things, Murali is no longer able to impart as much spin. Placid pitches in Ahmedabad and Kanpur have not helped, but in his prime he could make batsmen struggle on shirtfronts. Admittedly the batting has been superb but the contest has been one-sided.

Always a fighter, Murali has been forced to go meekly to his fate. Particularly in these parts, where they become symbols of wider success, it is hard for champions to retire but the signs cannot be ignored. Murali senses his powers are waning, can feel it in his fingers. He knows Read more…

Administrator IND vs SL, Sri Lanka Ahmedabad, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Glenn McGrath, Kanpur, Muttiah Muralitharan, World XI

I am no pulp patriot or sadist to be rejoicing the one-sided battering of one team, even if that treatment is being meted out by your own team. Competition in sports is all about a contest between two sets of skillful players and the more evenly matched they are, the better it is for the spectators.

We in India have a long history of Test match contests where India has thrived on its low, slow, spinning tracks to pulverise its rivals into submission. In times gone by, when Tests were the soul and substance of cricket, India had reason to feel elated at subjecting the best teams of the world to this searing examination of their skill and patience on wearing wickets. If pace was India’s bane, inability to play quality spin was the most vulnerable part of a team visiting India.

The atmosphere at the ground used to be electric when a Bedi, Chandra or Prasanna would make a batsman feel miserable at the sight of the turning ball, while being surrounded by a clutch of fielders waiting for a bat and pad. Thousands would scream each time the ball would lob into the fielder’s hands and the umpires would find it impossible to segregate the sound of the ball hitting the bat from the roar of the crowd.

Men like Kumble took this strangulation of the batsmen to a different level and India became unbeatable at home.

In our most immediate times, where the frenetic pace combined with close contests in the shortened version of the game have caught the imagination of the public, Test cricket cannot survive when the contest between bat and the ball is completely unequal.

Is there any fun in watching either only the batsmen score runs or only the bowlers take wickets, or whichever team bats first winning the match with ease because the placid nature of the wicket allows them to make more than 600 runs in a breeze?

Doesn’t a lack of contest make the whole action boring to watch, even if the team Read more…

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India’s 100th win in a Test match came at Kanpur and showed how the game of cricket can change the fortunes of the players in a matter of days. If in Ahmedabad it was Sri Lanka who dominated the Test match, in Kanpur it was India all the way as they won in style.

The Kanpur Test match also saw the comeback to Test cricket by Sreesanth after being out of the team for over 19 months. To be fair some of that time out was due to an injury that he suffered and from which he has recovered now, but there was also a sense of despair being felt in official circles about his tendency to go over the top in his aggressiveness and end up upsetting everybody. It wasn’t getting him any extra wickets either and if anything it was taking a lot of energy and focus away from his bowling.

The young man may have got a touch carried away with the media mileage he was getting with his antics and dramabaazi for that is the only way to describe it but the prolonged spell away from the team would have made him look back at his approach and introspect if it was doing him any good. The warning letter from the BCCI would have also been an eyeopener for him and it was just the shock that he needed at that time.

When a player is doing well he gets a lot of hangers on who are not his real well wishers but who are only interested in the perks of being with a known name and face and so they are hardly going to tell the player that he is not on the right track for fear of upsetting him and losing the proximity to him. This by the way is not just about cricketers but also other professions and thats why there is a sense of dread about a couple of our younger sportstars from other fields who may just be getting misled into doing things that takes away from their concentration on their sport.

Sreesanth’s bowling in the first innings was just the kind of run in and bowl hard that India needed for Ishant Shrama despite all his potential was looking just a bit jaded and perhaps a bit complacent. Sreesanth’s success should spur him on to reclaim his place in the team and start bowling teams out. What was most refreshing about Sreesanth’s success was that at no stage did he go over the top to celebrate taking every wicket and he simply folded his hands in prayer to thank the almighty for giving him another scalp. The smile after taking a wicket suits him much better than a snarl and he will win more fans with that attitude. It in no way takes Read more…

Administrator IND vs SL Ahmedabad, BCCI, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, India, Ishant Shrama, Kanpur, Richie Benaud, Sreesanth, Sri Lanka

There are some gluttons for punishment out there. In a recent poll, 7 per cent of India supporters said that Test cricket was their game of choice. Watching the tedious fare on offer between India and Sri Lanka this month, the surprise is not that there are so few, but that there are any at all. Frankly, root canal treatment would be more fun.

They are at it again in Kanpur this week: hundreds on the first day for Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir as India plundered a mountain (233) for the first wicket and a molehill (137) for the second, Rahul Dravid using the conditions to keep Father Time at bay. Why even consider retiring with such heaven-sent batting conditions to gorge on?

All this came on the back of a monstrously dull affair in Ahmedabad, where bowlers lay down to be slaughtered at the altar of batsmanship. Almost 1,600 runs were scored there for only 21 wickets taken and seven individual hundreds were notched while two of the top-ranked bowlers in the world, Harbhajan Singh and Muttiah Muralitharan, were rendered impotent by batsmen unwilling to spurn such an opportunity to feather their own statistics — and, more importantly, by an awful pitch.

After the match the focus was on statistics — Sachin Tendulkar’s 43rd Test hundred, for example, during which he passed the small matter of 30,000 runs in international cricket. The usual press releases from the ICC had such a slant, too: with his sixth career double century, Mahela Jayawardena, it said, had overtaken his compatriot, Kumar Sangakkara, to take the No 1 spot in the world rankings.

When the game offers no result — no chance of a result, more importantly — no fluctuating fortunes, no interest and no drama, what else but dry statistics is there to talk about?

What the ICC’s press release should have said, of course, was that the umpires and Read more…

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India’s run-fest against Sri Lanka may not be the greatest entertainment, but the crowds in Kanpur will be content with a win for MS Dhoni’s men

What can you say about a series in which 2,133 runs have been scored in 19 sessions for the loss of just 25 wickets? What can you say of the 10 centuries scored already, of a bowler as accomplished as Muttiah Muralitharan being carted all around Green Park? And is Test cricket in India really on an intravenous drip if more than 25,000 take up vantage points in the dilapidated concrete stands in Kanpur?

Over the past 24 hours, I’ve fielded calls from two radio stations, one in the UK and the other in Australia, both wanting to know why pitches in India are so placid, and whether they are responsible for the decline in popularity of the five-day game. Sunil Gavaskar quipped during the Ahmedabad Test that the surface was like a road and, apart from the opening hour of the series when four wickets fell, the contest between bat and ball has been as unedifying as Muhammad Ali reducing Ernie Terrell’s face to pulp while hissing: “What’s my name, Uncle Tom?”

The facts are irrefutable. Over the past five years, nearly 50% of the matches in India [11 of 24] have ended in draws. And unlike a Cardiff 2009 or The Oval 1979, most of the stalemates have been mind-numbingly boring. In the same period, 11 of 35 Tests in England have been drawn. Leading the way in pitch preparation, as on the field, are Australia [two draws in 27] and South Africa [three in 29]. And just to prove that south Asia does not only do touch-of-grey Tests, Sri Lanka have had 18 results from 22 games.

Are Indian curators incapable of producing result-oriented pitches, or have they been led astray by idiotic guidelines put in place by the game’s administrators? The last time a Test was played in Kanpur, India beat South Africa by eight wickets just before the end of the third day’s play. There was all sorts of tripe about “dust bowls” and “sub-standard pitches”, strange when Read more…

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It’s that time of the year when winter is creeping up on North India in stops and starts — chilly one day, temperate the next — making it hard to determine how many woollens one should wear before stepping out.

On Sunday afternoon, some of the onlookers had over-budgeted while others had been foolhardy. A confluence of sweaty tweed jackets, jumpers tied around waists, and shivering striped t-shirts greeted the Indian team during their first practice session ahead of the second Test against Sri Lanka starting on Tuesday.

But Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s boys got only moderate attention from the hundreds who had gathered at the ground — rather peacefully, as if toning down their usual boisterous obsession to match the pace of cricket’s five-day format. Not too many eyes were trained at the squad practicing in the nets in one corner, and even less at Sachin Tendulkar, getting endless throw-downs from coach Gary Kirsten, in another.

Ruling the roost on the day, partly because of the last match in Ahmedabad and partly because of recent history, was the dual-coloured 22-yard strip in the middle of the once-glorious Green Park Stadium.

Everyone in the vicinity of the pitch had either an opinion on its nature, or an anecdote about it from the years gone by. There were reminders of how the wicket for this Test hadn’t been used for an international match in decades, and how it was the one on which Malcolm Marshall had made Sunil Gavaskar drop his bat with a bouncer in 1983.

There were detailed analyses of how its greenish tinge was only a mirage, and an oasis of runs lay hidden underneath. Then, there were views that the grass on the surface would be uprooted on the eve of the match, leaving nothing more than an inert replica of the track provided for the first Test.

Cynosure of all eyes

Indian cricket, in general, has an unusually strong affinity for pitch-gazing on the eve of a Test, and the attention given to the playing surface by our national team is far greater than any other side in the world. Too often, the track becomes so fascinating that team composition Read more…

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Kumar Sangakkara comes across as a charismatic personality who is as erudite off the field as he is astute on it. But then that is something one can expect from someone who is training to be a lawyer in between cricket tours. Fully aware of Sri Lanka’s abysmal record in Tests in India – over 27 years in 14 Tests they lost eight and drew six – he put the ball firmly in the home team’s court on arrival by saying that the pressure was all on India while his team had nothing to lose.

It was clear that the Sri Lankans came over as underdogs despite the fact that they are the No 2 ranked team in the world and India are one place behind. Of course this could largely be due to the fact that the Lankans are so tough to beat at home but events in the just concluded Ahmedabad Test proved that the Indians who themselves have a formidable record at home can underestimate their neighbours only at their own peril. Under the circumstances it was gratifying to read that MS Dhoni after the conclusion of the Ahmedabad Test has said that it is going to be a close series.

There is much talk about the lustrous quality of the Indian batting line up and why not? Where else will you find four batsmen in the top seven average 50 plus? One other has an average in the mid 40s while the averages of the other two are in the mid 30s. One batsman is the leading run getter and century maker in Test history and another is fifth in the all time list of run getters. A total number of 16 double centuries – including two triple hundreds - have been notched up between five batsmen in the line up.

These days however one has to in the same breath talk about the lustrous quality of the Sri Lankan batting. Like with India, batting has always been the Lankans’ strength but in recent times it has been at the peak. The Ahmedabad Test underlined this. Sri Lanka’s total of 760 for seven declared was the highest Read more…

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