Have you even heard of that story about the King Frog whose hubris finally lead to his demise? It goes like - once upon a time there was a big fat frog who was under the impression that he was the biggest thing that God created ruling a good well with a large number of inhabitants, all smaller than him. At the same time he did not fail to gloat over that fact and made everyone always keep that in mind.

One day a junior member of the tribe had an accidental ride to the surface and while hopping around he happened to see a medium sized cow grazing close to the well. The junior who was living under a false impression could not believe what he witnessed and made a B -line back to the well and reported the matter to his beloved king claiming that he saw a living thing bigger than him. Disbelieving the junior the king blew himself up and inquired “Was he this size?” Then he just kept blowing himself on till he finally died of a heart attack.

That is a good lesson for anyone not to live by a myth.

A while ago the ICC had protruded the Lankan cricketers to be ranked the second best in the world Test rankings and we believed we were there in reality. However we first began to challenge the status quo when the Australians hinted that there should be a division among the Test rankings with the top four of Australia, England, South Africa and India slotted together in the big-league while Sri Lanka, Pakistan, New Zealand, West Indies and Bangladesh playing in a lower rung. This was one their solutions to the problem of the dwindling competitiveness among the Test playing countries. When this call first came Sri Lanka was at the number two slot and obviously we were rather perturbed.

The events that followed made us think more pragmatically. The ICC rankings are given on the current form of a country ranked on the results they yield. Ironically it is only a yardstick, 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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