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Tag: BETWEEN WICKETS

Sports

A mature Kuldeep Yadav has been the quiet success of the India-England Test series

Kuldeep Yadav celebrates a wicket during the third Test match between India and England at Rajkot | Photo Credit: VIJAY SONEJI He might look like an accountant accidentally woken up by an alarm beeping too early, hair dishevelled and on the point of complaining. But the smile is never far from Kuldeep Yadav’s eyes, suggesting he enjoys a laugh against himself. “I have become mature,” he told the media at the end of the series against England where he took 19 wickets and brought left-arm wrist spin to the forefront of cricket conversations.The craft appeals to the romantics. The wrist spinner is capable of looking like a genius one day and a novice the next, adding to the glorious uncertainties. Since making his debut seven years ago, Kuldeep has played just 12 Tests while missing 56 th...
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Ind vs Eng Tests | Dreams come true when you hold on to them against the odds

File picture of India’s Dhruv Jurel and Akash Deep during net practice. The pair were instrumental in India’s win over England in the 4th Test at Ranchi | Photo Credit: Vijay Soneji One is a war veteran’s son who threatened to run away from home if his father didn’t buy him a kit and allow him to play cricket; another, in effect, did run away and started out in another city. A third sold pani puri off a cart, a fourth spoke delicately about how “things weren’t financially strong at home.” They are, respectively, Dhruv Jurel, Akash Deep, Yashasvi Jaiswal, and Sarfaraz Khan who played key roles in India’s victory against England.There’s more. Aged five, Jurel had an accident that required plastic surgery. A decade later, his mother had to sell off her gold ornament to get him a kit bag. ...
Sports

The way things fit together is the essence of good selection

As India prepare for a Test match with possibly their least experienced middle-order ever, it might be worth looking at what constitutes good team selection.Selectors are like wicketkeepers, remembered only when they make mistakes. Success or failure of their job is judged on whether the team wins or loses. In the former case, selections seem inevitable; in the latter, ill-advised.As in life, however, you can do the right thing and get the wrong result (and vice versa). Theoretically, AI can select a team entirely by algorithm, but the process will lack important human qualities: imagination, creativity and unpredictability. Two of the most intelligent writers on the game have given us two fine notions of a cricket team, stressing its essential variety.The great England captain Mike Bre...
Sports

Ind vs Eng Tests | The way things fit together is the essence of good selection

File picture of Indian players standing for the national anthem ahead of the 1st Test against England in Hyderabad | Photo Credit: ANI As India prepare for a Test match with possibly their least experienced middle-order ever, it might be worth looking at what constitutes good team selection.Selectors are like wicketkeepers, remembered only when they make mistakes. Success or failure of their job is judged on whether the team wins or loses. In the former case, selections seem inevitable; in the latter, ill-advised.As in life, however, you can do the right thing and get the wrong result (and vice versa). Theoretically, AI can select a team entirely by algorithm, but the process will lack important human qualities: imagination, creativity and unpredictability. Two of the most intelligent ...
Sports

IND vs ENG Tests | This could finish as the finest series ever played in India

India’s Kuldeep Yadav celebrates the wicket of England’s Zak Crawley during the fourth day of the second Test cricket match between India and England at ACA-VDCA Stadium In Visakhapatnam on February 5, 2024. | Photo Credit: K.R Deepak This England series is promising to be the most exciting played in India. The teams know how Bazball can succeed as well as how it fails. That knowledge will be important over the next three Tests as each team begins to move closer to the style the other plays in. England might learn that sometimes defence is the better part of valour while India could abandon some of its overcautious approach. It will be fun to watch the process.England had said they would chase 600 even. But it is usually prudent to have an anchor around whom the others can play. Bazbal...
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Ind vs Eng Tests | India’s home record is formidable; Bazball is England’s best chance

The Indian team at a net session at Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium ahead of the first Test match against England on January 23, 2024 in Hyderabad | Photo Credit: Getty Images Ninety years ago, when England first toured India for a Test series, E.H.D. Sewell, player-turned-reporter, wrote in an Indian newspaper: “If compelled to bet, my rupee would be on India. But what a cheerful loser I should be!” Writers tend to hedge their bets. Had Sewell been writing today, he might have said much the same thing, but perhaps with greater conviction in the first half of that prediction. In recent years India haven’t done too well when they have gone into a series or a tournament as the favourites. Most recently, there was the World Cup; earlier, following a dramatic victory in Australia, they ...
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Ranji Trophy | A golden jubilee, and time to name the stands after the greats

Prasanna and his Karnataka teammates get a rousing welcome on their arrival in Madras from Jaipur after beating Rajasthan in the Ranji Trophy final in 1974. That was Karnataka’s greatest year when holder Bombay was toppled at Bangalore in the semi-final. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives Fifty years ago this year, Karnataka won the Ranji Trophy for the first time and changed the face of Indian cricket, leading to the game spreading faster and wider. They loosened Mumbai’s grip on the trophy and paved the way for Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Railways, U.P., Rajasthan, Gujarat, all of whom won their inaugural titles in the years following. Mumbai had been champions for 15 consecutive years when Karnataka beat them (on first innings lead) in a semifinal at the Chinnaswamy Stadium. They then b...
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Cape Town Test | Sport, like art, need not make sense; it can be enjoyed still

India attempt to flatten out a problem area on the pitch during the second day of the second Test match between South Africa and India in Cape Town, South Africa, on January 4, 2024. Suresh Menon writes that the idea of a dodgy pitch spreads quickly within a team – it becomes a self-fulfilling reality. | Photo Credit: AP There was a screen between me and the action in Cape Town. The television screen. Sometimes this can be an advantage, the presentation of the game from different angles. Often it is a disadvantage (even when the commentary is turned off) because, in effect, you are watching the game through someone else’s eyes.The 642-ball Test there must rate as one of the strangest played. It has inspired many theories and many might-have-beens from experts, players and viewers. It w...
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SA Test team controversy | This might be an inflexion point in the game, but we need to care

Only two players from the South African team that beat India in the first Test are in the squad to play in New Zealand. Image for representation | Photo Credit: Getty Images It has been happening for a while but now it is out in the open, shorn of the veneer of normalcy that administrators like to put on things.South Africa favouring their domestic T20 tournament over a Test series in New Zealand is only the latest and least ambiguous step in a journey that cricket has been making in recent years. This might be an inflexion point in the game.Only two players from the team that beat India in the first Test (Keegan Petersen and David Bedingham) are in the squad. South Africa are led by Neil Brand, who will be making his Test debut. Six others are uncapped too.Former Australian captain St...
Sports

No one goes to a sporting contest just to watch the rain

Cricket needs to be speeded up, and by this I don’t mean there should be only 20-over matches. Even within that limit, though, players have shown an annoying habit of slowing down the game either for tactical or psychological reasons. Or because they can get away with it.Time-wasting by players is only one aspect of the manner in which spectators are deprived of a full day’s game. There is too the bigger issue of the quest for perfect conditions involving natural phenomena like light and rain. There is so much cricket now that players cannot be blamed for taking advantage of unscheduled off days or extra rest.Sunil Gavaskar’s ire at the India-South Africa T20 being washed out in Durban is understandable. His argument that international grounds can afford to cover the entire area when it...
Sports

Between hope and hubris: Innocence, glumness, despair, gratitude

The World Cup has gone from being an event in the future with its administrative confusions, to one in the past, full of might-have-beens. In between it showed the best the 50-over game has to offer, suggesting the format isn’t ready to roll over and die yet. Had India won, we could have said this with greater confidence, for what India thinks today others do tomorrow. The script was hammered out by everyone from the ruling party and the cricket board to the broadcasters and fans, some of whom were willing to pay up to five lakh for tickets, air fare and hotel rooms. There is an innocence in believing that the best team always wins and that half a million is small price to pay for the ‘I-was-there’ bragging rights. But this is sport. Unexpectedness and upsets are what it thrives on. We ...
Sports

In sport, you often learn more from a defeat than from a victory 

England’s Jos Buttler walks off the field as Indian players celebrate his wicket during the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 match between India and England in Lucknow on October 29, 2023 | Photo Credit: PTI Sometimes an early defeat in a World Cup can be a blessing. It rids the team of complacency, it focuses attention on weaknesses that might have been covered up by victory, it re-motivates the players, it shines a light on team selection since non-performers have no place to hide. Australia, who began with two defeats at this World Cup now look like one of the favourites. It can go the other way too. Champions England are at the bottom of the table two-thirds of the way down the league. This puts their qualification for the 2025 Champions Trophy in jeopardy. Only the first seven tea...
Sports

Selfish vs altruistic in sport: No ‘I’ in team, but there’s a ‘me’

After he got to his 100th international century, Sachin Tendulkar said that it would be selfish of anyone to retire at the top. “When you are at the top,” he said, “you should serve the nation.” Yet, selfishness is an important, even necessary element in the make-up of elite sportsmen. Even a team sport like cricket is a face-off between two individuals: the batter and the bowler. And while the elements of selfishness and self-absorption are seen as necessary in individual sports like golf and tennis, it does not take a great leap of the imagination to see these as universal traits. You only have to look at the run outs in the game — the better batter is always protected, the lesser player making the sacrifice even if it wasn’t his fault. The senior batter knows he is being selfish, but...
Sports

Kohli and Root — two contemporary greats and their different approaches

File picture of Joe Root and Virat Kohli ahead of an India-England Test match. Watching the two contemporary greats in white-ball cricket has been fascinating, writes Suresh Menon | Photo Credit: Getty Images “I have to stay true to my technique,” said Virat Kohli after the first of two successive centuries in the IPL, reminding everyone, “We’ve got Test cricket after the IPL.” He was saying, in effect, that there are two ways of making runs. One is the way he normally plays, and the other is to play like someone else. When a traditionalist makes a century in a T20 game playing his normal game, the cricket gods rejoice.The IPL can be cruel. Joe Root, according to some the greatest England batsman of all time, spent much of this year’s tournament sitting in the dugout. When he was final...
Sports

India deserve the money, but the ICC needs to work out a better system 

FILE PHOTO: The International Cricket Council (ICC) logo at the ICC headquarters in Dubai, October 31, 2010./File Photo | Photo Credit: NIKHIL MONTEIRO In the days when there was no money in cricket, England, part of a colonial power, and Australia, a largely white colony, ruled the game. As the two original members of the ICC (International Cricket Council now), they had the power of veto. It was a skewed system. Still, England saw it as a moral responsibility to take the game to the colonies. Perhaps they needed teams they thought they could beat; perhaps it was a way of inculcating certain values in the locals. Perhaps was to emphasise Englishness through sport. Whatever it was, and despite the obvious condescension involved, the game spread. India, the West Indies, New Zealand were...
Sports

Generally, a bad ball is just a bad ball; no one plays to lose 

It is now a fact of life that when a player has a bad day on the field at the IPL, he will be trolled by his team’s fans, by neutrals, and anybody with a social media account. The latest to receive the full blast of public opprobrium is Rajasthan Royals’ Sandeep Sharma who bowled a no-ball and conceded a last-ball six to allow Sunrisers Hyderabad to squeak through. No one plays to lose (we won’t get into the seamier side of sport here, although some of the trolls raised it), so the suggestion made in frustration by many who assume that professional sportsmen are not interested in winning is pure hogwash. But this is a line of criticism often heard from disappointed fans.Occam’s razorSome of the logic is convoluted, the conspiracy theories flow easily. In sport, however, Occam’s razor ap...
Sports

In defence of defence – played right, it can be a sexy shot too

One of the finest shots I saw on a cricket field came off the bat of Sunil Gavaskar. The bowler was Imran Khan who was fast and had been troubling Indian batsmen series after series. The venue was Chennai where that India-Pakistan Test was played. Imran’s delivery rose sharply, and so too in a sense did the batsman who moved beautifully into line back and across, stood tiptoe, met the ball in the top half of the bat and dropped it at his feet. I can’t remember if Imran applauded, but from outside the boundary, a handful of spectators did. I was in the media box where we didn’t do such things, but in my mind I saluted Gavaskar. That backfoot defence was comparable to anything the attacking player of the day, Viv Richards had hit. Both defence and attack can be sexy, and speak of the batt...
Sports

In defence of defence — played right, it can be a sexy shot too

Representational image of batsman Virat Singh playing a forward defence during a Duleep Trophy | Photo Credit: S.S. Kumar One of the finest shots I saw on a cricket field came off the bat of Sunil Gavaskar. The bowler was Imran Khan who was fast and had been troubling Indian batsmen series after series. The venue was Chennai where that India-Pakistan Test was played. Imran’s delivery rose sharply, and so too in a sense did the batsman who moved beautifully into line back and across, stood tiptoe, met the ball in the top half of the bat and dropped it at his feet. I can’t remember if Imran applauded, but from outside the boundary, a handful of spectators did. I was in the media box where we didn’t do such things, but in my mind I saluted Gavaskar. That backfoot defence was comparable to...
Sports

Choosing all-time teams: why Bradman may always not make it

Does cricket above all sports lend itself most often to such mental exercises as “the greatest Indian team of all time” or, to go one step higher, “the greatest-ever team of all time?” Even Don Bradman — who is in everybody’s all-time team — couldn’t resist the temptation. In The Art of Cricket he talked about ideal elevens and such things as teams with players’ names beginning with the letter ‘H’ (Hobbs, Hutton, Hammond etc) and other combinations. That book was published in 1958. In 2001, Bradman’s Best, a book about his all-time team caused as much interest as heartburn. Bradman saw his first Test aged 12; it was an Ashes contest (Australia v England) at Sydney in 1920-21. Bradman thus had an intimate knowledge of 20th century cricket (he died in Feb 2001 aged 92), apart from being d...
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World Test Championship final — no room for experimentation 

There is little room for experimentation in a one-off WTC final, with a combination of talent, experience and form being the only criterion to go by. | Photo Credit: AP After the _ (fill in the appropriate word depending on your political and sporting proclivities: weird, bizarre, inspiring, stunning, embarrassing, hubristic, painful, moving, rousing, crazy…) start to the Ahmedabad Test, it was surprising that Virat Kohli won the player-of-the-match award. The real impact players were paraded around in what looked like an oversized shoe to chants that weren’t ‘Kohli, Kohli’ as they usually are in an Indian stadium. It is unlikely that the tacky tableau will be repeated when India take on Australia next, in the final of the World Test Championship at the Oval in London. But that will no...