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Showing posts with label Ranji. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ranji. Show all posts
Looking forward... and back.
I seem to be in a majority of one for thinking that a rather barren 2010 is not such a bad thing for India. While everyone and their uncle seems to think that not playing enough tests in 2010 is going to negatively impact us, not least in the ICC standings, I actually think it is a blessing in disguise.
A cursory look at the ICC FTP indicates that India have a pretty busy lead in into the year, with tours to Bangladesh and the West Indies ( for the T20 World Cup) and playing hosts to South Africa and the IPL.
Following which, there is a lull till the Australians come a visiting (again!) for a 7 ODI set. Which kick starts what is possibly the most hectic year and a half India has, with away series in South Africa, England, West Indies and Australia, the World Cup at home, and playing hosts to New Zealand, England and Pakistan. I kid you not - between September 2010 and April 2012, India will be playing an incredible 21 Tests ( and this does not take into account any additional Tests the BCCI may host to ward of all the negative criticism)!
Which is why I think the break in the lead up is important. And so too the timing of the break.
India's break from International cricket happily coincides with the English County season, from start to finish. And given the benefits reaped by Zaheer Khan, RP Singh and Sreesanth from their stints with English Counties ( not to forget Piyush Chawla's abridged time with Sussex), it is an excellent opportunity for us to get our bowlers over there.
Or at the NCA. Or the MRF Pace Academy.
Blips in the rankings are not a real concern. What is more important for India as a cricketing entity is building a dynasty. And the most vital ingredient to building a dynasty is a potent bowling attack. One that has the ability to defend whatever score the batsmen put up. And I strongly believe that we have all the tools for just such an attack.
Consider the following list of bowlers
Munaf Patel
RP Singh
S Sreesanth
Ishant Sharma
Sudeep Tyagi
Irfan Pathan
Zaheer Khan
Ashish Nehra
Now consider the list again
Munaf Patel Current age 26 years 174 days
RP Singh Current age 24 years 27 days
S Sreesanth Current age 26 years 330 days
Ishant Sharma Current age 21 years 122 days
Sudeep Tyagi Current age 22 years 105 days
Irfan Pathan Current age 25 years 67 days
Zaheer Khan Current age 31 years 87 days
Ashish Nehra Current age 30 years 248 days
Add to the mix
Harbhajan Singh Current age 29 years 183 days
Pragyan Ojha Current age 23 years 119 daysRavinder Jadeja Current age 21 years 27 days
Piyush Chawla Current age 21 years 9 days
Amit Mishra Current age 27 years 39 days
If handled well, we not only have age but also experience on our side - vital factors in building and then sustaining a dynasty.
The 2010/11 -2011/12 season will show us if we can handle our bowlers properly. The lead up to that is an opportunity to work the bowlers into form ( and fitness). Which is why the barren 2010 season ( or non season) isn't the worst thing to happen to Indian cricket.
Speaking of Indian cricket, the Ranji semi finals begin tomorrow. The marquee match is between two ordinary teams, the other between my pre tourney favorites and "the" red hot team of the tournament.Mumbai vs Delhi gets top billing because of the history between the two teams- for a time, especially in the 80s, it was almost inevitable that the two teams would contest the Ranji finals. Every single year.
This year is different. Two very ordinary teams, one with major leadership issues and the others with no bowling to call upon will try to recreate the magic of the Mumbai - Delhi contest. And the only thing worth looking out for is how Ishant fares with the ball.
The other match, between UP and Karnataka, is the money game. The best bowling line up in the country, led by the Future India Captain( I haven't given up hope yet) play the most dominant batting line up in the country, bar Tamil Nadu. And while UP will be without Sudeep Tyagi or Suresh Raina, this will be the ideal platform for Tanmay Srivastava to show why he was once regarded so highly in the U-19 setup. For Karnataka, Uthappa's captaincy and Manish Pandey's batting will be the keys. And the Chinnaswamy wicket.
Here's to a good game then..
Happy New Year.
Whatever gets you through the night
The morning papers are a bad place to be after yesterday’s game. Unless of course you’re on a different train of thought.
Overnight scores for the Railways vs. Tamil Nadu game: Railways: 327, TN: 312/8, 16 more for that first innings lead.
But sample what Railways’ skipper, Murali Kartik has to say – “These are two tailenders and it takes only two deliveries to dismiss them”.
Now you can dismiss that comment, or like me, stay with it. You can snap at Kartik and say, yeah, right, it takes two deliveries to dismiss two tailenders, how many does it take to dismiss two openers?
Is Kartik insinuating that batsmen other than tailenders get more chances – surely a hangover from yesterday’s game – where it took more than two chances to dismiss Marsh and Watson.
Two chances for Marsh, and one for Watson.
Whereas Bhajji and Nehra, both tailenders, albeit accomplished ones, were dismissed on the second ball they faced.
No, this is not working, not for Murali, not for me. Wonder how Sachin's getting through all this?
1. Updating his new video release titled 'Playing with duds'
2. A long net cracking the Dilscoop with Dilshan, cracking his skull with Misbah
3. Sulking in a corner with his prawns
4. Being spanked by SMG 175 times
5. Negotiating contracts as father X'mas after Yuvi's grandfather remark
6.
A matter of scheduling..
| Wed Nov 11 - Fri Nov 13 09:30 local | 04:00 GMT 23:00 EST -1d | 22:00 CST -1d | 20:00 PST -1d | Indian Board President's XI v Sri Lankans Bandra Kurla Complex, Mumbai |
09:30 local | 04:00 GMT
23:00 EST -1d | 22:00 CST -1d | 20:00 PST -1d Group A - Mumbai v Orissa
Brabourne Stadium, Mumbai
The Ranji Schedule
----
Rohit Sharma will captain the Board President's XI against the visiting Sri Lankans in a three-day tour opener to be played in Mumbai from November 11 to 13. The 14-man squad, announced by the selectors in Nagpur today, also includes Robin Uthappa who was named vice-captain after an impressive showing in the Champions League Twenty20.
Karnataka play Delhi.. Delhi loses Sangwan, Karnataka Uthappa. Mumbai loses 4 players, Bengal 3. And Bengal are playing Baroda.
What should have been a post congratulating the selectors on a job well done( the BP XI composition is very interesting, to say the least) ends with me questioning the genius who decided to schedule the BP XI game to run parallel to the Ranji Trophy.!
Bored Question
While discussing about the West Indians in an East Indian team, Krish asked me this...
"Nice research, RajaB! I wonder if they play cricket in Lakshadweep. Maybe our own Brian Lara or Curtly Ambrose."
This triggered another interesting question...
Even if they do play cricket in Lakshadweep and the Andaman islands, where do they go from there ??
I mean if a kid from TN or AP or Goa or Mumbai or Delhi or even a Jharkhand plays well (or he is percieved to be playing well by those powerful and mighty...) then he moves on to represent his state / region in age group cricket and then moves on to the Ranji level.
Now, imagine I am a talented kid (just imagine !!) from either Lakshadweep or Andamans. Where will I go ??
Even a Services has its own Ranji team (I am leaving Railways as it is fairly large, railway zones and so on), so do we need a combined Union Territories / smaller states team playing Ranji ??
Do we have enough talent in the Union Territories / smaller states to warrant a team ??
10Ten – Nineteen Eighty Nine
Summer holidays came once a year, how disappointing (they still do I am told). The disappointment can’t be described in words, I always wanted a minimum of 2-3 summers an year. And obviously the summer holidays too. In fact those were days when I was upset with Jesus Christ, for he came back to life on a Sunday every year, on Easter. I wanted to ask him why he wouldn’t select a working day for that, for it would become a holiday for me.
And those were also the days when I used to think about cricket all the time, including my sleep. The days when “The Hindu” was read from the third back page on, when I played book cricket all the time when it wasn’t a break, played French cricket using a paper ball and the physics record notebook during those times the bell rang before 4.30p, then came the time I played cricket in my gully and then after the sun had set I talked about anything that is cricket. It could be international, Ranji, district level, schools, street level.
Those were the days when I insisted that my father bought me an SS Ton, a bat I had seen many international players carry (Symonds and Duncan Fearnley were the others seen frequently) to play the cork ball and rubber ball cricket versions. But whatever the versions, summer and 10Ten always have a special place in my heart.
That was when my younger cousin Deepak from Madras used to vacation with us. While as any other cricket crazy Madurai street my street was as mad about cricket, there still was a window when nobody played cricket in the whole town. At noon when the sun used to shine or rather blast out with vengeance, all the boys would disappear for their lunch at 12.30p before regrouping by 3p for the next game. These three and a half hours was when this spectacle called 10Ten used to happen.
Deepak used to stay at his maternal grandfather’s house which was opposite to my house. Outside the house was a narrow concrete ally which was approximately 5 feet in width and about 40 feet in length where there was a concrete fencing separating two houses. This became our cricket stadia during those three and a half hours.
We had a stone next to the gate of the house that would turn our stumps, and roughly 8-10 feet from it was a line on the floor which became the 2 line. For, any ball that crosses this line accounted for two runs. A further 4-5 feet away was another stone which marked the bowing crease, any ball that crossed it entitled three runs to the batting team and then came the fence that demarcated the boundary of the house. This became our boundary, the final frontier of the stadia. Any ball that went aerial route to hit the concrete wall was a six and one that rolls in a four and if it flew out (be it any direction outside the fence demarcating the alley) you are gone.
Now that we know some rules and the topography, let us see what a game of 10Ten actually is.
It is a one player versus another variation of cricket. As the name suggests one person bowls 10 overs to the other. Each chooses his favorite team and gets 10 wickets to bat. So the innings ended once those 10 wickets were out or if the 10 overs had been bowled. The other beauty of this form of cricket was that two teams played and not two people (as it would be), it could be international or local, one person would represent a team. Deepak invariably chose the Indians of 80s. So for him every time, Srikanth and Gavaskar opened his innings and Maninder Singh was his last man. Another amazing thing was that the batsmen used to change ends as it happens in cricket normally. For example if the ball crossed the 3 line the person batting had to spell out who would bat next. There used to be a fight most of the time Deepak crossed this line. For, most of the time Deepak tried to cheat me by getting a Lalchand Rajput out instead of a Kapil Dev, when Lalchand had just scored a three in the previous ball and it was Kapil who should have faced.
And this is an underarm variant of cricket.
Underarm was a misnomer those days (80s) in most parts of cricket playing India. For many, any ball that was thrown (overarm) was underarm. That was wrong, the pedigreed me reasoned with two clinching advantages to prove that the average cricket player of those days wrong. The first that I was an English professor’s son (so I exactly knew what underarm meant) and I also came from a Tambram family (to who statistics, cricket, Hindu paper, coffee and a centum in every mathematics test were mandatory to prove their parentage). So I (rather we, me and Deepak knew what underarm was, and then we also had Tevor and Greg Chappell to thank for letting the world see what underarm actually meant) knew very well that a ball is underarm only as long as the bowling hand doesn’t get up above the bowlers hip. And this form of bowling formed the base for the 10Ten games.
Those days I used to always think out of the box, for those were the days when I didn’t know there existed a box. I always preferred Andhra Pradesh as my team. The reality was that they were one of the weakest Ranji trophy teams those days, who always used to fight with Goa tooth and nail to determine who the worst team was in the south zone. But what caught my fancy was their captains name, it was V Chamundeshwaranath. I don’t know why, he used to be my favorite Indian cricketer and Andhra used to my favorite team and therefore they played against Deepak’s mighty Indians in every single 10Ten match we played.
2 out of 5 times Andhra won against the mighty Indians of Deepak. Of the other three, one match definitely ended when Deepak took the ball away and walked out of the match because I had got either his Azharuddin or a Vengsarkar out and he wouldn't accept that.
My Andhra line-up used to be something like this…
Vinod Kumar and Prasanna used to open, Rehman followed them. Then you had Kamaraju who preceded Chamundeshwaranath the captain. Then came Murthy and Ravi Kumar and Krishna Mohan, who used to be their wicket keeper in the previous season. This season, if I am not wrong (now!!) Prasanna was their wicket keeper. Their last man was Chakradar Rao who if my memory hasn’t failed me was a left handed spinner who was to be told before every time he ventured out to bat, how to hold a bat. I prided the moment when Chakradar scored some useful runs and won matches for me against the mighty Indians of Deepak. I would never forget a particular over which an over when a confident Deepak made Gavaskar bowl to Chakradar and Chakra like a true man responded with a four, a three and two in four balls to win the match for Andhra Pradesh.
Memories that would be for life time, those days. I wish I and Deepak could travel back in time or at least we travel back to Madurai, to that same place and had a rematch. With our kids and folks in full audience.
As Brian Adams used to sing when I was 17*, “Those were the best days of my life”.
* I have graduated henceforth to other (good) music
Ranji snippets
by Homer
Random thoughts on the Ranji quarterfinals
1. Chesteshwar Pujara - Scoring runs on the Rajkot featherbed is one thing, scoring runs when it matters, quite another. Coming in at 13/3, chasing 325 runs for an outright win, on a 4th innings Brabourne stadium pitch and scoring a ton to seal the deal - this kid is more ready than I thought he was 4 weeks ago.
2. Subramanian Badrinath - The 92* in the second essay may not be enough to get Badri another chance to fail in the Indian team. Has fallen well behind in the pecking ordewr to take up Rahul Dravid's job.
3. Rahul Dravid - Is Barkus willing? The talent is there, so is the ability.. But the mind continues to play tricks.
4. Lakshmipathy Balaji - The Smile is back. And how!!
5. Piyush Chawla - Where has the mojo gone?
6. Vineet Indulkar - The next great Mumbai batsman before Rohit Sharma became the next great Mumbai batsman. Now plays for HP along with Bhavin Thakkar. Which begs the question - why are people lamenting the death of Mumbai cricket if there are so many Mumbailkars unable to find a spot in the team and are forced to ply their trade elsewhere?
7. The Mumbai Cricket team - In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is King. This is the wrong team - wrong balance, wrong selection, just plain wrong. This team has ONE bowler ( Dhawal Kulkarni), the rest make up the numbers ( with occassional cameos). The batting order is unsettled,with the top3 (4?) alternating places. They have an apology of a leg spinner, all of 36 years of age who neither bats nor bowls. The captaincy has changed hands 4 times in the last 6 years. This is ateam with no selection continuity or investment in youth ( Iqbal Abdulla, Mumbai's main spinner last season and all of 18, does not make the final XV).And yet, Mumbai has won 5 games outright (out of the 7) in the league phase and continues to crush opponents. And things will only get rosier with Zaheer Khan and Sachin Tendulkar joining the team from the semis onwards..
Who would have thought?
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