About a week ago, Mumbai Indians had all their noses in the air and, at least, one foot firmly in the semifinals: after comfortably winning almost every match, they even emerged as the favourites in virtually every book.

They needed just one more victory to finally take that giant leap into the last four; at that time, of course, it seemed as simple as taking the next step during a casual stroll in the morning.

That step, however, didn't turn out to be so simple: in fact, it drew them away from home and into the killing climes of Chennai. There, first, the humidity sapped Tendulkar; then, the heat of the competition got to his team. Eventually, they failed to chase down a fair-game 165.

The next step was even more complicated, taking them all the way from down South to the fringes of northern India. On the face of it, though, it seemed like a facile mission: zip into Mohali, zap the already-down Kings and go back into the reassuring folds of home.

But then, you scoff at a pride of hungry lions at your own peril: not too surprisingly, Mumbai managed only 154 and just didn't have the heart to defend it. Suddenly, it was two defeats in two games; you didn't have to see the anxious faces in their dugout to know that they had lost the momentum.

That is, however, not the main reason for their anxiety; Mumbai Indians are probably worried about something else: the curse of the Number 14. Surely, the ghosts of an earlier lifetime, of IPL 2008, are haunting them again.

In the inaugural edition too, they won six straight games after a disastrous start to be called the momentum-team; but they lost the next three to be unceremoniously left out of the race. Clearly, they had peaked a little too early; is that the case this time too? Can they get past 14 points at least now?

More importantly, do they have the wherewithal to go all the way? Are they still as red-hot as they appeared to be just a couple of matches ago?

The answer, on current form, is no. First and foremost, their batting doesn't have the firepower to keep winning day in and day out; yes, there is Tendulkar but he must be feeling like Read more...

Bobilli Vijay Kumar IPL Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, IPL, Sachin Tendulkar, Twenty20

Sachin Tendulkar's birthday being named World Cricket Day is a tremendous tribute by cricket's apex body, the International Cricket Council. The announcement came a day after arguably the world's finest cricketer, Garfield Sobers, paid handsome tributes to Sachin, saying that with all his achievements he won't give it away so easily.

  Before this tribute to Sachin, Indians were basking in the glory of the world's finest hockey player, Dhyan Chand, being remembered by his birthday being named the National Sports Day of India. One can't remember other sporting greats being similarly commemorated. But Sachin's glory is that he is being honoured in his lifetime.

    Only recently we had Winter Olympic gold medallist Hannah Kearney seeing a day named after her in Vermont, US.  Hannah Kearney opened the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games with a bang, winning the United States' first gold medal in the moguls' competition. That sparked a great run for the US, as they went on to win 36 more! Last week, Hannah returned to her hometown of Norwich to parade through the town. She also went through Hanover, where she was born. Vermont governor Jim Douglas declared that February 26 will for ever be known as Hannah Kearney Day!

      Otherwise we have only had things, events, tournaments, etc named after sporting heroes. On surfing the internet you find that there are Bradman Biscuits named after the Aussie legend. Someone says he wants to see an Alfonso Soriano shampoo, named after a major League baseball outfielder. Another doesn't like a talk show being named after the brash tennis icon John McEnroe. He says basketball great Magic Johnson was given a talk show because he was a likable guy.

      A highway in the US was named after Mark McGwire, famous baseball player who averaged a home run once every 10.61 at bats, the lowest at bats per home run ratio in baseball history. It was a portion of I-70 near downtown in his hometown St Louis. After his disgrace following a drugs scandal, the portion of I-70 was "renamed" I-70.

      There were calls to have a Jim Ross Barbeque Sauce after this WWF wrestler peddled his barbeque sauce so much on the WWF airwaves. There was actually an entire WWF cookbook at one point. American NFL footballer Mike Ditka, one of the two people to win Read more...

Pradeep Vijaykar Indian Cricket Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Sachin Tendulkar

Sachin Tendulkar joined an elite group of Test players when he took the field against Bangladesh last month. He became just the fifth person to play Test cricket in four different decades having made his debut as a sixteen-year-old against Pakistan at Karachi in November 1989. Let’s have a look at the players he emulated and how they performed in the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings.

The first man to achieve this most remarkable of feats is also unique in that he participated in Tests in five different decades. That man is Wilfred Rhodes, who started his career as a specialist left-arm spinner in the 1890s who didn’t bat any higher than tenth in any of his first nine Tests. However, by 1912 he had graduated to opening the batting with Jack Hobbs and that pair still holds England’s first wicket record partnership in Ashes Tests with the 323 they added at Melbourne in February 1912. Rhodes also holds England’s record partnership for the tenth wicket too, and by the time he was recalled for his final appearances in 1930 he was back to number 10 playing as a spinner.

Batting-wise, he achieved 646 points and fourth place in December 1913 after he scored 152 against South Africa at Johannesburg in the match that Sydney Barnes took seventeen wickets. However it was with his bowling that he really hit the heights. He spent a total of twelve Tests at the top of the bowling tree between 1904 and 1907 peaking at 823 points. He was unfortunate that despite ending his first-class career just 31 runs short of the 40,000 run / 4,000 wicket double, he never topped the Test all-rounder table thanks to South African Aubrey Faulkner who reached his peak around the same time Rhodes did.

Jack Hobbs made his Test debut in 1908 and ‘The Master’ was only toppled from his lofty perch at the top of the Batting Ratings for one match in the entire period from 1912 to 1928 (by South African Herbie Taylor in 1923). He peaked at 942 at the end of 1912 which is the third-highest points tally ever achieved. His opening partnership with Herbert Sutcliffe was legendary and he spent more than a quarter of his Test career with a Rating of over 900 points. His career records of 61,760 first-class runs with 199 centuries will never be beaten and no-one else has ever scored a Test century at the age of 46. Even when he finally ended his international career Read more…

Administrator Indian Cricket Aubrey Faulkner, Bangladesh, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, England, ICC, Jack Hobbs, Johannesburg, Rhodes, Sachin Tendulkar, Sydney, Sydney Barnes, Test Cricket

Stories of international sportsmen in their schooldays are revealing. We know of Sachin Tendulkar’s sleep-walking and running singles in his mind when asleep. The bowler who complained to five-year old Tiger Pataudi’s father that “If I bowl fast, I could kill him; if I bowl slowly he hits me to the boundary” is part of folklore too.

The revealing anecdote of Sunil Joshi, Karnataka’s remarkable cricketer, concerns the 110-kilometre train ride he took everyday from Gadag, his birthplace, to Hubli so he could attend nets and be back in time for school. In one sweep, it reveals the player’s temperament, his passion for the game and his willingness to work hard at it.

Today, when small-town India produces international players regularly, it might be difficult to fully unerstand the struggles of a Sunil Joshi to break into the big time. Hubli was the backwaters of the game in Karnataka and Gadag was the backwaters of the backwaters.

Amazingly, at 40 Joshi continues to inspire Karnataka, and is the sole survivor of the team which won the Ranji Trophy final of 1998-99, the last time Karnataka triumphed.

There was a time after a Dhaka Test (92 in an innings and eight wickets for the match) when he was seen as a potential India all rounder, but it is as a left arm spinner of impeccable style that he continues to serve Karnataka, a pillar around whom the team revolves.

Recently overtook the great Bhagwat Chandrasekhar as Karnataka’s highest wicket taker in the Ranji Trophy. His 444 wickets from 107 matches is topped only by S Venkatraghavan’s 530 and Rajinder Goel’s 637.

On his Ranji debut in Hubli, he remained unbeaten on 83 but the match was called off following the upheaval on the demolition of the Babri Masjid. He made his Test debut on his 27th birthday in Birmingham, broke a finger while batting, could not bowl and had to return home. It was an anti-climax to a season when he scored over 500 runs and claimed 50 wickets in the Ranji Read more…

Administrator Indian Cricket Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Dhaka, Hubli, Karnataka, Ranji, Sachin Tendulkar, South Africa, Sunil Joshi, Tiger Pataudi

Ricky Ponting is fascinating viewing at the moment.

Watching him get dropped at the start of his inings playing the pull shot this morning will inevitably start another round of speculation urging him to shelve the shot.

He wants to play it and good luck to him.

The pull is not so much a stroke as a signal of intent. It sends aggressive vibes flowing through both dressing rooms.

If Ponting gave the shot away it would leave him in a difficult place because there are few graceful ways of handling balls on the body.

It is a shot based on instinct.

Our only hope for him is that he plays it with conviction. No shot is more vulnerable when played half-heartedly than the pull.

People saying he should make some concessions to advancing years are making solid points. Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar and Steve Waugh all modified their games.

But the pull shot is not simply part of Ponting’s game but the very essence of it. Read more…

Administrator Australia Blogs.CMDN.com, Brian Lara, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Ponting, Ricky Ponting, Sachin Tendulkar, Steve Waugh

India’s star batsman is as happy piling up runs in Cuttack as scoring a century at Lord’s

One of the advantages of having a partner who isn’t especially interested in sport comes in the form of observations that are stripped bare of the fake patinas that we aficionados love to add on. Soon after Sachin Tendulkar’s unbeaten 96 had guided India to the easiest of victories in Cuttack, I was thinking out loud: “How does he still motivate himself to go to such venues and score runs?” She looked perplexed for a moment. “Don’t people go to watch the games there?” she asked. “Do they pay less money to get in?”

Touché. When you follow a sport like cricket, steeped in tradition, it’s easy to succumb to what I call the Houses-of-the-Holy syndrome. When a batsman makes a century or a bowler bowls a game-changing spell at a venue like Lord’s, the MCG, Eden Gardens, the Wanderers or the Kensington Oval, there’s a tendency to imbue it with mythical qualities. A hundred made at the Barabati Stadium or the Arbab Niaz in Peshawar isn’t viewed in quite the same rose-tinted way.

Tendulkar, though, scoffs at this particular form of snobbery. For years now, he has been a disciple of the first commandment that the great Bill Shankly preached; that it’s “their [the players'] privilege to play for you [the fans]“. Unlike the big-time Charlies who came to English football and became mice among men during trips to the wintry wastes of Wearside and north Lancashire, he has made it his business to score runs wherever he goes.

His 45 one-day hundreds have been distributed across 31 different venues, with Colombo’s Premadasa Stadium having been witness to four, including his first way back in 1994. The 43 Test centuries have been spread across 30 venues. Apart from the absence of a Test hundred in Zimbabwe and a limited-overs one in the Caribbean, there are no gaps in the résumé.

In 2009, despite India’s threadbare Test schedule and being absent from a few one-day games, he has already amassed 1,505 runs, 964 of them in coloured clothes. Each of the three one-day centuries has been memorable. The 163 not out in Christchurch lit the touchpaper Read more…

Administrator Indian Cricket Australia, Blogs.CMDN.com, Chennai, Christchurch, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Cuttack, Eden Gardens, Kensington Oval, Lord's, Premadasa, Sachin, Sachin Tendulkar, Tendulkar, the MCG, the Wanderers, World Cup, Zimbabwe

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…

Administrator Views AB de Villiers, Andrew Strauss, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Dale Steyn, Daniel Vettori, graeme swann, Kumar Sangakkara, Mitchell Johnson, Mohammad Asif, MS Dhoni, Sachin Tendulkar, Thilan Samaraweera, Virender Sehwag, World Test XI

INAIA IS NOW the world’s top team in Test cricket. The move to ensure that india plays more Tests is a step in the right direction and can help this format regain its popularity

For cricket’s hardcore devotees, the purists who insist that Test cricket is the real form of the game, September 24, 2007, was no day for celebration.

It was the day Mahendra Singh Dhoni led a team short of full strength — a squad for which top batsmen such as Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly had made themselves unavailable — to victory in the ICC World Twenty20 in Johannesburg. The game that we knew, relatively gentle, moderately fashionable and acceptably paced, took on another dimension.

It was not as though fans suddenly woke up to the joys of big hitting to the detriment of all else —after all, the subcontinent has been serving up flat decks in one-day internationals (ODIs) for some time now. It was just that India’s administrators, who till then considered Twenty20 cricket a creation of marketing men in England, wholeheartedly adopted the shortest version.

If sociologist Ashish Nandy’s assertion that cricket was “an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British” was a bit of an exaggeration, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) strove to make this a reality with T20s. The hurried establishment of the Indian Premier League ushered in the era where T20 is king.

One-day cricket became popular in India after the country won the World Cup in 1983. T20 got wide acceptance in 2007. Now it is to be seen whether India rising to top position in Test cricket leads to revival in interest in this variety of the game.

When India beat Sri Lanka 2-0 to become the No. 1 Test team in the world, the men counting the coins in the BCCI’s vault discovered there were things that didn’t figure in a balance sheet but they mattered a lot to the game’s stakeholders.

Suddenly, being the best in the world, rather than briefly occupying top spot thanks to a quirk in the rankings system, became the goal. Reaching the top has forced the board to request the visiting South Africans to convert February’s five-ODI series into one comprising two Read more…

Administrator Indian Cricket Australia, BCCI, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Eden Gardens, England, ICC, Kolkata, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Nagpur, New Zealand, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Test Cricket, Twenty20, VCA, VVS Laxman, Yuvraj Singh

This is what Sachin Tendulkar asked Dinesh Karthik with less than 15 runs required to win and SRT in his nineties.

Now Dinesh Karthik (DK) on the field reminds one of a cat on a hot tin roof. Not like a cat which has 8 lives safely stacked away in the kitty and can still dance on the roof with a feline grace, caring two hoots about the impending disaster. Nor like Stuart Broad’s cat which doesn’t need any extra lives.

DK resembles more like a normal cat on a mildly hot tin roof with 3 lives under his belt. But at Cuttack he looked more like a cat with a nervous twitching disorder and only one life left to play on a sizzling tin roof. A cat which suddenly realised that on one side of the hot tin roof was a boiling water filled bath tub and on the other was the top chef of a Guangdong restaurant. This scenario is supposed to be the most horrible in cat nightmares and fate seemed to have added Chris Broad somehow to it for DK.

An exhibition of breathtaking passage of cricket by DK throughout the Lankan innings was surpassed only by his extremely brainy little batting display near the closing phase of the Indian chase. The Cuttack ODI rightfully belonged to DK but the short sighted adjudicators upheld Jadeja’s claims to that title. The extremely hilarious moments provided by DK were too many to be counted and too blatant to be forgotten in one’s life time.

He started with his piece de resistance - the Dilshan run out that was never to be. With his back facing the stumps and the ball in his hands DK was looking at Dillu some distance in front of him. Dilshan’s super handsome face was a mesmerising sight and he couldn’t take his eyes away. All those lovely matey moments spent with his DDD mate flashed in front of his eyes at that instant. The resultant back fllick; or was it a back loop?, flying harmlessly over the stumps. The India captain and the DDD captain both came to him and asked, “Boss DK why didn’t you turn back and throw the ball?” DK was too busy thinking about MSD’s impending return to the team.

Later Sangakkara jumped down the pitch, confident that he could afford to miss the ball and yet run, shake hands with the non striker and come back again, secure in the knowledge that all would be well. DK had no intentions of proving Sanga wrong, but for those damned Read more…

Administrator IND vs SL Blogs.CMDN.com, Boss DK, Chris Broad, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Cuttack, Dinesh Karthik, MSD, Sachin Tendulkar, SRT

Every time the Indian ODI team walks out to bat, a pesky question tags along: why is the moment's most devastating pair in cricket not opening the innings?
 
You can see the answer right in front of the question too: Sachin Tendulkar. When you have the game's colossus at your disposal, why would you look beyond or consider any other alternative?
 
Tendulkar, if nothing, is king in One-day cricket: almost every conceivable record has come to rest before his hallowed altar. At the ripe young age of 36, in his new avatar, he is the pillar on which India raise their foundation, if not their hopes.
 
So is the question redundant? Probably not. Simply because it is not as simple as it seems: if the bloodbath in the current series is any indication, even 400-plus totals are only as safe as the ghettos in New York. Batsmen don't bat any more; they hyper-ventilate.
 
At the end of the day, we don't see score cards either; we see scare cards.
 
In such a scenario, clearly, every over is crucial; indeed, every batsman has a larger than life role to play. And this is where the pesky question starts to gnaw even more: Where is Gautam Gambhir really? Is his purple patch being wasted?
 
The angry-little fellow has, of course, grown into India's most reliable batsman in the last couple of years; if you have more faith in rankings than in the leaders in Copenhagen, you will be at peace with his preeminent position.
 
Gambhir is virtually unstoppable in, both, Tests and Twenty20s; yet, in One-dayers, he seems like he has just come from Cameron's new planet Pandora (where cricket is yet to be invented). His last five walk-ins have yielded a grand sum of 27, with just one two-digit knock; his Read more...

Bobilli Vijay Kumar Indian Cricket Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Gambhir, Gautam Gambhir, ODI, Sachin Tendulkar, Sehwag, Sourav Ganguly