Did you know that besides being an all time great batsman the Indian cricket coach is quite Viv Richards-like in qualifying as one of the top all rounders to have played in ODI's?

Cricinfo

25-Feb-2013

Did you know that besides being an all time great batsman the Indian cricket coach is quite Viv Richards-like in qualifying as one of the top all rounders to have played in ODI's?? I never even bothered to check until I came across this Friday column by S Rajesh on cricinfo.

Chappell has taken 72 wkts in the 74 ODI's he played!! Now I know what makes him bowl so much at the top order men in the nets.

The article gives a reasonable method to judge all rounders in ODI's. Problem is, while the bowling economy rates of players is available on the players' stats pages the batting strike rate is yet to become a permanent feature in those columns...I wish Wisden and Cricinfo take note of this sooner rather than later.

Strike rates and economy rates of individual players are functions of average strike rates / economy rates for that era and need to be viewed as such. You need to make a few adjustments while judging specialist bowlers and batsmen from different generations with those figures. But for the all rounders the relevant figures, as indicated in Rajesh's article, are differentials of batting and bowling figures - and that should essentially cancel out such 'generation gaps'.

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It's not what you say...

The life of the modern elite cricketer is different from most of our own

Cricinfo

25-Feb-2013

The life of the modern elite cricketer is different from most of our own. At an early age, usually before they leave school, they are hand picked from thousands of other hopefuls to be their country's Best New Hope. They're often sponsored before they can drive, they pay more attention to the location of their off stump than their school lessons, and ultimately they are bred and nurtured to be athletes. They are ushered into state cricket, national A sides, and eventually the national team itself, collecting money along the way. Mundane goals such as holding down a regular job, are at best secondary to goals such as maintaining a 50+ average, or consistently taking wickets. Cricketers evolve differently as people as a result of these different priorities, it's inevitable. With the bulk of commentators everywhere made up of former athletes, are we kidding ourselves to expect anything else?

While many elite athletes are still capable of maintaining society's standards for morals and ethics, plenty cling on to the school boy mentality they were never forced to relinquish due to the all-forgiving cocoon they're wrapped in. Ego and arrogance are justified as self belief, stubborness as grit & determination, and humour such as Dean Jones' thought of as larrakinism. After life in cricket finished for Jones, he moved into coaching and commentary after a quick public relations course in how not to make an arse of yourself. It either didn't include a lesson on always treating the microphone as though it's on, or Deano didn't listen that day.

So is it really fair to single out Jones? Judging by the reaction to his "terrorist" remark, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was the first time in history a cricket commentator had behaved in a politically incorrect manner, though a quick stint down memory lane tells us otherwise. He's far from alone when it comes to saying the wrong thing on air, as the following examples show:

Mike Gibson & Ian Chappel: The 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth games was set to the domestic political back drop of native land rights for Indigenous Australians, and when a troope of Aboriginal dancers entered the arena Gibson exclaimed "I don't know what that chant is, but I hope they aren't about to claim that piece of land out in the middle." As Gibson was off-air at the time, and this was just sport in general, not cricket, this would have escaped the list and public knowledge, if Ian Chappel hadn't thought it humourous enough to include in a collection of anecdotes published entilted "Smile Sport!" in 1983. If this sort of humour is good enough for Chappel to print, and nobody objects, with the pepetuation of racial stereotypes and socially inflammatory repercussions, why are the Word Police so vigourously chasing Jones for the same crime? Is it just because it's in a different media?

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Swinging in confusion

Here’s a much-awaited treatise on that great mystery of cricket – swing

Cricinfo

25-Feb-2013

Here’s a much-awaited treatise on that great mystery of cricket – swing. While Saad Shafqat mentions a few interesting facts there about the past of swing bowling and touches upon the scientific simplicity of it all, he yorks me with the lines:

It is often said that reverse (super) swing is poorly understood, but in fact it is a simple and straightforward technique that you can try in your own backyard. All you need is a tennis ball, a roll of electrical insulation tape, and a set of stumps to aim at. Cover one half of the ball with strips of tape and hold it down the center, with the taped side entirely to one side. For a toe-bruising yorker, keep the taped side towards leg and deliver the ball aiming for second slip. About two-thirds of the way the ball will curve like a banana and crash into the base of middle and leg. The faster you are the better, but you don't have to be very quick to create the effect. To bowl a menacing outswinger, keep the taped side facing off and aim for fine leg. The physics is elementary. The smooth, taped side creates less turbulence than the uncovered, rough side of the tennis ball. Less turbulence means lesser resistance, and the ball moves in that direction.

A scientific confusion is created here. For all the elementary science lessons at your memory’s disposal and without treading into ‘turbulence’ territory you would have thought that the smoother or shiny half of the ball would face lesser air resistance and try to travel FASTER through the air than the other (rough) half and thus force the ball to move away from it, which would be the opposite of Shafqat’s take in the last two lines. The resultant trajectory, when viewed from above should resemble a heated bimetallic strip. I believe most of us laymen generally regard the normal (or conventional) swing to function that way rather than ‘reverse’ (or ‘super’ or whatever) swing.

Is the turbulence effect, that obviously functions inversely as the ‘expected’ effect explained above (let’s call it that), so strong that it overcomes this expected effect and reverses it to a degree that it becomes too negligible to even deserve a mention from Shafqat? And does the cricket ball behave in exactly the same fashion as the tape ball? In case you think of dismissing the above words of Shafqat as a typo there’s further confirmation of what he intends to say:

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A nice celebration for a 1st anniversary

What is the best way to celebrate an anniversary

Cricinfo

25-Feb-2013

What is the best way to celebrate an anniversary? Simple - recreate the original magic.

Test cricket in the year 2006 has so far been generally disappointing. If we delve deeper for reasons we find that most of these Test series were afflicted by at least two of the four principal causes behind nondescript matches: mismatch in strengths of rival sides, loss of key players through injury, pitches that are unconducive to rivetting cricket (bat dominating ball being the bigger problem) and safety first approach from skippers.

Logic suggests that the above list sequences those causes in their descending order of impact. Now let us designate those reasons as A (team mismatch), B (loss of players), C (unconducive pitches) and D (defensive approach) and rate a few series on those shortcomings.

India v Pak @ Pak: C & D; rating - avg. Eng v India @ Ind: B, C & D; rating - disappointing Sri Lanka v. Eng @ Eng: B, rating - good Aus vs. RSA @ RSA: A, rating - avg. Ind vs. WI @ WI: B, C & D; rating - disappointing Pak vs. Eng @ Eng: B, D and E (NIGHTMARISH CATCHING); rating - disappointing

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Nehra and Mongia - A case of incongruous pragmatism?

It seems it has been a long time since I posted on Different Strokes and on cricket, a subject that was the reason I started blogging in the first place

Cricinfo

25-Feb-2013

It seems it has been a long time since I posted on Different Strokes and on cricket, a subject that was the reason I started blogging in the first place. But it was not a conscious decision to stay away from cricket and so when I saw this on Cricinfo yesterday, I had to break my silence.

Dinesh Mongia and Ashish Nehra are two players who brought out contrasting reactions from me as I watched the drama unfold in South Africa during the last World Cup. While in Nehra's case it was all "hip hip hurrah", I dreaded the sight of Mongia walking in. Through the course of India's campaign, he never looked like he deserved his place ahead of Laxman.

This was never more apparent than in the match against England at Durban, where his 38 took all of 62 balls. In a game where India scored just 250, I thought his labored stint did India no good. But that was before Nehra took over and broke England’s back with a World Cup best performance for India.

That was 2003. Three years thence, both men have been cast by the sidelines. In Nehra’s case it has been his perennial fitness issues. He has been in and out of the team. But in Mongia’s case, he has never recovered from the debacle that was WC’03. Playing only a handful of games for India, Mongia has since concentrated on turning out for Punjab and also in summer at Old Trafford and later at Grace Road, with considerable success.

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As the Crowe flies in the wrong direction...

Cricinfo

25-Feb-2013

Mr. Martin Crowe is once again caught spewing generous doses of oral vitriol. In his latest outburst Crowe has come down heavily, among other things, on the candidature of some fledgling sides of international cricket. I am an admirer of Crowe's frankness of expression at most times but on this occasion I failed to agree with his skewed notion.

Crowe browses through Bangladesh's Test graph and announces:

"Bangladesh have played a staggering 44 Tests, for one win, over just six years - they simply aren't going to make it."

It would be understandable if someone disregards the 'easy' feats achieved by other teams against the present Bangladesh and Zimbabwe sides. It sounds harsh but it is also common sense. But Crowe's ignorance of the constant improvement shown by Bangladesh and willingness to dismiss the team as a 'never-going-to-make-it' side on the basis of self-satisfying evidence betrays prejudice unexpected of a former great cricketer.

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Cricket World Cup ‘07: An early set of predictions

Just as Lahar did before the Indo-WI Test series, it is my turn now to put my head on the chopping block

Cricinfo

25-Feb-2013

Just as Lahar did before the Indo-WI Test series, it is my turn now to put my head on the chopping block. I do so by airing a comment on the World Cup 2007 prospects of the leading ODI teams with brief notings (most of those end up with an emphasis on bowling). I realise that the event is way too distant in the future to be discussed with any thoroughness. But what the heck - no one’s going to hang me if I am wrong with these predictions!

There’s always some fun in there for you if you are playing The Predictor – you enjoy the outcome either way. If you end up right with some of them you can always pull up your collar to flaunt that ‘I told U so’ printed in bold on it. For the ones that prove you wrong, it is again fun to revisit the prediction and find the assumed parameters that got altered after you made the prediction. The prediction is only upto semi final qualifications, so that limits my freedom within a reasonable territory.

I am sure to come back and reminisce upon this one just before the 2007 World Cup (surely, and I may even make a fresh set of predictions then to challenge this one!) and re-read it again after the 2007 World Cup is over. Likewise I invite reader friends to leave seeds of their wildest thoughts on the matter here and reap some fun for themselves later on.

Most fun comes from reading a wild-thought post when a number of friends add their thoughts and comments of all kinds, shades and sizes to your thought. The resultant collage is often wonderful to come back to for pure fun.

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The Lankan Leap

I have never been to beautiful Sri Lanka

Cricinfo

25-Feb-2013

I have never been to beautiful Sri Lanka. But I can picture supporters of Sri Lankan cricket team getting greatly excited by the commendable performances of their boys during the very recent past. It all started with a good show in the VB series Down Under and the team has not looked back since.

I take the pleasure of reflecting on some feats that Sri Lankans registered recently during a heady month-and-half long patch. The brave little men seem to be finding their feet on foreign shores, finally.

1) Sri Lanka followed on in the first Test versus England and then topped 500 runs in their second essay to turn certain defeat into a comfortable draw. Upon hindsight, that 2nd essay acted as a flight ticket for Sri Lankan self-belief, a tool that they often leave back in their shores. It changed the dressing room attitude as well as the outcome of the Test and ODI series beyond imagination.

Principal features: The show of spine started right at the top with their talented captain Mahela Jayawardene. He took over as skipper due to non-availability of the injured Marvan Atapattu (who is also a vital batsman for them on overseas fixtures) at the start of the series. Here he crafted a masterly rearguard century to set the ball rolling.

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The 6-6-6 men for Australian batsmen

Cricket funda: Hadlee's comet comes once in 29 years

Cricinfo

25-Feb-2013

Cricket funda: Hadlee's comet comes once in 29 years

The only 2 bowlers to take modern Australian batsmen for breakfast, lunch and dinner over full series, Sir Richard Hadlee and Harbhajan Singh, were born on the same day, 29 years apart.

Corollary: If we extrapolate that occurence then someone born somewhere on the 3rd July of 2009 may grow up to manhandle Aussie batsmen again.

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