India vs Sri Lanka / Cricket Selectors

Saurav Ganguly is back with a bang, and India plays cricket today in his backyard today at the famous Eden Gardens... a mouth-watering prospect for Ganguly fans like me.

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Latest media reports suggest that Irfan Pathan & Yuvraj Singh are unlikely to play today on account of a sore shoulder and a stiff back respectively. In an ideal world, neither should expect to be an automatic selection for the world cup..one was dropped from the team for acute lack of bowling form and has done nothing since then to merit a call for the world cup, the other has been out of the team due to injury for a long time now, and it's not always easy to make a swift comeback. ...and post this match, Vengsarkar & co. get just one more chance before they need to decide the final Indian 15 for cricket's mega show in the caribbean.

It'd be an interesting wait-n-watch this one. Starting from the 1987 Cricket World Cup ( don't remember much before that), I don't think the selectors would have ever had such a problem as far as World Cup selections are concerned. A core 12 would have always been beyond doubt - all that the selectors needed to rack their brains about was about the bench warmers, people like sanjay bangar and parthiv patel. This time it's going to be a tougher one though..let's see how the colonel performs.

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India vs Sri Lanka, Eden Gardens, Kolkata. Thursday, 8th February 2007

Match live on Neo-sports from 1:00 pm (including pre-match nonsense) and on Doordarshan from 2:30 pm IST

For live streaming audio on the internet, click here.

Did India get it right at Capetown?

I didn't see the match yesterday, so this late comment - now based on today's cricket stories in the morning's Hindustan Times...

Neil Manthorp, the newspaper's cricket correspondent reports from Cape Town - Bennet Hewe has prepared a pitched that might have been easily imported from Delhi. " Bone-dry and short of grass, it offered the home side's seamers nothing........but even worse for Grame Smith's team were the scuffed and worn patches at either end that will deteriorate quickly as the match progresses - to the delight of Anil Kumble."

India are comfortably placed at 254/3, but still a few questions cannot be completely stifled:

- If the wicket was a belter, and so similar to Delhi's, was this the right time to demote Virender Sehwag? With all due respect to Jaffer and Karthick, who have both done a wonderful job, if Sehwag had succeeded the scoreline could have been well in excess of 300. High scoring rates is a major weapon with which the Aussies have slaughtered opposition relentlessly now - we will know about the impact of this slow batting rate once the Proteas start batting.

- If the wicket is so very likely to crack, shouldn't Harbhajan Singh have been picked up ahead of Munaf Patel? ( and not the fittest either )

In my previous post, we had discussed the importance of one pre-match element: the toss. This one, one which happens before the toss, might be almost as crucial - it's called team selection!!

Today in Cricket History

Poonam and I were sipping our Assam chais* at the Cha-Bar inside the Oxford Book Store inside the Statesman House today evening when A Book of Cricket grabbed my attention. Now if you are a regular to this store or have been there even a few times, you must have already got thinking by now. Light, unlike sound travels in a straight line, and without bending this basic principle of science, it would be utterly impossible to have a dekko* of the sports section from any of the tables in the cha-bar. Well, i did have a dekko and i have not managed to create any flutters in the world of sciene either. It just happened that Bakhtiar Dadabhoy's efforts had been carelessly abandoned by my predecessor on the cha-table and it was lying under the table somewhere in between mine and Poonam's feet. Now i would have never known a thing but she gets tickled and ruffled if the faintest of foreign particles manage to contact her body or any part covering her body, which in this case was her left shoe. Well, her tickling cost me six hundred rupees but it looks like money well spent.

A Book of Cricket Days is no novel concept. You must have sometime or the other read a column in some newspaper titled "Today in History". It's a surprise the author picked up on this much beaten idea. Who the hell wants to know what happened in the world of cricket on 20th November 1936 or 1956 or any other year for that matter. But that's not how Dadabhoy saw it, as i realised only a little later. You may not be curious to know what happened on 20th November 1987, but that's just because you don't know what happened on that fateful Friday, that too in the life of a god fearing Muslim cricket player. The ex-Pakistan captain Rameez Raja became the first victim of cricket's Law 37-1. To add to Raja's displeasure, when he became the first batsman to be given out for obstructing the field in one-day internationals, he was on exactly one short of hundred, on 99. But that's not what the higest point of the book is, for a mere rattling off of such facts and figure would have converted it into a most insipid affair. Raj Singh Dungarpur very correctly point it out in his foreword: "This book with its emphasis on bare facts and records could easily have become a dry catalogue of dreary statistics but the author has avoided this pitfall with diligent and resourceful research and a discerning eye for the colourful detail of anecdote". Dadabhoy had a tough task on hand, yet he has managed to make every single day exciting for the lovers of that beautiful game called cricket. Pick it up for those moments when you come home early to catch an exciting contest of bat and ball only to find the rain-gods playing foul with your plans. So what if that day's cricket is a non-affair. Long, long back, exactly ten or twenty or thirty years back, it was an exciting day of cricket, says Dadabhoy. Let's re-live the joy.

* chai - hindi for tea

dekko - to catch a glimpse