India vs England Series Preview – And The Point Is ?

Critics have said that the series between India and England starting in Hyderabad on Friday 14th October is little more than a money spinning extravaganza, taking advantage of Indian fans love of limited overs cricket with a meaningless procession of five One Day Internationals and a T20 during a 3 week tour that has been shoe-horned into an already hectic international schedule.

Indeed this tour isn’t even an obligatory one. The ICC demands that every major cricketing nation plays each other home and away over a nine year period, something known as the Future Tours Programme and England touring India is certainly not a series in danger of defaulting on that promise any time soon.

For me though, this tour is a great idea. Never mind the financial implications; this One Day series pits current World Champions India against an England side hoping to claim their crown at the next World Cup in New Zealand and Australia in 2015.

Since winning the Ashes in January, the first time England have triumphed Down Under in 24 years, Andy Flower has put success in One Day cricket at the top of England’s agenda. However after a disappointing showing at the World Cup in April 2011, losing by 10 wickets to Sri Lanka in the quarter finals, changes were needed and Alastair Cook has since replaced Andrew Strauss as captain in this format.

With home series wins over Sri Lanka and India already secured under Cooks captaincy the future looks bright for this young side, but this tour of India will be their toughest assignment yet and we will learn a lot about just how far England have come by the end of it.

Historically England have struggled in India, winning only one of their last 13 One Day Internationals here, so any success enjoyed in this series will be a real statement of intent from Cook’s men.

But regardless of how this series progresses, it’s just nice to see England and the ECB focussing their efforts on 50 over cricket, rather than annexing a One Day International series awkwardly to the end of long test schedule, as if it were a warm-down exercise to the main event.

Look at the Ashes schedule last year. Many people, including Sir Ian Botham, bemoaned the decision to play 7 ODI’s at the end of such a draining and intense test series. Those One Day Internationals were supposed to be a warm-up for England’s World Cup campaign but with players tired and unmotivated, poor performances and injuries were all England took home from that series.

Whether One Day cricket is your thing or not is up to you, but one thing’s for sure: for England to prosper in this format it is imperative that they play more series like this one, focussing specifically on the 50 over game, building a specialist squad to compete with the best teams around.

This series should tell us a lot about whether England’s masterplan for world domination in every form of cricket is on course, but it is unlikely to be one-way traffic. Given India’s strength at home, plus England’s appalling record there, even a narrow defeat may give rise to optimism in the camp, depending on how well the side performs.

My only concern is that in continuing the rotation policy that sees Jimmy Anderson rested for this series, will we actually see an England One Day side that is essentially the first XI regularly enough before the World Cup in 2015?

In Australia last year, Alastair Cook shined the ball for the whole of the test series. Why? Because out of all the England players, he sweated the least (sweat on the ball reduced the chances of getting the ball to reverse swing).

To be the best, that level of detail needs to be considered, and I just hope that England remember to hone a winning first XI as well as amassing a huge pool of players from which to choose from.

Or perhaps I’m just being pedantic now?

Tom Huelin for DieHard Cricket Fans
Follow Tom on Twitter @tomhue1

The Mumbai Indians win the CLT20: stats and other stuff

For the first time in the T20 Champions League’s rich, three-year-old history, a team that didn’t win its domestic competition has been crowned the champion of champions. Just in case you doubt the accuracy of that fact, I’ve compiled a list of all the winners. Please take your time to go through it, however long and tedious it may seem.

Year	CLT20 Champions	Domestic Champions
2009	New South Wales	Yes
2010	Chennai Super Kings	Yes
2011	Mumbai Indians	No

Source: Brain

Sarcasm aside, this is actually a half-decent achievement for the Indians (Mumbai Indians, that is… I will never get over how stupid a name that is for the franchise). I would have taken any sort of win after, you know, that series. A pretty exciting CLT20 was exactly the sort of thing most Indian (Team India, not Mumbai) fans needed after being battered in Tests and ODIs. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that it was… actually, I’m not going to say it at all, I’ll have someone do it for me.

Thanks, Cliche Correspondent Ravi Shastri.

Nope, not until you’ve perfected faking laryngitis. (terrible execution of dark humor here)

Anyway, it was a good tournament, mostly because I only tuned in towards the latter stages – my first game was RCB’s record chase. It’s quite the underdog story for Mumbai, actually, once all the talk about flouting the rules or whatever has been extinguished. No, Somerset, you weren’t the underdogs, because you really should have been the favorites to beat Mumbai. I know it’s a hard pill to swallow, but you’ve gotta accept that, despite having a well settled team, you really did lose to an IPL side missing half its regular XI.

The India-England ODI’s are a few days away, which is another post for another day. I’ll leave you with some stats relating to Mumbai’s CLT20 performance.

• Mumbai took the idea of T20 being a batsman’s game, and bitchslapped it into unconsciousness. Their highest run scorer was Kieron Pollard, who scored 123 runs at 20.5, just over one-third the number of runs scored by David Warner, the top-scorer (328).
• Pollard also scored one of Mumbai’s two fifties, the other one coming fromAiden Blizzard.
• Among those who actually made runs, Lasith Malinga had the second-highest strike rate (183.78) in the CLT20, with the highest being Kevon Cooper’s 191.17.
• Lasith Malinga made exactly as many runs (68) as Yusuf Pathan andSuresh Raina, in the same number of innings.
• Mumbai’s bowling stats, on the other hand, are pretty impressive. Malinga(10) and Abu Nechim Ahmed (8) are both among the top five wicket takers, and Harbhajan (7) sits just outside that.
• In that top five wicket takers’ list, though, Malinga (20) and Ahmed (17.4) are the only ones not to bowl 24 overs.
• This has nothing to do with Mumbai, but Trinidad’s spin duo of Badree andNarine have a combined economy rate of 4.46 rpo in the 48 overs they bowled. Wow.

Contributed by DHCF Rishabh Bablani
Rishabh’s personal blog

CricLit – The Sum-erset Of All Fears

SCCC-IA agent Alfonso Thomas

Tom Clanc-ingdownthewicket comes to the fore in this CricLit entry, lending his pen to a thriller that would put the world on a precipice. Perhaps one from which it might not recover as a new world order threatened to break into existence…

Chapter 17

The days were shorter now back home, Alfonso told himself. It wasn’t that the season had gone on late in India, just that days were shortening back in England. The earth’s orbit around the sun, and the way the axis of rotation was not perpendicular with the plane of the… ecliptic? Something like that.

The team coach dropped them off in front of the Chennai stadium, and he walked in, wondering when the last cup had been, aside from the 2005 Twenty20 Cup, when Graeme Smith was in flight and outlined by the Oval floodlights. Blackbirds.

About the only good news was that he didn’t bring the video of the CB40 final or the Friends Life T20 Finals Day – but that wasn’t quite true either, was it. He brought no videos home, but it was less easy to clear out the mind than to clear out the dressing room at Lord’s or the Rose Bowl or wherever…

Alfonso heard the sounds of the Chennai crowd, the TV was tuned to ESPN Star. The Mumbai dressing room was making noises. Toshiba Power Sixes. He walked into the Somerset dressing room to announce the team.

“Alfonso!” Kieswetter ran over to deliver his bat, followed by a plaintive appeal. “Alfonso, you promise we can win this tournament?”

Oh, shit… the kids were back in school and there was the matter of the other game up in Bangalore. Somerset had to, had to, had to… when! When could the run break loose. The semi finals were now half-done, and Somerset were currently his baby and the England players had come out a week behind, and he had to get them over the line if it was going to end this trophy-less run.

“I’m going to try, Craig,” Alfonso promised his wicketkeeper, who was too young to understand about any obligation beyond Somerset’s promise.

“Alfonso, you promise?”

“I don’t know.”

“Game time,” Trego announced. ” And tomorrow’s the Final day.”

Alfonso hugged each of his team mates, but the exercise in affection merely left a nervy spot on his conscience. What sort of a captain was he turning into? The start of the 2012 season was next April or May, and who could say if Somerset might have a trophy, finally, to their name for that? Better find out

Better find out the date of the Friends Life T20 and CB40 finals so that he could schedule it now. Try to schedule it now. Alfonso reminded himself that little things like promises to his team mates on the matter of trophies were – little things!

God, how did this ever happen. He watched the players talk in their dressing room, then himself headed out to the umpire. The toss was won. He elected to bat, before walking back to his team. He was banking on Trego and Kieswetter now. It was much more likely they’d get a good start, and his other batsmen were also more selective in their shots of late. The cool boxes held a bag full of – Red Bull, wasn’t it.

About where Lucozade Sport had been twenty years earlier. The taste in question was very fruity, to mask the amount of sugar it had, and lack of alcohol content, which wouldn’t have done any favours.

Alfonso looked at the scoreboard. If he were very lucky, Somerset might get 140/150 on the board before the Mumbai Indians chased. He needed those runs. At the ground, he lived on the hope that Somerset might win and his system was becoming saturated with expectation. Once he’d been able to nap in the dug-out, but no longer. By the start of play, his system was wired, and by late afternoon his body played a strange melody of fatigue and nerves that sometimes left him wondering if he were going a little bid mad.

Well. As long as he asked himself that question… A few minutes later, a wicket had fallen. Pity the sun had dried out the pitch. Trego had beaten himself for pace – he’d planned to be there for at least an hour, but… it was always something for Somerset, wasn’t it?

When he walked, there was that look of discomfort from the dug-out. On the way into the dressing room, he opened the locker door to pull a Jelly Bean from his kit bag. These he chewed and washed down with an energy drink, starting off his third bottle in less than 13 overs.

Trego was no longer there, though he’d left some foundation on which for Somerset to push on in the powerplay. Alfonso watched and saw some good running between the wicket. It was fine. He took the team sheet and flipped the batting order around, making the power-hitters his priority. Jos Buttler was now coming in next.

Alfonso settled back into his chair and allowed himself a smile. It was working. Going hard at the start would be the resurgence of Somerset’s trophy hopes. Shop owners in Chennai were loading up Scrumpy in anticipation of the extended stay of their English tourists. The team, explained Tresco who’d opted to stay in the town of Taunton, was after all of fairly decent potential with good players. The Champions League was a tour that would prove this. Champions League? Alfonso thought. Well, why not?

It’s worth it, Alfonso told himself. You helped bring that about. You helped make that happen. You took tickets, and if nobody else knows it, the hell with it. You know. God knows. Isn’t that enough? No, Alfonso told himself in a quiet flash of honesty.

So what if the idea of Somerset winning a trophy had not been completely original? What idea ever was? It had been his thought that would make it happen in Chennai, his captaincy had gotten the team through this far, his… he deserved something for it, some recognition, enough for a little footnote in Somerset’s history book, but would he get it?

Alfonso snorted into his Red Bull. No chance. Kieron Pollard, that clever chap, would be hitting everybody to all parts when Franklin, Symonds, Kanwar were all done with it. If Alfonso ever tried to get his bowlers to get them to play straight, it’d look like a poor line, bowling either to leg or off side – and not a good length.

Cheer up Alfonso. You’re still alive. You have the CB40, you have the Friends Life T20. You have the County Championship.

Pete Hayman for DieHard Cricket Fans
Follow Pete on Twitter @petehayman

Shoaib Akhtar Speaks (The Truth?)

Autobiographies really are something. It is a time when self important sporting celebrities get to wave their creative pencil and indulge themselves in a self-made ego trip. Most of them are ignored as they lack the creativity, or the writing skill, or are just plain boring outside of the game. Then you get the select few personalities who carry off interesting laughs and anecdotes and make the experience a pleasure to read.

And then there is Shoaib Akthar.

Anything less than borderline insanity from this man would have been a let down, and lo and behold he has delivered. When it comes to stirring up a storm in a tea cup, he is a natural. Unlike Afridi though, Shoaib is articulate, and his points dive into grey and debatable areas instead of being dismissed as tripe.

What did he have to say in the aptly titled “Controversially Yours”? Does he make a point or is he simply a bag of wind?

1. Sachin and Dravid Are Not Match Winners

In Dravid’s case, total nonsense. He single handedly won games for India in both forms of the game and was often the last man standing amongst dominoes. To suggest that Dravid “didn’t know the art of finishing the game” is nothing more than a cheap shot at the great man. Credibility 0/10.

Above the belt pelase. © Getty Images

In Sachin’s case though, maybe he has a point. Sachin through the nineties was a frustrated lone figure who got nil support from his inept team mates. You can’t fault him for being unable to do it all alone, everybody else were looking after their own pockets. The Sachin of the 00′s was a different figure though, he finally had adequate batting backup and was allowed to pile up the runs carefully. Guilty of being a run glut, yes. Guilty of not winning matches, it can also be argued. He has far less Dravid’s and Laxman’s in his innings vault. Credibility 5/10.

2. Sachin Was Scared Of Him.
Rubbish. This is the guy who manfully fought Wasim & Waqar, Lee & McGrath, Ambrose & Walsh, Steve Bucknor… the list goes on. While not always coming off the winner of the battles, never ever backed down, be it 16 or 36 years old. Why should he be scared of Shoaib? Has he forgotten the 03 World Cup? Credibility 0/10.

3. The IPL Cheated Him
Believable, and he won’t be the last. The IPL is built on a foundation of masses, greed and corruption. He joined a team run by an arrogant Bollywood star in a tournament run by an arrogant nobody Lalit Modi. With a set-up like that, it was inevitable. A paint job will only cover the cracks in a dam, soon this whole circus will be flooded by a crashing wave. Shoaib should have known better than to take part. Credibility 8/10.

4. Everyone Ball Tampers
Correction, Pakistan ball tampers. And no it shouldn’t be legal, where do you draw the line, a maximum fingernail length in the ICC code of conduct? My only hope is that the pioneers of swing such as Imran aren’t exposed to have resorted to dirty methods in the past, although I get the feeling it just may happen. Credibility 8/10.

Michael Jackson impersonations are perfectly legal though. © AFP

5. Shoaib Malik Shouldn’t Have Been Captain
A stab at his own team mate? Only he would dare, but again he actually has a point here. Malik was an above average ODI batsman at best, with a shaky test career and a dodgy bowling action, with an eye for female tennis players. Why was he made captain? On paper it looks like a nothing decision, possibly influenced by those that favoured Malik. But in reality one must also consider that Pakistani teams were often unstable and a logical choice for captain was not always clear. Again debatable.Credibility 7/10.

6. He Was Humiliated

Shoaib didn’t spare anyone, even lashing out at Wasim Akram and partially blaming him for not fulfilling his career to its potential. I’m not sure how big a part politics played, but they were certainly present as he was inexplicably robbed of a swansong finish against India in the World Cup semi final. It must be said though that despite whatever corruption and vendettas he may have had to face, he was an unlikeable and destructive person to begin with. Most of what we had to put up with was a result of his own actions and he has nobody to blame. Credibility 5/10.

Surprisingly all in all, the points Shoaib Akhtar made in his autobiography were not entirely a load of pies. While dealing out low blows to Indian batsman, he dealt to his former team mates and management with equal measure and venom. Will it have an impact? Probably not, Shoaib Akhtar lashing out is really about as credible as…

This. © Getty Images

Contributed by : Varun Prasad
Original Post : The Cricket Musings

Master Of Puppets

I just spotted a great post by Tim Holt, it is called Cricket Marketing 101- Use The Name Of Sachin Tendulkar, in which Tim de-constructs the cheap and obvious strategies employed by Shoaib Akhtar’s PR consultants, who use the name of Sachin Tendulkar and the remote-controllability of his easily manipulable zealots, to increase the sales of his silly little book, and the hype around it. On this occasion Tim also mentions how bloggers more or less blatantly exploit Sachin’s name to trigger a deluge of blog visitors.

From the top of my head I can name several blogs who played that card. I did that, too, as a rather obvious pisstake on this strategy of “no given f*k + little effort = many clicks”; put Sachin in the title and gazed at the jump in visitor numbers with disblief. It is hilarious, and it gives you a feeling of power over the masses, to summon them just by pronouncing the magical two words, but at the same time it is also scary to get overrun by a raging mob, and logically copping a fair bit of stick from them as well. Tim, in his article, calls them fanbois, I used to call them “Sachin zombies” and Sachin the “zombie master”, and if you adopt the role of a high priest, by singing his gospel and giving the Sachin sermon, you can control them as well, which is exactly what these bloggers are doing. The same crazy effect does, BTW, also apply to Shahid Afridi.

Which means that the current constellation of Tendulkar, Akhtar and Afridi involved in one and the same incident is getting mirrored as a superangry multi-climax in the visitor figures of any cricket-related medium. This peak in the traffic stats, and subsequent slump, also seems to suggest the other way round that the respective audience doesn’t care about much else (but I guess most people I personally talk to are “meta” cricket fans, who are interested in cricket in general and will click any headline that promises a good read).

What I find interesting as well is how different the priorities of the fanbois are, if you compare Sachin and Afridi as players, their image, personality, reputation and aura, and what they have accomplished in their careers. But I guess it takes a bunch of bored sociologists to analyse the motivation of the two kinds of fanatics, and their reasons for picking these two specific, opposite types of national sports icons to idolise.

But back to Tendulkar, the tactic of utilising his name while actually not giving a shit could be observed excellently when Sachin had made his ODI 200. Everybody wanted to have their share of the traffic cake, and Sachin posts kept popping up on blogs on which you would otherwise not find a single article about him, let alone India in general. Some even posted two posts in a row about him, making it fairly obvious that they were just trying to stay at the top of everybody’s blogrolls *ahem*.

Most bloggers are amateurs, hobby writers who don’t earn a single penny with their texts. So why this frenzy, this anxiety, if you couldn’t care less about the player? Apparently the blogger’s currency, in which his or her efforts get rewarded, is attention, reputation, response, approval, and the great summoning powers described above; measurable by the number of clicks, comments and shares. Shoaib Akhtar however is milking the holy Sachin cow for real monetary profit, measurable in his bank account, and willingly aided by anybody who picks up his cheap manoeuvre and helps him deliver the word to the potentially outraged.

I would say Akhtar 1, Bloggers 0

And while we, the media, the bloggers, readers, consumers and Akhtar, are getting lost in this secondary theatre of war, there is a guy whose market value benefits most from these permanently and continuously bubbling emotions, which provide him with seemingly eternal public omnipresence… his name is The Little Master, and he needn’t even pull the strings 

Contributed by Wes
Follow Wes on Twitter @WesPFCNFS
Wes blogs about cricket @ playforcountrynotforself

Akhtar strikes, Afridi bites

Do not think of knocking out another person’s brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.

Shoaib Akhtar is no stranger to controversy. He made an entire career out of it. When he was not busy shattering stumps and taking off on airplane celebrations, he spent his time fighting doping allegations, chucking scandals, ball tampering suggestions and even an unfortunate case of genital warts! He never shared a good equation with most of his team-mates as Mohammed Asif and Inzamam will testify. So what do you expect from him when he is finally unshackled from the restraints of being an active player and is all set to release his autobiography?? The book is titled, “Controversially yours”, for God’s sake! I would have been more shocked if there was no eyebrow-raising stories in the book.

Autobiographies need to have controversies, if they have to sell. Just ask Herschelle Gibbs. In Akhtar’s case, he has served a generous dolloping of controversy, ranging from candid admissions about ball tampering to passing incendiary comments about Tendulkar, Dravid, Akram and some of his own team-mates. Lost in the hullabaloo over the Tendulkar-Dravid comments is the fact that Akhtar has generously praised Ganguly and Dhoni for their leadership skills; but then again, how do you promote your book’s publicity based on that?

When there is a controversy involving India-Pakistan cricket, can the great Afridi be far behind? I have already written about him here, and my feelings since then have not changed much. While most other Pakistani cricketers have rubbished Akhtar’s tales, Afridi has backed him on his observations over Tendulkar, generously adding that Sachin’s legs used to ‘shiver’ when facing him. Setting aside the fact that this is hard to visualize, it is mighty impressive that Tendulkar manage to score a brilliant 98 in the 2003 World Cup and some impressive knocks in the tour of Pakistan in the following year – all this while on ‘shivering legs syndrome’!

Look, I’m not dissing either Akhtar or Afridi here. It is their right to express their opinion, whether most people agree with them or not. If they feel that Tendulkar is scared of Akhtar or that Dravid is not a match-winner, so be it. If you think otherwise, go ahead and express that as well. It is not a compulsion that everyone should shower glowing praises on Tendulkar, or have an unanimously good opinion about Dravid (though it would be hard to differ in this regard!). The fact is, when people look back twenty, thirty years from now, they will see that the records and accomplishments speak for themselves. There is no need to fly into nationalistic rage and degrade others’ achievements. It is noteworthy that the men at the center of the storm – Tendulkar and Dravid – have refused to comment on this, while others speak for and against them. Perhaps, there is a lesson to learn from them here.

Benny for DieHard Cricket Fans
Follow Benny on Twitter @tracerbullet007