Good Enough England win the Ashes

"When we are bad, we are very bad but when we are good, we are good enough".

England captain Andrew Strauss aptly summed up in the post-match interview at the Oval how England won the Ashes despite Australia scoring more centuries and taking more wickets in the series. Twice his team was good enough to win the match, once they were good enough to hold on to a draw and in the fourth test when they were bad, they were really bad!

Half-Monty, Twelve & Thirteen

Punter Ponting had forecasted that it would be Symond's match.....

At 172/4, with Andrew Symonds's cricket bat in full swing, the Australian captain would have thought that he had put his dollars at the right place. And why not, Symonds was on 26 off just 30 balls. Poor Monty had already been clobbered for two huge 6's in a space of 3 balls, with Symonds also showing his defensive skills in the delivery in-between. It's funny then, how dramatically the script changed, and how wrong Punter was!

Well, it actually turned out to be Poor Monty's match!! That he had just finished his unluckiest overs was a factor the Australians forgot to factor in! Now, the Englishmen find the number 13 unlucky and Sikhs despise the dozen. Monty Panesar happens to be both - once through with his 12th and 13th overs, Monty struck, and struck big time. In the very next over, he dashed Punter's gargantuan hopes. In his next (15th), he struck again - Gilly gobbled up and Monty on fire. Four overs later, the new-kid-on-the-spin bamboozled the original master and before he hit the scare of the double dozen, Monty trapped Lee in his 23rd over to complete his Half-Monty. ( 5/92 )

Harmison and Hoggard decimated the remaining half of Australian cricket and from here, it's upto the English willows to deliver the goodies . 2-1 will be an ideal scoreline to enter the Boxing Day Test with....it's good fun jumpin' the gun sometimes na?

Cricket's Cup of Woes

The Ashes is round the corner, the world's biggest cricket show is just a few months away, my team is beginning their campaign in South Africa later today, yet I am not getting terribly excited about cricket. So much so that after the frenetic activity i displayed during the Champions Trophy, I haven't posted a single entry in the last 10 days. There's something definitely wrong with the world of cricket....

The two touring teams have begun their campaigns in identical fashion - while the Prime Minister's XI have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Englishmen, the Indians fared only marginally better in their tour opener against a Rest of South Africa team. Of the twenty-two batsmen on display from the two touring teams, as many as 13 failed to reach double digit scores including a duck each from Raina, Mongia and Anderson. These curtain-raisers don't bode too well for the cricket ahead and what makes matters worse is the injury lists - Marcus Trescothick, an important component of the vicotorious Ashes team ( 2005) with 431 runs in that cricket-at-its-very-best series is out of contention due to some stress related problems, Yuvraj Singh who tore his ligament playing kho-kho with his shoes on has added to India's already long list of batting woes, Sehwag is in discomfort, Flintoff is not in the pink of health and i am sure i am missing out on a couple of others.

Another Ashes drubbing looks not too far away for the Pommies and the Indians, who have always found South Africa in South Africa the toughest challenge ever look ready to be slaughtered again. In the tour opener, they found Steyn too tough to handle, wait till they face the likes of Ntini and Pollock on the bouncy Durban. Latest weather reports from Johannesburg (that's where the first ODI is happening later today) say that the sky is turning grey already, unless the clouds are a good nimbus, it might be a gray day ahead for India.

Neither Australia nor South Africa are the teams that they were 5 years back - one is good without being very good, the other very good but not unbeatable any more (i guess you know which adjective fits whom). That makes it only sadder for cricket - an erosion of their strength has been nullified by the alarming plummeting of quality elsewhere. India and England were the rising forces of cricket a couple of seasons back, one had bearded the lion in its den and the other had snatched the Ashes back after a long hiatus. It's mine and cricket's misfortune that their ascendancy has been reversed all too rapidly - we are back to a boring unipolar world !

Any wonder that I am disillusioned and disenchanted with cricket. Want more reasons? Throw a glance at the schedule for the coming World Cup - there are more mismatches than matches. Bermuda is a kind of shorts, a triangle, a nation, an unsolved mystery - that's all i knew about it till the ICC in all its wisdom told me that it's a cricket playing nation and they will be competing at the highest level very soon. Not to miss the others who will be joining the party - Scotland, Netherlands, Canada....is that some convoluted strategy to improve the status of the Bangladeshi and Kenyan cricket teams? I can't think of a better reason for converting cricket's showpiece tournament into a complete circus.

Cricket needs a miracle, and soon. Will you gentlemen join me in the prayer?

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post script

while researching for the post, came across a site called www.injuryupdate.com !! further research might reveal that its board of directors include Shane Bond, Ashish Nehra, Marcus Trescothick, Sachin Tendulkar....