Economics and politics dominated an auction that left a pair of veterans counting their blessings

If you’re Mohammad Kaif, a lottery ticket would be a smart move, while Damien Martyn could do worse than contemplate the tables at Bellagio or Caesar’s Palace. Neither man has played international cricket for more than three years, and Kaif’s performances in the inaugural Indian Premier League – he didn’t even make the Rajasthan Royals squad for the second season in South Africa – were as ordinary as Martyn’s brief flirtation with the nearly forgotten Indian Cricket League.

The Royals, captained and coached by Shane Warne, bought out Kaif’s $675,000 (£412,000) contract before the auction to free up the space that they then filled with the classy 38-year-old batsman who was once Warne’s brother in baggy-green arms. If that raised eyebrows, there was bemusement when Kings XI Punjab, who have appointed Kumar Sangakkara as captain in place of Yuvraj Singh, splashed out $250,000 for Kaif, whose batting is usually conspicuously devoid of the power and pizzazz associated with Twenty20 cricket.

Many of the headlines in England on Wednesday will focus on the lack of interest in Graeme Swann, but the Twitter-friendly off-spinner’s IPL tale is far from over. The auction represents only the most high-profile route into the league. There are other ways. Both the Mumbai Indians and the Chennai Super Kings have injured players that they can replace before the action begins on 12 March. In Mumbai’s case, they will have only the $100,000 that they spent on Kyle Mills last season, but Chennai have a whopping $1.55 million to draw on, having seen Andrew Flintoff go under the surgeon’s knife yet again. Don’t be surprised to see Swann or Doug Bollinger, another who attracted no interest, fielding a few calls from agents over the coming days.

With the auction taking place in Mumbai, a city subjected to the worst terror attacks ever seen in India, there was little doubt that the story of the day was the shunning of the 11 Pakistan players on the auction list. When Richard Madley, who usually helps sell antiques and Read more…

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The Sri Lankan cricketers did well to beat India in the Idea Cup final by four wickets with nine deliveries to spare in Dhaka, Bangladesh on Wednesday.

On the whole the cricketers can feel proud that they downed the much stronger Indians after losing an earlier game to them. But while they are basking in the glory of this victory, they must remember that one swallow does not make a summer.

The selectors and Sri Lanka Cricket led by two former champion cricketers Ashantha de Mel and D. Somachandra de Silva too can blow their trumpets now that the cricketers have succeeded.

Like in life in sport too, team work is essential for success. The cricketers, selectors and SLC worked together in harmony and with the game at heart and the final product was success. GREAT.

No cricket till November
But sadly the cricketers will not have any cricket to give continuity and build on this success. The cricketers will not have any cricket until Chrys Gayle’s West Indians arrive here in November later this year.

Some of our star cricketers will have the opportunity of playing in the Indian Premier League and the counties, while the youngsters who showed great promise will be kicking their heels playing in the local scene.

Sri Lanka Cricket will do well to probe all avenues and try and get the youngsters to play some international cricket where ever possible. They must use their influence with their counterparts in other countries and get the youngsters playing.

Before going on to comment on the final that Sri Lanka won, we would like to tell those who matter that the Lankan cricketing cupboard is full of promising material and it is now Read more…

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As always, the Test XI of 2009 will be a major talking point as the merits of those who made the side and those left out are debated.

Choosing a Test team of the year can be hazardous. So far no lives have been lost, though it was a close run thing last year after Sachin Tendulkar was omitted. No amount of sweet words could convince offended parties that selection had been based on 12 months and not an entire career. In hindsight the criteria may have become too cut and dried, allowing the inclusion of one-year wonders. Accordingly, an adjustment has been made.

Only those performing well in 2009 have been considered but thereafter heed has been taken of records. Alas that has meant the exclusion of Thilan Samaraweera, the most productive batsman of the year (1234 runs at 72.6) and a miracle worker. It’s not so long ago that he was shot and almost killed when terrorists attacked the Sri Lankan bus. As usual, though, the side has been selected to win cricket matches, not as a slap on the back.

More than ever it is necessary to look beyond the statistics. Averages have been distorted this year by the free-scoring series between Sri Lankan and India. Four of the five highest scorers of the campaign are Sri Lankan. The Indian top order averaged variously 90, 70, 87, 67, 67 and 92.

They cannot all play. Even to concentrate on them means forgetting about Ross Taylor, Graeme Smith, Younus Khan, Chris Gayle, Michael Clarke, Jacques Kallis and so forth. As it happens, none of them made the cut anyhow, but all deserved consideration. Anyhow, here goes!

1 Virender Sehwag
Impossible to omit provided he has a presentable season. His ability to take attacks apart and to sustain his domination sets him apart. Sehwag is a great batsman and among the most devastating openers the game has known. His defence is immaculate and mostly mothballed as he plays his full range of shots from the first over. Impudent but rarely imprudent, his madness conceals a shrewd cricketing brain.

2 Andrew Strauss
Pipped higher scorers like Gautam Gambhir and Tillakaratne Dilshan due to the part he played in recovering the Ashes. Simply, he was the most influential batsman in a tight series. Read more…

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Many records were broken in the recent run feast in India. One record went unnoticed. Sri Lanka became the first Test squad to contain as many as 4 wicketkeepers - Prasanna Jayawardene, Kumar Sangakkara, TM Dilshan and Kaushal Silva.

Actually, there was a 5th wicketkeeper. At 47, the manager Brendon Kuruppu is still trim. As the oldest member of the army of wicketkeepers, Kuruppu must have been disappointed that he was not called up.

Ironically, the first choice Prasanna Jayawardene kept poorly. He either dropped catches or obstructed the slips. Virender Sehwag, who is second only to Viv Richards as a merciless hitter, made merry.

In Kanpur and Mumbai, maiden overs were rare. Even dot balls were hard to come by.

In the ODIs, Sangakkara has been even worse than Jayawardene. On Friday, two easy chances were put down off the rampant Mahendra Singh Dhoni in the same over. Luckily, Dilshan’s assault and Matthews calmness took Sri Lanka across the line.

Sanga has often relied on his exceptional batting and speaking to cover up his faults on the field. He will be remembered as the finest speaker among the world’s top batsmen. The media has been carried away by his well-spoken manner. Cricketers should be judged on their performance on the pitch not on the mike.

Sanga cannot combine the responsibility of captaincy, wicketkeeper and the leading batsmen in any form of the game. One of the three must be discarded. He has lost the first virtue of any gloveman. He does not watch the ball on to his gloves. Instead, he grabs it.

Dhoni’s fortune as a captain and keeper cannot be the benchmark for Sangakkara. Dhoni does not bat in the top order. The Indian captain is not the sword of his team’s batting. He is just a bit player in a batting powerhouse. Instead of Sanga, Dilshan or Prasanna should Read more…

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“We are being deprived of Test cricket,” says Sri Lanka captain Kumar Sangakkara. “The young guys in our side are desperate to perform at the highest level, and that means Test cricket.”

You can see his point. The series with India now over, a well-beaten Sri Lanka’s next Test will be against West Indies in November 2010. That three-match series will be the only Tests Sri Lanka play in the next 17 months.

It isn’t just the Sri Lankan players who are missing out. We, the fans, are being deprived of seeing a fantastic pool of talent. Tillakaratne Dilshan is an exciting run-a-ball opener who offers far more than the Dilscoop. Sangakkara is a batsman of panther-like grace deserving of far greater exposure. Mahela Jayawardene has every shot (bar the Dilscoop). Thilan Samaraweera, meanwhile, has quietly snuck along to a plus-50 average in 57 Tests.

The bowling may have suffered from Chaminda Vaas’ retirement and Murali’s demise (how sad to see him suddenly seem so harmless). But Malinga the Slinger is only 26. Then there’s the finger-flicker, Ajantha Mendis. His unorthodoxy no longer surprises opponents – he was even left out of two of Sri Lanka’s recent Test matches with India. But there’s more to come, surely.

We shall see little of all this, at least in Tests. Part of the problem, no doubt, is that Sri Lanka aren’t a very good draw for the other Test nations, particularly those outside of Asia. Their last 15 Tests have all been in the sub-continent and only nine of their last 43 have been elsewhere. Sri Lanka have played just two Tests against Australia and two against South Africa since August 2004.

It is hard to take the ICC’s Test rankings seriously when a team full of talents are not tested in a variety of conditions against a variety of opponents, when they don’t even have that basic right: to play the game. And the problem isn’t exclusively Sri Lankan; India, fresh from Read more…

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A total of 241 men have taken the gloves in Test Match cricket and 203 in One Day International cricket. Historically it has always proved very difficult to combine both jobs of batting well and keeping wicket. However, a number of players have bucked the trend in these forms of the game and here we pay tribute to them.

The rapid onset of the one-day game in the recent years has persuaded international teams that they need to consider their wicket-keeper more as a front-line batsman, with the admission that they wouldn’t necessarily take the chances that the pure stumpers of old may have done. Long gone are the days of the wicket-keeper hidden away down the batting order in case of emergencies.

One of England’s finest glovemen was Bert Strudwick who played 28 Tests between 1910 and 1926 but ended with a Test batting average of 7.93 and a highest batting rating of just 104. George Duckworth replaced him in the team and held his place for most of the next decade but he ended with an average of 14.62 and a highest rating of 127. Other examples of the ‘all-field, little-bat’ keeper include Ken James (highest rating 41 in 11 Tests), Gil Langley (highest rating 223 in 26 Tests), and Narendra Tamhane (highest rating 251 in 21 Tests).

To illustrate this paradigm change, in the 1980s Test wicket-keepers averaged 23.61 with the bat. In the 1990s it was 27.29 and in the 2000s it had risen to 30.76.

Of course, some have flourished despite keeping wicket for the vast majority of their careers. Andy Flower managed to combine his role as key batsman and wicket-keeper and became the first keeper to reach the number one spot in the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings for Test batsmen in 2001. He was followed the following year by Adam Gilchrist, who hit 17 Test centuries and single-handedly revolutionised the way wicket-keepers are viewed in the longer format Read more…

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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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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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Sri Lanka batsman Mahela Jayawardene became only the seventh batsman in test cricket to score six or more double hundreds when he made 204 not out against India in the first test on Wednesday.

Australia’s Don Bradman tops the list with 12 double hundreds and West Indian Brian Lara is second with nine.

England’s Walter Hammond (7) and Pakistan’s Javed Miandad and Sri Lanka’s Kumar Sangakkara and Marvan Atapattu (six each) were the other members of the select club.

The 32-year-old Jayawardene’s remarkable effort on the third day helped the visitors reach 591 for five at the close on day three in reply to India’s 426.

“After playing for so many years I have realised what my strengths and weaknesses are and how to manage my innings and how to build the innings,” Jayawardene told reporters after notching his second double hundred of the year.

“Once you get to a stage, you realise how to pace your innings and how to attack and how to play on different surfaces,” said the former captain whose test best is 374 against South Africa in 2006.

It was Jayawardene’s 27th test century but the first on Indian soil.

Sri Lanka are ranked second behind South Africa in the official test rankings and are aiming to win their first test match on Indian soil since their first visit in 1982.

Jayawardene, who shared in a Sri Lanka record unbroken sixth wicket stand of 216 with wicketkeeper Prasanna Jayawardene (84), has given the tourists a good chance to achieve that goal.

“When we came we had a very realistic plan of beating India with the team we had and with the way we have been playing test cricket in the last two three years,” he said.

“So it was one of our goals and the way everything was set up we were disappointed Read more…

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CRICKET supporters in Australia and England can easily get the wrong idea about the health of Test series. Demand for tickets for Ashes games is so high that the idea of staging the Sydney Test in a vast amphitheatre in the western suburbs has been mooted. Lord’s Tests are routinely played to full houses. Selections are hotly debated. Phillip Hughes or Shane Watson? Four speedsters or a slowie? People care.

Test series are followed on television, radio and the internet. Reports dominate the back pages. No one doubts that it is the most significant form of the game. The Ashes were paramount, the one-day internationals a consolation. Five-day encounters with India are often spellbinding.

Elsewhere, another story is told. In some countries, a Test match is staged and no one turns up. The Kiwis play on oddly shaped grounds before a smattering of spectators. Stands in Sri Lanka and Pakistan echo as a five-day match unfolds. South Africa offers free tickets to busloads of schoolchildren. Bear in mind that only nine supposedly cricket-mad nations play Test matches. Their teams contain all the dynamic and glamorous performers around and still the matches are played to almost empty houses. If they cannot hold an audience, what price the rising nations?

Concerned that Test cricket is dying a slow and painful death, and aware of its duty as a guardian of the game, the Marylebone Cricket Club asked a subcommittee of the great and good (mostly) to put on its thinking cap and recommend changes calculated to breathe fresh life into the format. Determined to rely on fact as opposed to supposition, the elders commissioned a report on the public’s view of Test cricket. Already they feared the worst but wanted to add weight to their argument. Otherwise they’d sound like a bunch of old fogeys.

Although the samples were small, the pollster’s conclusions ought to ring alarm bells. Alas, the situation is even worse than had been feared. Connoisseurs have long been convinced Read more…

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