India deserve to be the best team in Test cricket after reversing their fortunes since the heavy loss to Australia a decade ago

Last Sunday, Bollywood luminaries and team-mates, his childhood coach, Ramakant Achrekar, and those he grew up admiring gathered at the south Mumbai residence of Mukesh and Nita Ambani, owners of the Mumbai Indians IPL franchise, to celebrate two decades of Sachin Tendulkar in Test cricket. There was even Asha Bhosle – of Cornershop’s Brimful of Asha fame – to sing that classic from Umrao Jaan, Aankhon ki Masti (The Magic of these eyes).

Tendulkar was a John McEnroe-admiring curly-haired bully of eight when the movie was released in 1981. But as much as he would have enjoyed the evening, it wouldn’t have been a patch on what had happened earlier in the day, as victory by an innings and 24 runs over Sri Lanka at the Brabourne Stadium took India to the top of the Test rankings for the first time.

To understand what it meant to Tendulkar, you perhaps need to go back a decade, to a Test tour of Australia when he was captain. A magnificent 116 at the MCG turned out to be a mere footnote as Steve Waugh’s side annihilated India 3-0, the margin that had been predicted by Jaywant Lele, the BCCI secretary of the time.

Those were the worst of times. The morning after the Mumbai victory, Rahul Dravid, who aggregated 93 runs in those three Tests a decade ago, spoke of how things had changed. “Back then, people were happy if we won one game,” he said. “No one expected much more on overseas tours. These days, when you play for India, you’re expected to win wherever you go.”

He and Tendulkar have played as big a part as anyone – Sourav Ganguly and Anil Kumble, both now retired, were the others at the forefront – in scripting the turnaround over the past 10 years. In the post-match interviews, several of the players and coaching staff spoke of the last 18 months, in which India have beaten Australia, England, New Zealand and Sri Lanka, but to get to the heart of the revival, you have to go back to Eden Gardens in March 2001.

When folk refer to Edgbaston 2005 as The Greatest Test, a lot of Indians are Read more…

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A notable feature of the ongoing Ranji Trophy championship is the virtual absence of off-break bowlers in the higher end of the bowling honours list.

This ought to be seen as an unhappy development in a country for which this type of finger spinners — with the ball breaking into the batsman’s body allied with flight and line and length variations with a high intelligence quotient of the practioners — have played a distinguished part and has been regarded an important cog in the wheel of India’s bowling arrangement.

The decline of quality off-break bowlers has been a gradual feature in the last two decades and in this season the sheer anxiety of being called for illegal action has eliminated this particular facet of the game in India.

Harbhajan Singh is an exception though since 1998. The off-break bowler in the current Ranji Trophy Super League bowling honours list is Bengal’s Saurasish Lahiri with 17 wickets in four matches.

He is followed by Tamil Nadu’s Ravichandran Ashwin with 13 wickets from five matches. Ashwin has been included in the Indian team for the two Twenty20 matches against Sri Lanka.

Former India and Himachal Pradesh’s Sarandeep Singh is a way down third in the list. But after ten years in first class cricket, he was called for bowling with an illegal action in the Mumbai-Himachal Pradesh match recently.

Harbhajan Singh was lucky. A rookie off-spinner ten years ago, his action was sorted out in less than two days in London by former England off-spinner Fred Titmus.

New Zealand’s left-arm spinner, Stephen Bock was once reported to have said: “He (Harbhajan) was not within cooee of a legal action”.

But Titmus who was instructed by the ICC then to rectify his action along with the MCC Head Coach Clive Radley felt that there was not a lot wrong to the naked eye at normal Read more…

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Despite the placid nature of the pitch at Motera, the Indian bowling was disappointing in the first Test. Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his men simply did not get their gameplan right on a surface of this sort.

This, perhaps, is not the flattest track seen in the country, still Sri Lanka’s 760 for seven declared is the highest Test total on Indian soil.

For most part, the Indian attack lacked purpose. Spin legend Anil Kumble’s control was sorely missed.

Indeed, the lack of consistency in the Indian bowling was appalling. On a surface already loaded in favour of the batsmen, run-making became easier.

There were quite a few tactical ploys the Indians could have attempted. For instance, when the pitch offers little, tight and precise bowling can make the batsmen work for their runs.

A paceman can bowl an off-stump line — he can even pitch the ball a touch wide to frustrate the batsman — with a packed off-side field. But then, such tactics on a flat deck require extreme accuracy.

No sense of direction
Leg-spinner Amit Mishra did try operating round-the-wicket against the right-handers with five fielders on the leg-side but his line lacked a sense of direction.

Tactics are often dictated by conditions and a negative line can, on occasions, yield positive results. Mishra should have consistently landed the ball outside leg and spun it around the leg-stump. Instead, he experimented by flighting the ball across the right-hander and went for runs.

Former England left-arm spinner Ashley Giles bowled an outside-the-leg-stump line to the right-handers from over-the-wicket when Nasser Hussain’s men visited India in the 2001-02 Read more…

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» Inaugural match thrills 50,000 crowd in Bangalore
» Duminy’s unbeaten 99 stuns Royal Challengers

There were 30,000 inside the Estádio Nacional in Lisbon on September 4, 1955, when Sporting drew 3-3 with Partizan Belgrade. There was no glitzy opening ceremony or a global TV audience of more than half a billion when the European Cup got under way, but more than half a century on, Lalit Modi hopes that the Champions League Twenty20 will revolutionise cricket in the same way that Gabriel Hanot’s brainchild did club football.

Close to 50,000 watched the opening game at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore, and after kung-fu-fighting Shaolin monks, a laser show and Shaggy of In The Summertime fame had primed the crowd, the hometown Royal Challengers, without Kevin Pietersen, were ambushed by a dazzling unbeaten 99 from JP Duminy, the hero of last year’s MCG Test. Henry Davids, Justin Ontong and Ryan Canning kept the strike ticking over for the Cape Cobras, and Duminy did the rest as the Royal Challengers’ slow-bowling duo of Anil Kumble and Roelof van der Merwe were taken for 69 in eight overs. Kumble dropped a tough caught-and-bowled chance when he had 74, but otherwise, it was an accomplished innings.

The Royal Challengers’ innings was built around half-centuries from Robin Uthappa and New Zealand’s Ross Taylor. Charl Langeveldt had given the visitors the perfect start, having Jacques Kallis caught behind, but with catches going down in the murky atmosphere and lofted hits falling into gaps, Uthappa and Rahul Dravid wrested the initiative.

Langeveldt went off with a jarred shoulder after dropping a catch and in the final stages, his team-mates had no answer to Taylor’s aggression. Monde Zondeki and Rory Kleinveldt bowled far too many full tosses and Taylor (53 off 24 balls) blazed away for 33 in the last two Read more…

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Karnataka Premier League is drawing big money. What’s the game?

You know something’s up when you see a gathering of netas, film stars, real estate barons and even a reformed underworld don. What’s up in Bangalore is interest in T20 cricket, and this motley crew had gathered for a no-holds-barred auction to grab a team for the upcoming Karnataka Premier League (KPL), an Indian Premier League (IPL) clone dreamt up by the Karnataka State Cricket Association (KSCA).

The eight winners walked away with five-year team franchises after paying a whopping Rs 35 crore. The top three teams were bought by realtors that spent nearly Rs 17 crore among themselves. The Bangalore Urban team was bought for Rs 7.2 crore by Brigade Developers; the Bangalore Rural franchise was bagged by Melmont Constructions, a Puravankara group company, for Rs 5.5 crore; and the Mangalore team was snapped up by coastal builder Fizza Developers for a little over Rs 4.2 crore.

Then, there is Mantri Developers throwing in Rs 7.7 crore to play main sponsor. The live telecast rights have been sold to a regional channel owned by the Sun TV Group.

According to Srikanta Datta Narasimharaja Wadiyar, a scion of the Mysore royal family who now heads the KSCA, “We are thrilled that we are the first in the country to start such a tournament.” Brijesh Patel, KSCA’s honorary secretary, is also thrilled to bits with the mega deals. “We had held a T20 tourney much before the BCCI fell for the idea,” he says.

All this, despite stiff opposition from former Test captain Anil Kumble and ‘Mysore Read more…

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I remember the day as clearly as if it was yesterday. June 18, 2005. It was raining hard as it does in Mumbai that time of the year. I was in a no-nonsense bar in Bandra with good friends, watching in wonder as Bangladesh pulled off a stunning win against the Australians at the lyrically named Sophia Gardens in Cardiff. It was one of those moments in sport when your own team is not playing and the underdog whips the big bad bully. You won’t believe how many supporters Bangladesh had in Bandra that day.

From then to now, it has been a forgettable ride for anyone following the Australian team. From being a band of tough, occasionally arrogant, always gritty and supremely gifted cricketers who every other nation loved to hate, they’ve gone to being a team that can barely complain about being ranked No. 4 in the world. The polite way to say it is that they’ve lost their aura. In simpler words, they’ve merely become more ordinary, both in terms of individual talent and collective belief.

Previously, every win against Australia, irrespective of who achieved it, was celebrated like mini Diwali, a triumph of good over evil. It seemed as though the collective might of the rest of the cricketing world did not quite match up to the men in the Baggy Green caps.

Now, your average cricket fan can’t even tell the difference between Peter Siddle and Marcus North. Oh, and even the Australian selectors can’t name one good spinner, it Read more…

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Javagal Srinath, India’s second most successful pace bowler, has joined another legend Anil Kumble, in criticising the Karnataka State Cricket Association for “rushing” to promote T20 cricket, while ignoring KSCA’s own proposed cricket academy, which would have nurtured young talent.

The Karnataka Cricket Academy (KCA) recently acquired legends Gundappa Viswanath and Syed Kirmani as directors, but long after it was first conceived, it is yet to become operational.

Srinath, always a respected cricketing voice, is now an ICC match referee. The Mysorean has seldom been hesitant to call a spade a spade, though he has often steered cleared of making cutting remarks on a public platform.

While acknowledging that Twenty20 cricket has perhaps come to stay, he is more than a little perplexed by the Karnataka Premier League. “It’s a great format, helping the game reach newer audiences,” he admitted, then shed the initial reluctance and opened up.

“But you have to orient kids towards the longer version first, then introduce them to T20. Don’t make these kids out to be professional T20 players aged 17 and 18. Money at this early stage is very difficult to handle and has a different meaning.”

Echoing Kumble’s views on KPL, Srinath said, “It would have been prudent if the KSCA conducted the event on its own, and then went to sponsors with proper data points. If the Read more…

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For a long time, Mahendra Singh Dhoni has been the golden boy of Indian cricket, the superhero who could do no wrong. India's formidable record under his captaincy helped, but adoring fans were also charmed by his graciousness -- like asking Sourav Ganguly to set the field for a few overs in his final match and inviting Anil Kumble to receive the trophy along with him at the end of the India-Australia series.

Above all, his straightforwardness and plain talk came across as a breath of fresh air. When a reporter asked him if it was true that he had threatened to quit when Irfan Pathan was selected instead of R P Singh, Dhoni didn't pussyfoot around the issue. He asked the reporter to name his source, and said such a leak was disgusting and disrespectful. In the byzantine world of Indian cricket, here was a man willing to speak his mind.

Unfortunately, such transparency has been in short supply during the entire fiasco surrounding Virender Sehwag's injury. And Dhoni has, in a few short days, gone from Captain Cool to Captain Grump. It is probably his first serious misstep as Indian captain, and his aura has certainly lost some of its sheen as a result. Read more...

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It’s been a week since the spectacular IPL final and the not so spectacular closing ceremony. You don’t need to be very smart to know that Deccan Chargers won a taut final after facing the ignominy of being the winners of the wooden spoon last year.

The runner-up was Royal Challengers, a team that was perhaps rightly branded last year as a test team and had finished seventh. They were not much different this year as the highly valued Kevin Pietersen, who was supposed to give momentum to the side as captain and key batsman, nearly derailed the challenge till Anil Kumble, the former test captain, stepped in to show the way with a little help from Ross Taylor to end up a close second. Read more…

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It is only in the fitness of things that a team - in fact the only one in the tournament - without a celebrity mascot, an anthem or a plethora of merchandise should go on to win IPL 2 in a stunning recovery from the rock bottom it had hit in the earlier version of the tournament. It just goes on to show how even in its most advertisement-friendly (read trivial) form, cricket, the sport, manages to hold its own. Kudos to Rami Reddy - probably the only owner apart from Preity Zinta who shared the dugout with players throughout the tournament and (thankfully) did not leap into players’ arms or (allegedly) inform them about personal breakups in the middle of the tourney - for understanding the value of on-field performances in the middle of all the Bollywood frenzy. Read more...

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