Archived Cricket Articles

articles

December 2008
- The Curse of the Jelly Bean
  - Nothing can save you from it
- And it's over....
  - But it is still the most exciting time in years for Australian cricket
- Test Cricket at the Crossroads
  - Two great test matches in India and Australia but what of the future?
- On their way up
  - India aren't number 2, but are going up there
- Where are the crowds?
  - A thought attempting to explain why the stands in India are half-empty
- Holding out for a hero
  - England Vs Australia, 1981: Botham's Ashes
- Dan's the Man
  - Daniel Vettori is one half of New Zealand cricket, and the second half is missing
- Australia looking to self-destruct
  - Why else would they hire Greg Chappell in their support staff?
- Hitting the High Road
  - A great test that marks good things to come for Indian cricket
- Top Domestic T20 Bowlers
  - The Best bowlers from the best domestic T20 teams
- Top 20 Batsmen Domestic T20 batsmen
  - The best batsmen from the best domestic T20 teams in the world
- Many cracks, but no turn
  - Chronicling Australia's year in search of a worthy spinner
November 2008
- 'Open Source' Cricket
  - Building cricket's brand by giving away broadcast rights
- Arjuna vs the Indian Cricket Mafia
  - A pointless gangwar that is giving Sri Lankan cricket problems
- Krejza's late impact
  - Jason Krejza is no superstar. Obviously. But he already looks more suited to India than Lee or Clark. When Krejza was picked to tour I wasn’t that unhappy.
- A New Spelling for Hubris: E.N.G.L.A.N.D
October 2008
- Let's not throw it away yet
- Englishmen Abroad
- Dan's the Man
  - The most rated, under-rated player in the world... is undoubtedly, Daniel Vettori.
- Why only Warne?
  - Why stop at Warne. Let's get more guys out of retirement
- Role Reversal
  - India’s biggest ever test victory, margin-wise, but how significant is it? After all, this is kind of what we’d grown used to from India on tour in the 1990s - bad shot selection from batsmen, utterly ineffective bowling with indifferent fielding and generally low intensity levels from the team overall. But to see Australia play like that – they’ve never looked so out of it in the last 15 years. Is a handing-of-the-baton palpable?
- Look left, look right, do nothing
  - Sri Lankan cricket is at crossroads.We could go left, keep picking players past their due date and hope that they deliver once every 2 years or so. Heap praises on them and talk about how we can't go forward as a team without them.
- Tunnel Vision
  - One of the big selling points of a 20/20 match is that it doesn't last very long. This means that can all be done and dusted in under three hours - games can start early evening after work/school, and kids with limited attention span can enjoy the experience. The truncated version of the game also suits the TV scheduling. Oddly the organisers of next summer's 20/20 World Cup seem to have overlooked this - or deliberately disregarded it
- Increasing the Charge
  - The Big Four finally in the same match – every one of them. Pity it was not all in the same innings, otherwise it could have been a different story. And pity none of the contributions were as eye-catching as Zaheer Khan’s and Harbhajan Singh’s fifties in the first innings, but it is interesting that the side that had 156 and 123 as its highest individual scores could not beat a side that had 57 and 54 as its highest scores (all in the first innings).
- NZ the attention seekers
  - NZ will do a lot to come into the international spotlight
- An End-of-an-Era Series
  - If India had beaten Sri Lanka in the last test series, there would still be some credence to the claim that the forthcoming India-Australia 4-test series is between the top two teams in the Test Cricket world (though South Africa remains a team not too far away). But beating Australia will not place India at the top of the table.
September 2008
- Brown wrists
  - The other day I watched the Pro40 playoff between men in green pyjamas and Jason Gillespie.In this game, Vikram Solanki and Moeen Ali had a bit of a partnership. The commentators took this as their cue to say the word wristy in every sentence.
- Ranatunga has balls
- Fast Forward to Antigua, November 2008
  - England bowler Stuart Broad runs in to bowl the final ball of the match to Stanford batsman Chris Gayle. England made 170 for 6 off of their twenty overs, and West Indies are 169 for 5. Two runs are therefore required to win in the unprecedented, multi-million dollar winner take all extravaganza.
- Fast forward : Antigua, November 2008.
- Reckoner
  - (Shivnarine Chanderpaul was named the ICC Cricketer of the Year 2008 at the ICC Awards function in Dubai on the 10th of September, 2008)
    
    With a physical frame that has only slightly developed from his first international season fourteen years ago. Shivnarine Chanderapaul stands as the last genuine member of our golden era, entering at the last throes as Richardson, Walsh and Ambrose were firing their final rounds.
- Antigua – November 2008.
- Greg Chappell gets yet another high-profile Aussie coaching job
  - Fresh from the NSWales cricket board thinking Darrell Hair should be teaching youngsters how to be fair, Greg Chappell is taking over the Australian Centre of Excellence. Also known as the Cricket Academy.
- One more terrible blow for Symonds
August 2008
- Things you didn't know about India v Lanka
  - Given the somewhat tumultuous ups and downs in the Test series, and the innumerable variables that have been introduced since, you wouldn’t want to stake anything too expensive on either of the teams.
    
    Now ‘stats’ is a slightly scary word and may put unsettling images of thousands of complex numbers floating around. But it is quite simple here, really. Hell, if you are smart enough to understand cricket, you should get this, no problem. A little study of some recent stats involving both teams, using some interesting tools such as Squadstats, puts forward some curious revelations regarding which way the ODI series could go.
- Stop picking on the ICL players
- Freddie Vs Jacques
- Minority Report
- Minority Report
- Don't uncork the champagne, please
  - Let’s say someone borrows your car and drives it into a ditch. He (or let’s say she, in keeping with the popular lore of women drivers) then buys you a new one as a replacement. At the end of it, will it go down as the two of you being even, or will it go down as you owing him/her (the him being to stave away a ‘chauvinist’ tag) one?
July 2008
June 2008
- Top ICL players
  - The best players from the ICL
- What to do with India?
  - Obviously, these people have become a right pain in the neck. They’ve become the Russia of modern cricket. Pushing everyone around, and no one is really sure why. It’s as if they’ve got lots of nuclear bombs, or something.
- Top T20 International Bowlers
  - The best bowlers in T20 Internationals (Archived)
- Top T20 International Batsmen
- Lack of common sense stops play
- Work in Progress
- The diplomatic straight bat...
  - This writer engages in a form of journalism called “We told ya so”.
    
    Recently I said that Michael Hussey, would play for Chennai in the champions league thingy, because he likes to please people.
    
    He can’t play for them as Australia are preparing for their tour of India, and daddy Sutherland said no.
- Minutes from a meeting
  - Some questions (Answers below) -
    
    Do you bring back Flintoff, if he's fit, and let him bat at eight with Ambrose at seven?
    
    How many overs a day can you expect Freddie to be able to bowl?
- The overworked Brett Lee
  - The buzz in the Australian camp is Brett Lee is overworked.
    
    That makes sense as Australia has only been taking two bowlers into each test.
    
    But this can be fixed quite quickly.
- The Age Factor
  - A common topic of discussion when talking of T20 is the relevance of the age of the players. There is probably no clear answer (yet) about whether or not age makes any difference. The following stats may or may not provide that answer, but what it will do is provide some insights.
- The IPL XI
  - It is a reasonably routine and cliched idea but it is a great deal of fun so let us just do it. The difference this time, of course, is that the list is being picked not arbitarily but based purely on the ranking points of the players, so it probably provides some kind of tangible, fact based response.
- The IPL's Best
  - The best from the IPL's first season
May 2008
- Trying to Tie a Kangaroo Down
  - (Paraphrased) "Against Borg, Connors is like an eager child who when given a row of blocks and asked to lay out a set design, eagerly pursues the assemblage only to get it wrong every time"
    
    The line is taken from an SI article commenting on a 1980 Wimbledon clash between those two great rivals of yesteryear.
- 'We CAN be heroes'
- The dullest cult figure in the history of English sport
  - I had high hopes for Monty Panesar.The first reports were he could really bowl.That he could really not bat.And that he fielded like a particularly uncoordinated cerebral palsy afflicted platypus.
- Get a move on
  - (This post is in reference to the ind.cricinfo.com/engvnz/engine/current/match/296900.html ongoing Test match between England and New Zealand in England, where England scored 319 runs at 2.86 r.p.o in their first innings. Today is the fifth day of the first test.) England deserve to end up behind New Zealand. They looked at the fact there were 2 days left, the fact they had 10 wickets in hand, and they thought, lets play the draw. It’s piss poor.
- Let The Buyer Beware
- Revolution: Count Me In/ Out
  - I'm sitting at home with my laptop literally on my lap while I sprawl on my rec room couch watching tonight's latest 20/20 match on the telly. What is of note is that this ain't an IPL game (that's on later).The West Indies Players Association (WIPA) is holding an inaugural tournament in Trinidad comprising several local clubs, several smaller islands (Dominica is up tonight v. 'Comets' which features Darren Ganga) and a masters team featuring many former Test players (e.g.Ambrose, Crofty)
- The Royal Challengers' king size problems
  - Bangalore were the obvious team to fall apart in the IPL.They spent too much on players who are not T20 players, and then played their non performing players ahead of the only two T20 players they have.
April 2008
- Indian Petulance License
  - They say T20 lowers the bar in cricket, and allows brawn to triumph over brain. It is a highly suspect observation, because that is damning a format of a sport which has not really had enough time to be tested yet. But there is no doubt that the IPL event, with its focus on “entertainment” and money, has lowered IQ levels to increase eyeballs and media hype.
- A pretty pass
  - How did it come to this? A game that captivated, entertained and reveled in the majesty of its own rich history now seems just a faltering footstep away from total collapse, a sport stifled under the weight of its own bulging pockets.
    
    Forgive the hyperbole but, in the light of the ICC’s decision to suspend their CEO Malcolm Speed, I feel a little colorful language is in order.
- Suggested improvements for the IPL
- The fowl means Watson adopted to do well in the IPL
- Team performances so far
- Natural Talent Magnified
  - The real value of the T20 format is this – players can parade their natural talent more than ever before.
    
    A batsman can flaunt the results of hand-eye coordination without using his mind too much. A bowler can go flat out in his four overs and try all sorts of things without fear of too much censure.
- Delhi prices crash
- It's time
- Yes We Khan
  - Omar Khan assumed the title of Manager of the Trinidad and Tobago cricket team five years ago. In the time to date, TT, long considered a middling player throughout the decades with three regional titles to show, has become a Caribbean giant winning virtually every format title over the last three consecutive seasons. Of note, all primarily without the efforts of a Brian Charles Lara.
- Freddie and the Dreamers
  - You can almost feel the ache that surrounds English cricket at the moment, the sense that everybody is just biding their time and getting the job done until a certain A. Flintoff rides back into to town to make everything ok again.
- Undervalued genius
  - Why Sehwag's so hugely under-rated
February 2008
- Batsmen need culling
- Watch your wallet
  - The aura that the IPL has already gathered without a ball being bowled goes to generate two contrasting and staggering feelings. Firstly, it leads you to marvel at the extent of change that an alteration in format can do to the overall image of the sport and secondly, it leads you to contemplate the impact it will have on those who are involved in the sport in a non-playing role. Let’s refrain from going too deep into the first thought since it could lead to discussions running into hours, and it has been done.
    
    It is the second line of thinking that promises unexplored territories and new ideas, so for its sheer novelty and uncertainty, let’s wade in there a bit.
January 2008
- Mud flying all around
- What is made of terracotta, about six inches tall and may originally have been a perfume jar?

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Manjrekar gets bounced!

The BCCI removes Sanjay Manjrekar from the commentators' panel.

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