It’s a tricky scenario. You can’t really bet your hard-earned money on one team when the two best Test sides lock horns. But if you simply cannot hold yourself back, the loopholes need to be analysed.

South Africa have more than proved themselves on the international arena with scintillating performances on a consistent basis while Team India is touted as the next big thing in the cricketing fraternity. So if nothing, the two Test series will at least decide the ruler of the ICC rankings, at least for now.

The South African team was initially scheduled to play five ODIs but an interference of the cricketing boards, in a bid to save the fading excitement and grace of Test cricket, saw the itinerary being altered to a couple of Tests followed by three 50-over deciders.

Whether or not the encounter between the two sides will live up to the label of the ‘Majestic Combat’ is to be seen. Now, that is because, both the teams are struggling on various fronts.

If there has ever been a team worthy of replacing the Aussies at the top of the pack, it has been South Africa, hands down. Similar to Roger Federer’s supremacy being challenged by Rafael Nadal time and again, it has been the Proteas that has given the Champion Aussie outfit a run for their money every time the two sides have met on a cricket field, at least in the recent past.

The famous Johannesburg ODI where Australia scored 434 runs only to be chased to death by the so called ‘Chokers’, is an example that supports my above statement very aptly.

Getting back to the loopholes of both the teams, South Africa, the second ranked Test team, have not been in the ‘Test-groove’ in the recent past. They played two Test series against Australia (at home and away), sharing a trophy each. The only other Test series they have played is the one against England that concluded recently. It was drawn 1-1.

Their pace attack comprises of only two big names - Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel. The spin department is not worth the time and space in the blog. With India being among the best players of spin bowling, Paul Harris and Johan Botha will have to come up with something Read more…

Administrator India, South Africa, Test Cricket Australia, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, ICC, India, Ishant Sharma, Johannesburg, Rahul Dravid, Shahadat Hossain, South Africa, Sreesanth, Sri Lanka, Test Cricket, Yuvraj Singh, Zaheer Khan

India has just scored an emphatic 2-0 victory over Bangladesh. Barring the opening day of the two-Test series that witnessed a middle-order collapse, India were pretty much on top for most of the series.

      Nonetheless, the series also exposed certain chinks in our armour. We need to work on them as sterner test awaits us against South Africa beginning with the first Test on February 6. After all, the series is being billed as the battle for the champion Test team in the world.

      1. Middle-order batting:  Due to injuries, our middle order is suddenly looking brittle. Ok, we have Tendulkar in great nick. But Dravid, Laxman and Yuvraj are likely to miss the first Test. Indications are Yuvraj will miss the entire Test series. So what do we do?

      I think India has adequate bench strength. The question is whether the selectors will go for the real guys or opt for their favourites. If the selectors think that Dinesh Karthik, that little darling of the five wise men, will shore up the middle order, then God help India.

      Sure, we need experience. But I am not saying, call back Ganguly. Or even Mohammed Kaif.

      I have four fresh names: Cheteshwar Pujara, S Badrinath, Manish Pandey and Manoj Tiwary. The last three are among the finest fielders in India.

      Pujara and Badrinath are the two unluckiest cricketers in India today. Each of them has scored centuries by dozens. Badrinath, especially, has also proved his worth during India A tours abroad. Obviously either the selectors don't like his face or they know about a major chink in his batting that nobody else can find on television. I know he is 29 but so what? Even Mr Cricket, Michael Hussey made his Test debut at 30.

      Both Badrinath and Pujara are tailor-made for Test cricket. They have solid defence, decent footwork and play the ball on merit. They can graft and build a long, patient innings. Surely, both deserve a chance.

      Pandey and Tiwary are two of a kind. Both have the game to succeed on the big stage. After his recent stunning ton in the Ranji Trophy, Pandey is high on confidence too. Tiwary has fallen off the mindmap. But his 102 off 123 balls for East Zone against Central Zone, shows Read more...

Avijit Ghosh India, South Africa Bangladesh, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cheteshwar Pujara, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Dinesh Karthik, Dravid, Ganguly, India, Laxman, Manish Pandey, Manoj Tiwary, Mohammed Kaif, Rahane, Raina, Rohit Sharma, S Badrinath, South Africa, Virat Kohli, Yuvraj

The Pakistan episode of the IPL is turning out to be like a gripping murder mystery. The body is there for all to see; there are enough suspects, motives and witnesses too. But somehow we fail to zero in on the culprit, even though he is floating right in front of our eyes. The first clue behind the mystery surfaced on Friday afternoon. Even as Lalit Modi nudged her at the press conference, belatedly, Shilpa Shetty thundered: ‘‘Why should the Pakistan players’ security be our onus?’’ Then she said something-something about political parties and loony groups.

    The second part was important, but not critical; the first part was the real clue, the giveaway. A quick follow-up and a few calls later, the mystery solved itself: The government had refused to provide security for the players. For any player, not just Pakistan’s.

    The immediate thought was: Very good. Why should the government do anything? Isn’t this a commercial venture? If the IPL can pour out millions on players, and make billions in return, shouldn’t it take care of all aspects related to the tournament too, including security?

    Absolutely. Except that the motivation was not so straightforward. To unravel it, we need to go back a little, into the past: In the inaugural year, the government was like a silent partner; it turned almost every stone to make the ambitious project a runaway hit: visas, security, the IPL bosses simply had to name it, and they got them on a golden platter.

    The next year, however, the government became a hostile partner: it refused to play sweet ball, explaining that it could not guarantee foolproof security to the players, or to the tournament itself, owing to the General Elections. Instead of negotiating, or trying to convince the seat, Modi promptly whisked away the IPL to South Africa.

    Many in the Congress saw it as a slap on their face; more importantly, they were also worried that the backlash might hurl them into the wilderness again. Luckily, cricket proved to be a minor player, the mandate didn’t turn negative and it returned to power.

    But then, a hurt political party is more dangerous than a woman spurned: it was just a question of time before Modi would be made to pay for his audacity, for taking on the government itself. Is it a surprise, then, that the Congress mustered all its muscle in Rajasthan a few Read more...

Bobilli Vijay Kumar IPL, Pakistan Blogs.CMDN.com, Congress, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, IPL, Lalit Modi, Pakistan, Rajasthan, RCA, South Africa, Zimbabwe

In the latest world rankings, released after the Joburg and Hobart Tests, England are without a single batsman in the top 20 for the first time, by my reckoning, since 2002.

Andrew Strauss has slipped seven places over the course of the series with South Africa to No 21 and Kevin Pietersen’s fall has been sharper: down from No 4 at the start of the year to No 26 now.

Pietersen has fallen behind Paul Collingwood (up to No 22 despite not scoring a hundred in his past 11 Tests) and he is only one bad innings away from falling to England’s fourth best batsman with Alastair Cook in 28th place.

Heck, by the end of the Bangladesh tour, Pietersen could even have slipped behind Ian Bell, who is at No 32 and rising.

Four, or even five, batsmen in the top 30 isn’t in itself a bad thing. We’ve had as few as three in recent memory - and no more than six. Sri Lanka and Australia have only four each at the moment. South Africa have five and India have six, but England have two more than New Zealand or Pakistan and one more than the Windies.

That reflects our overall world Test ranking of fifth. The problem is the lack of one or two superstars. Depth is one thing, class is another. There are six different nations represented in the present top ten and England’s finest is 11 places outside that list.

This may be only temporary - Strauss could slip back into the top 20 next week if VVS Laxman (No 17) pays for a poor match against Bangladesh - but it has been a long time since we were without any top 20 representative. Pietersen had been in the top 20 since 2006 and was as high as No 3; before him there was a Trescothick or a Vaughan to fly the flag and, apart from a slump in 2000 and a brief dip in 2002, Graham Thorpe was in the top 20 between 1995 and 2003.

Before him, Mike Atherton and Alec Stewart were regulars in the top ten - and briefly, in 1992, we even had the No 1 and 2 batsmen in the world, in Graham Gooch and Robin Smith. Read more…

Administrator Views Alastair Cook, Alec Stewart, Andrew Strauss, Bangladesh, England, Hobart, Ian Bell, Joburg, Mike Atherton, New Zealand, Pakistan, Paul Collingwood, Pietersen, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thorpe

South Africa coach Mickey Arthur has yet to be convinced by the controversial Umpire Decision Review System, admitting he has ‘misgivings’ over its application.

The newly-adopted system was at the centre of a handful of flashpoints during England’s tour to South Africa - with TV umpire Daryl Harper criticised for his review decisions and the length of time taken to decide.

And Arthur, an early champion of the review policy, concedes he has yet to be convinced by the UDRS in its current form.

Arthur told the The Wisden Cricketer magazine: “I was always in favour of the UDRS but now that we have seen the system in operation for a decent period of time, I have mixed feelings.

“Incorrect umpiring decisions can affect the results of matches and also players’ careers so I felt that anything that could bring more correct decisions had to be good for the game.

“The system is definitely more good than bad but I do have some misgivings. We have to standardise the use of the UDRS across the world by using all the tools available. If ‘Hot Spot’ and ‘Snicko’ are used in one series but not another then the system is half-baked.”

Arthur has also raised questions over the fallibility of Hawk-Eye, suggesting the predictive system has yet to win over all cricket professionals.

“I’m not 100% convinced about the predictive element of Hawk-Eye and I don’t think many players are either.

“The other issue that needs to be clarified is the amount of time taken to decide whether to call for a review. I understand that in Australia it has been 10 seconds.

“In our series against England we were given 25. I think it’s fair to say that both Read more…

Administrator South Africa, Views Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Daryl Harper, David Richardson, England, Hawk-Eye, ICC, Mickey Arthur, South Africa, UDRS

England’s decision to allow “jaded” captain Andrew Strauss to miss next month’s tour to Bangladesh will leave many fans scratching their heads.

At a time when England are looking to lick the team into shape for their Ashes defence against Australia at the end of the year, it seems odd for the skipper not to be leading his troops from the front. Instead, it will be a “very excited” Alastair Cook who takes charge.

Strauss certainly does need to do something about his form. His team were fortunate to tie the four-match series 1-1 in South Africa after scraping two draws in Centurion and Cape Town by the skin of their teeth, and the captain himself was way below his best with the bat, scoring just 170 runs at an average of 24.28.

But rather than an extended rest, he could consider that the best way for a test batsman to regain his form is to play in a test. And given that Bangladesh’s bowlers are hardly the most fearsome in world cricket, shouldn’t an out-of-touch opener be relishing the opportunity?

Now the tour of South Africa is over, England have a four-week break before they leave for three Twenty20 matches in the Middle East ahead of the trip to Bangladesh.

Isn’t four weeks enough for Strauss to recharge his batteries before getting out there again to try to do what a batsman does best — and bat? Read more…

Administrator England Add new tag, Alastair Cook, Bangladesh, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cape Town, Centurion, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, England, South Africa, Twenty20

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

In the end, England were not able to produce a third great escape to win the Test series here in South Africa. But had they held on for a couple of extra hours at the Wanderers on Sunday they might have just managed to do it.

Johannesburg was hit by a huge thunderstorm in the afternoon which would have washed out any play after tea - and on Monday the city was hit by heavy rain and dark cloud which may have made conditions impossible on what would have been the scheduled final day.

Whether it would have been right for England to win the series is obviously highly debatable although this morning’s newspapers here in South Africa leave you in little doubt about what they think.

Stuart Hess, writing in the Johannesburg Star, states: “There are those who believe that England deserved to get something out of the Test series. They’d be wrong. The outcome was not a true reflection of the standard these two sides displayed, for South Africa were much the better team. England were resilient throughout, showed a lot of character, but even their own captain recognised they were the inferior team.”

Despite England’s rather disappointing capitulation yesterday morning it has overall been a gripping Test series. As England clung on to nail-biting draws at Centurion and Newlands we got a great picture through your e-mails and texts of how you were nervously listening to Test Match Special.

It was almost too much for TMS new boy Michael Vaughan at Newlands who turned to Jonathan Agnew during the final over to say “I’m sorry Aggers, I just can’t watch this”. Jonathan quickly replied: “I’m sorry you’ve got to. Remember how many times you put us through this sort of thing when you were captain.”

One of my favourite stories of people listening to the series came from Steve in Oxford who e-mailed us when England were taking important wickets one afternoon. He told us: “I am currently invigilating an exam and just jumped for joy at that wicket, disturbed everyone, but I Read more…

Administrator RSA vs ENG Adil Rashid, Alastair Cook, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cape Town, Centurion, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Duncan Fletcher, ECB, England, Geoff Boycott, ICC, Johannesburg, Michael Vaughan, South Africa, Stuart Hess, UAE, UDRS, Wanderers, Yorkshire

The referral system has irrevocably weakened the ancient link between umpire and player based on camaraderie

In the space of a few hot and heated days in South Africa, the age of deference in cricket all but died before our eyes.

If any single innovation were going to undermine the fragile, ancient contract of respect between players and umpires, it was not those hi-tech toys Hawk-Eye, Snicko and Hot Spot, but the bastard son of all of these: the referral system.

Andy Flower doesn’t like it – although, had a few decisions gone England’s way in the first Test, he might do. Stuart Broad, whose pink-cheeked youth barely disguises the gorilla roiling within him, clearly regards it as an instrument of the devil.

As long as the gadgets stayed in the TV box, they were relatively harmless innovations, talking points for the commentators who discussed at length if this were entirely fair on the umpires, given they had no access to these wonders of technology and we, the audience and jury, did. Every replay was accompanied by patronising blather along the lines of: “It’s a tough job out there; the umpires have to decide in a split second.” This did no more than prepare the way for the inevitable.

When the wise men of the ICC took the leap, it came as no surprise. They loaded the gun and handed it to the umpires themselves, with the golden bullet held up in the video replay room by that most ominous of silent villains, “the third umpire”.

The referral system is the European court of human rights of cricket. There is nowhere else to go. It is Hawk-Eye come to life (minus Snicko and Hot Spot, this time, because the local broadcaster can’t afford them).

There, surely, is no going back to the chummy days of yore, when Ian Botham and Allan Lamb felt comfortable popping a mobile phone into the pocket of Dickie Bird’s long white coat Read more…

Administrator Test Cricket Andy Flower, Birmingham, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, David Shepherd, Dickie Bird, Hawk-Eye, Hot Spot, ICC, Snicko, South Africa

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