IPL 3 has begun and a scrutiny of the finer points of this new avatar of the game will start. Imran Khan in his column has already told us how excited he is to see what new things turn up.

Cricket is a game that keeps evolving and that's why it is greater than any other sport and the fastest growing.

Just to take a review of the things that people have fine-tuned thanks to T20. The straight six, the reverse sweep which is more a hit. The slow sweep over short fine leg, the lofted cover drive, the drive over midoff and midwicket, late cut/steer, chip over slips, pull/hooks, flick over square leg.

For the bowlers, the yorker, slower ball, quicker delivery for spinners, bouncer, arrow straight bowling, doosra, flipper, off-cutter, flighted swing.

What we haven't seen perfected is a sweep or a scoop  over slip. Nicky Saldanha, the former Maharashtra Ranji bowler, would step out scoop from leg stump over his right shoulder over the keeper's head and over first slip. This irritated the keeper of our side, none other than former India keeper Nana Joshi, then in his  fifties. But that was the idea of Nicky.

Iqbal Khan played a similar shot in a one-day event at the CCI. He was a Mumbai Ranji player, who is now settled in the UK.

So what new did we see in the first two days of the IPL? One saw the slow bouncer of Angelo Matthews of KKR. In the match against Deccan Chargers he welcomed Hershelle Gibbs with a slow bouncer. Gibbs' greatness was that he saw it all the way and did not premeditate and let it go. When the regular bouncer came Gibbs pulled it away. Lesser batsmen would have remained in a confused state.

Mathews and Mahroof of Sri Lanka are bowlers who innovate and that makes them great competitors. Manoj Prabhakar was that type. India doesn't have one like him though Read more...

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ALLAN Border’s contribution to Australian cricket is almost impossible to measure.

Such is his nature that Allan Border does not notice let alone complain that the true worth of his service to Australian cricket is often unrecognised, unwritten and undiscussed.

So to this end it is hardly surprising that the 25th anniversary of his first appearance as his country’s 38th captain went unnoticed this week.

This is not acceptable. Attention should always be drawn to December 7, 1984 when Border succeeded his mate Kim Hughes as skipper against the West Indies in Adelaide.

It is a date of the utmost significance for it marks the beginning of what is best termed “the age of stability” in Australian cricket.

It is much too easy following the heady successes of the past 20 years under Border, Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist to ignore, even forget, the confusion, controversy and tensions which so characterised Australian cricket in 1984.

Despite some initial misgivings and an anxious and sometimes grumpy first two years in office Border prospered to become a very fine captain and led Australia on a record 93 occasions over the next nine years and three months.

Aside from his enormous contributions as one of the greatest and most courageous batsmen of any era (11,174 runs at 50.56 with 27 hundreds and 63 fifties) his legacy was the provision of certainty, unity and a collective confidence at a time of great uncertainty — a bequest from which Australian cricket in general and Ponting and his men in particular continue to benefit.

Indeed, it is remarkable that Australia has had just four captains in 25 years and there is no doubt that the many successes of this period have been a direct consequence of the impressive stability achieved and maintained at just about every level of Australian cricket. There is no Read more…

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India’s first Test captain, C K Nayudu was 37 when he led the team out for their inaugural match at Lord’s in 1932. At 57, he led Holkar to the final of the Ranji Trophy. At 62, he scored 80 against a Rajasthan attack which included internationals G S Ramchand and Vinoo Mankad. He played his last first class match at 69. When tales of longevity in cricket are discussed, it is impossible to ignore Nayudu, although his international career lasted only four years and seven Tests.

By one of those coincidences that seem pregnant with meaning, Nayudu shared a birthday with that other iron man of India, Sardar Vallabhai Patel.

In international cricket, the Indian whose record Sachin Tendulkar broke by playing twenty years was Lala Amarnath, the country’s first Test centurion in 1933. Lala played his last Test at Eden Gardens nineteen years later. Srinivas Venkatraghavan’s last Test was even more interesting. He played it in Antigua in the company of Laxman Sivaramakrishnan who hadn’t been born 18 years earlier when Venkat made his debut against New Zealand.

Two Pakistanis, Mushtaq Mohammed and Imran Khan had a twenty-year gap between their first and last Tests; in another year Tendulkar will go past that longevity record, and also that of Garry Sobers.

Imran played 88 Tests, Sobers 93, but the significant statistic of those who lasted longer at the international level is the fact that they averaged fewer than three Test matches a year. Jack Hobbs (22 years, 61 Tests), known simply as The Master played long enough to make 197 first class centuries, still a world record, but the West Indian great George Headley’s 24 years yielded only 22 Test matches. Robertson-Glasgow wrote of Frank Woolley (25 years, 64 Tests) that he was “easy to watch, difficult to bowl to, and impossible to write about. When you bowled to him there weren’t enough fielders, when you wrote about him there weren’t enough fielders…. He will rank as the greatest of left handers seen in the game.”

Woolley finished with 58, 969 first class runs, second overall only to Hobbs, he also Read more…

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Pakistan cricket is not alien to crisis. From time to time we have experienced it in every era and the present one is not any different to others.

The reason mainly being poor governance by those at the helm who had little or no ability at all to control the situation and, to save their own skin, they would succumb to all kind of pressures.

Sadly, a great majority of those administrators were forced upon the system to run the game as they pleased. The present lot is not any different.

Already a year in the office, they have neither managed to have a constitution nor have been able to convince their critics about the irregularities in maintaining accounts.

This is a huge scam and even the governing body of the PCB, which is supposed to bring some sort of transparency in the working of the board, has so far failed to make their presence felt.

The few voices of dissent from a couple of members from time to time in the meetings did little but not enough to go past the deaf ears of the PCB chairman who could have done the game some service had he not so far resorted to arbitrary decisions.

The appointment of Mohammad Yousuf as the captain for the tour of New Zealand has also come about in a similar fashion.

The members of the governing body once again have been made to look like the ‘dead ducks’. Their feathers have long been clipped from the time they joined the board and the future members will not be any different.

In a crisis like the one which resulted in Younis Khan quitting the captaincy and the tour, strong management should have made sure to shove off all the nonsense that has been going around within the team and should have made sure to back their captain to set an example Read more…

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They were the ultimate all-rounders, their on-field exploits directly proportional to their off-field escapades. Kirsten could well have been inspired by them. The most popular of the lot:

SHANE WARNE
The king of all cricket studs. During his phenomenal career, the blond Aussie leg-spinner is said to have bowled more maidens than batsmen. His appetite for sex was more pronounced than his hunger for wickets. From sending lewd messages to a woman while on tour in South Africa to chasing a British nurse, or posing in his underwear with two scantily-clad models during his county stint with Warwickshire, Warne has done it all. In 2005, Warne’s wife Simone Callahan said she has had enough and the couple decided to separate. They got back together again in 2007 only for Simone to feel devastated when he accidentally sent a text message meant for another woman to her phone. To Warne’s credit, he never let his private life affect his on-field performance, but then, as they say, “no one could spin it better than Warnie”.

BRIAN LARA
The pocket-sized Trinidadian is known to play strokes all round the wicket. Off the field too, Prince Lara could be equally charming. Lara’s dalliances include an affair with British supermodel Lindsey Ward. He has a daughter named Sydney with Trinidadian journalist and model Leasel Rovedas. He loves to party and lead life in the fast lane.

IMRAN KHAN
A lady-killer in the true sense of the word. The ruggedly-handsome pathan from Pakistan made maidens swoon on either side of LoC. Women found his killer looks and his flamboyance on the field hard to resist. Of his many dalliances, the one with Bollywood star Zeenat Aman received most publicity, but it was his link with Sita White, the daughter of an English tycoon, Read more…

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As anyone who has dabbled with numbers knows, statistics can be bent any way you fancy.

Here’s one. New Zealand’s most successful batsman, of those with a minimum 20 test innings, is John F. Reid, who averaged 46.28. But he wouldn’t make most amateur judge’s finest alltime New Zealand team.

Dan Vettori deserves the highest praise for becoming just the eighth cricketer to accumulate 3000 runs and 300 wickets in tests.

It is testimony to his skill and perseverance through a period in which for most of the time he has been his national team’s premier bowler and, gradually, one of its best batsmen. Not to mention captaining New Zealand for the last couple of years.

If you want to break down Vettori’s two components, it is easy to argue that his batting might give him more satisfaction. After all, his primary function is as a bowler and once it was clear he was an uncommonly talented spinner, he was always a chance to tick off milestones provided he stayed healthy and his form remained good.

The batting has matured, and improved, with time and perhaps the responsibility which comes with frequently having to bail your team out of another fine mess.

Witness Hamilton last summer, when he was at the crease before lunch against India, Read more…

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I have hardly been watching cricket for the last two weeks. The blame lies, in part, to the overkill of T20 with the IPL and the ICC World T20 over the last ten weeks. So, the India-West India ODI series was a little bit of a washout for me. And I am not referring to the rains and thunderstorms that the players had to brave!

I have been reading a little bit about cricket, though. I had time to read the Colin Cowdrey Memorial Lecture delivered by the former Aussie wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist late last month. Gilchrist tried to get the attention of administrators towards some of the key issues that the cricket world is faced with.

For those uninitiated with cricket history, Colin Cowdrey was a former English captain, the first in history to play 100 Test matches and ended his cricket career in the mid 1970s. He was known as a gritty batsman who later went on to become a successful thinker for the game, who helped modernise the game. Read more…

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My faith in Pakistan chasing any second innings total didn’t last long. In 1982, I ventured to Edgbaston expecting Imran Khan’s team would score around 300 to beat England. I was filled with the optimism of youth. Looking back, almost any target would have troubled Pakistan. The day turned out to be a rapid and mostly cavalier failure.

I’m not sure I’ve ever recovered. Whenever Pakistan bat in the final innings of a Test match, whether to win or save the match, I expect the worst and desperately look for signs that any success is a turning point.

Younis Khan’s team can’t have found it easy to switch from the glamour of the Twenty20 World Cup to a gruelling Test series in Sri Lanka. But against all expectations they found themselves in a match-winning position. It was a position that they should have turned comfortably to victory. Read more…

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While engaged in our discussion he asked me “Did, you happen to see that young fast bowler turning up for St. Joseph’s? I think the name is some Vaas and he looks very promising.” Being the inquisitive busybody, I redirected myself to Darley Road and waited until the Josephians began to bowl.

This may be a good two decades ago, but, I still remember my first encounter with fast bowler Chaminda Vaas. Still in his early teens the slightly built fast medium bowler was not a tearaway jaw breaking monster, but he definitely had something going for him – especially the one that he pitched just short. In short this young lad impressed me. So much so a few seasons later Vaas had developed into a fine young bowler and I became a very keen admirer of his. But, my views on Vaas at the schoolboy selections did not go in favour with the selecting umpire’s panel, but, the very next phase of Sri Lanka’s Test cricket amply proved that my intuition was correct.

Warnakulasuriya Patabendige Ushantha Joseph Chaminda Vaas always was Sri Lanka cricket’s unsung hero. Though he played the game at international level for the past fifteen years, and has been one of the main contributors for the elevation of Sri Lanka cricket to its present day level. He has lived in the shadow of the cricketers who has captured the imagination of the cricket mad public. In batting a youngster may emulate Sanath Jayasuriya and in bowling it may be Muttiah Muralitharan, but, not Chaminda Vaas. Read more…

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Younus Khan is the flavour of the season. Having led Pakistan to World Twenty20, the new captain cool has set his sights on higher goals. He spoke to DNA from Colombo on the targets his side has set, the problems in his country and the original captain cool MS Dhoni.

What worked for you in England?
There was no pressure on us. Nobody was expecting us to reach the semifinals, leave aside winning the tournament. There were no media persons hanging around our team. We had a lot of time to concentrate on our jobs. Unlike, say, the Indians we had a lot of freedom.

So you say you were not scared of losing?
We were second last time. We were on the verge of winning the final against India Read more…

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