Hariprasad’s Weblog

Sripathi has blogged about the analysis of India’s defeat at the T20 World Cup that is bound to follow. I accept his challenge and this post is a response to that call

India’s defeat, in my honest opinion, is mainly due to the following reasons (not in any order though).

• The lack of “skill” by the cheerleaders on the grounds. Their sober dancing was hardly motivating to the Indian cricketers, who are now so used to the energetic gyrations of the IPL beauties. And their sense of dressing is seriously objectionable, if I may add. Such gross overuse of clothing is highly inappropriate for employees of the motivation industry and our players could not recover from the dampened spirit.
• The lack of “star power” in the pavilion. Our cricketers are used to getting pampered and cheered off the field by Bollywood superstars. In England, they had to put up with Kirsten and his team after the matches.
• Our players got very used to the 7.5 mins break after every 10 overs. The continuous stretch of serious cricket for 20 overs was too much for our “young boys” to handle.
• Dhoni’s captaincy was severely affected by the “One Ball Ka Captain” contest introduced by Pepsi. If people can captain India by drinking, and Pepsi at that, what’s the motivation for Dhoni to put in all the effort!
• The prize money for the T20 World Cup needs to be up-ped by at least 100 times. What’s the fun in taking a game seriously, if all it will fetch are a few lakh rupees.
• The commentators need to improve drastically. The very boring, non-technical reporting they are doing during this World Cup is demotivating the Indian players. Yuvraj’s hits are described merely as “a Sixer” when a more appropriate description would have been a “DLFer”. Asking Harbhajan to just perform well and not give a “Citi” moment is unacceptable.
• And can somebody deck the trophy with a few hundred diamonds and emeralds please. Our boys have stopped playing for glass!

No cricket update since a while…and no better time than when the great IPL is on

I was recently watching the match between Kolkata Knight Riders and Chennai Super Kings. One commentator, whom I particularly hate, was on air. He tries to be the Richie Benaud of Indian commentary and, without a doubt, fails miserably. Kolkata were struggling and were around 70-odd for 4 wickets. His co-commentator asked him what he thought of as a possible strategy.

“This is T20 cricket. There is only one way to play the games – irrespective of the score, wickets or situation. You have got to be fearless…un–in–hi–bi–ted”.

Just as he finished the last word, another wicket fell. There were a couple of replays, an ad-break and live coverage was back on after a minute or so. The same commentator immediately after the resumption…

“Caution is the name of the game now. You have got to play the ball on its merit…and wait for the odd loose ball”.

Sigh!

The strange co-incidence that is. After a hectic visit to Nellitheertha and then to Udupi, I had a really good meal at the Udupi temple Bhojane Shale and got back to the comforts of the A/C room in the hotel to watch India’s batting in the first finals of the tri-series. Few balls later, I managed to get Yuvraj out. And then, India’s luck completely changed. I fell too tired and asleep. When I woke up, I saw the great Sachin correcting one more of his so-called career mistakes – scoring a hundred in a final….and then India won.

If you are wondering what my dozing off had to do with all this, read my earlier piece here. Of course, you alone are responsible if you took this whole brain dump seriously

Rewarding cricketers for the recent T20 victory is getting more absurd by the day. Politicians and other “high-society” people seem to be getting desperate to associate themselves with these people and grab some media attention.

• The Kerala government had only one cricketer, Sreesanth, in their quota for awards. So they decided to rope in another “candidate”. The beneficiary – Robin Uthappa from Karnataka. Reason – his mother is from Kozhikode.
• The Tamil Nadu government awarded Dinesh Karthik a sum of Rs 5 lakh. Reason – “The 22-year-old leapt to his left to catch South African skipper Graeme
  Smith before replacing an injured Mahendra Singh Dhoni behind the
  wickets and effecting two stumpings”
• A banker in London, who also co-owns the Le Bhum de Malabaricus, will give away Rs 3 lakh as an award to Sreesanth. Now thats about 3,500 pounds. How generous!!
• The president of the Andhra Pradesh’s Telangana Rashtriya Samiti has announced an award of 1,16,000 each to Dhoni, Irfan Pathan and Gautham Gambhir. Please don’t ask me the link between the Telangana Samiti and Dhoni, Irfan and Gambhir. And must be some patented algorithm that threw up the number 116000.
• Joginder Sharma is getting 21 lakhs. Reason (and this is by the Chief Minister himself) – “Joginder Sharma first got the wicket of Younis Khan and then the
  winning wicket of Misbah-ul-Haq, thus enabling India win the final
  match from Pakistan at Johannesburg in South Africa last evening,”
• Dhoni will be the first ever “Jharkhand Ratna”.
• Himachal Pradesh felt completely left behind. Not to be outdone, they have announced a package for the cricketers – “A week’s free stay to all the members of the team in any of the HP Tourism Development Corporation hotels in the state”

All of us who thought so are fools. We simply have no idea who the real cup winners are. And its a shame we do not acknowledge their hard work and planning. So they decided to let everyone know of their contribution.

http://specials.rediff.com/cricket/2007/sep/26slide1.htm

Check out the heroes in the front row. Our real cup winners And I can’t understand why they even bothered to place Dhoni and his men in the back row.

It Happens Only In India!!!!!!

There have been some atrocious reasons attributed to the success of the Indian cricket team in winning the Twenty20 final. If Chak De India and Shah Rukh Khan were the reasons we won, why not make Shah Rukh the coach (or should we say manager) of the Indian cricket team. He can still go around making two-three movies a year when we are not playing cricket and get truck loads of money for coaching/managing/inspiring the team to win matches.

Since its the season for absurd logic, here’s my own reason for the Indian team’s victory. Its a superstition in my family that every time I watch a cricket match completely, India loses. And me being crazy about cricket means I watch entire matches most of the time. And yes, I agree that its a strange co-incidence that India loses most of the matches when I watch them play. Since I am away from India currently and did not get to watch even a single ball in the entire tournament, India won the Twenty20 cup. Howz that for a reason

Maybe I should create a poll inviting readers to vote on what reason they think contributed to our victory. Something like….

———————————————–
Reason for India’s victory:

a) Shah Rukh Khan
b) Hari not watching cricket
c) Shahid and Kareena splitting (some folks in the team may have smelt an opportunity and egged themselves on to perform and become a hero. See….)
d) The clubs and bars in South Africa have lost their charm. Our folks were forced to hit the bed early and get up on time.
e) BCCI fixed the whole thing to generate interest in the upcoming India-Australia series so it could garner a couple of billion dollars. ( I read the Bangalore match is already sold-out, BTW).

—————————————————

While on cricket, I think we have a really really good chance of winning the India-Australia series. You see, the big three are coming back and they have to prove they are still useful in the team. Don’t get me wrong, I am still one of Sachin’s greatest fans. But I don’t buy all this talk about “I don’t have to prove a point after all these years”. Its a man’s basic instinct to “prove points”. And if proving a point means you get to stay in the team for couple of more years (couple of more billions, 50 additional ads, touring all over the world, 5-10 young careers destroyed), man, who wouldn’t want it?

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Bangladesh are playing Uganda in a cricket match today. You know what that means – that India is very very close to playing a series against Uganda. I am sure one is being planned for immediately after the tour to Australia later this year. What better way for the team to redeem itself after the thrashing it will receive in Australia than to play 3 test matches and, say, 7 ODIs against Uganda and achieve “glorious success” Remember our tour to Bangladesh immediately after the world cup this year. Talk about planning!

I am now completely convinced that racial discrimination is rampant in cricket and its practice is led by ICC. If this were not true, it is really hard to explain some of the recent happenings in cricket.

- Gayle and Michael Clarke had a bad confrontation in the Aus-WI match in the Champions Trophy recently. While Gayle was penalized heavily, Clarke, who was the initiator of the duel (according to Cricinfo reports) was let off without any punishment.
- ICC’s outburst against BCCI going soft on Azhar. At the same time, people like Hansie Cronje and Shane Warne (and Mark Waugh) are still glorified as great cricketers when they have openly admitted to having received money.
- Statements like “Aussies are aggressive by nature. So this has to be taken into account while considering their outbursts”.
- Ricky Ponting getting away so many times with his tiffs with umpires over the past two years.

It is sick to see such discrimination being practised so openly. Its time countries like India, SL and Pak got together and oppose such discrimination. After all, more than 70% of ICC’s revenues are due to these nations.

Time to focus my attention back on cricket now

Cannot really understand some things that are currently happening in the cricket world.

• England management really need a lesson or two on team selection. They have a “long term” captain who is not even sure about his cricketing future (Vaughan), a “medium term” captain who is not sure when he will be back to international cricket (Andrew Flintoff) and a “stop gap” captain who gets to captain for months together (Strauss). England have started their old habit of drawing test matches again. They are starting to be that boring team once again. I think they are going all the way down unless they choose a proper team starting with the captain (And I always thought that Marcus Trescothik would be their automatic choice as captain if Vaughan wasn’t around – he is not even their third choice now!)
• BCCI, for some strange reason, doesn’t want to embrace 20-20 cricket. Its proving to be popular world over. The only reason I can think of is that it takes the same effort to arrange a 20-20 match as a regular one-day match but the TV time is significantly lesser. Which means that the revenue from a 20-20 match is much lesser than an ODI. BCCI probably wants to see an equal number of ODI matches played instead of 20-20 stuff. Who cares if it appeals to the audience and if it brings in more people to the ground. At the end of the day, what matters is how much moolah the BCCI makes!