The fading flickering candle

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Cricket is a gift. A blessing. Bestowed on a few, gratefully cherished by millions. A bat is a strange sporting implement. A rather odd construct if you look closely at it. Shaped in this peculiar rectangular formation that slithers cylindrically just as the straight lines end. In the hands of the gifted though, this strangely designed piece of wood acquires the luminous splendour of a magic wand. Sourav Ganguly was among the gifted. The blessed. I have a friend who nearly played first-class cricket. His experiences in the game are real, untouched by the seduction of success. Watching Ganguly these days, he tellingly observed: "Sometimes cricket doesn't wait for you to leave it, it leaves you". An unwilling mind may refuse to concede, but the game seeps out. Cricket leaves you stranded. Convinced in the mind of producing what you once so easily could, but incapable of executing....

Relish the sport beyond the format

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When masters go to work, the stage is of little relevance. They relish the opportunity of a contest. Of pitting skill against skill. Of matching talent against talent. Emerging victorious or being defeated is a by-product of effort. In team sport, the individual is often helpless despite exerting every sinew to achieve the desired result. Two performances in the IPL so far have stood out for the sheer ferocity of their purpose. Muttiah Muralitharan turning back to clock for the Bangalore Royal Challengers against the Delhi Daredevils and Dale Steyn spewing fire for the Deccan Chargers against the Mumbai Indians. Murali contributed to victory. Steyn was unable to avoid defeat. Yet both produced a cricketing spectacle. For all cricket fans, except of-course those who regard T20 as an abomination. The anti-T20 argument goes somewhere along these lines. A spell of bowling in a T20....

The Eerily Real Rahul Dravid

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For the Dravid family it was just another day. March 9. Friday afternoon. Young Samit was fussing over his food. Vijeeta was coaxing him to eat. Senior Dravid was in a corner sampling a soggy snack. Brother Vijay was in a Red T-shirt tucked into his denims, the logistics man ensuring transport for home was organized. Mother Pushpa wasn't even around; it had been too late apparently for her to change plans to attend a seminar in Goa! Childhood friend Javagal was teasing Samit for preferring pasta over daal-roti. Another childhood friend Anil was just around, they were all in his office after-all! I was the intruder in the corner and wondered if it was just me who was missing something? Hadn't it been just minutes since the second highest run getter in Test history- say that slowly- the second highest run getter in Test HISTORY- had finished his....

So they are a bunch of jokers?

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There are a few phrases that jump gleefully into our cricket banter every now and then. Raj Singh Dungarpur's "Miyan, captain banoge" to the laconic Mohammad Azharuddin is the stuff of legend. Tendulkar's "When people throw stones at you, you turn them into milestones" is equally memorable. But the gold medal has been the sole preserve of Mohinder Amarnath's "bunch of jokers" tirade aimed at the national selectors on learning of his axe. Those three devastating words have had an indelible impact on our cricket discourse! Ironically, the same Amarnath is a selector these days. He sits on a five-man panel that reminds Indian cricket followers with monotonous regularity that while the 'bunch' may have changed, the 'jokers' are still very much around. 'Jimmy' as they endearingly call him in Indian cricket circles, is the latest inductee into an empowered group of men who have done precious little to....

Let him go...it will be okay

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"The team will not seem the same without him. His contribution goes far beyond his batting statistics. The example he sets in every respect and his extraordinarily positive influence in the dressing-room is acknowledged by all. He is held in the highest possible regard by his team-mates and there is no higher accolade than this." In a world that does not exist, those would be Krish Srikkanth's words. A generous tribute after he and fellow selectors announce an Indian one-day squad that does not feature Sachin Tendulkar. But that world does not exist. Those words though aren't imaginary. They were indeed spoken. In a world that does exist. A 68 year old by the name John Inverarity delivered them with brutal politeness. The chief of Australia's selection panel was saying thank you and good bye to Ricky Ponting after slamming the door shut on his one-day career.....

The squabbling conjoined twins

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I have never met Mr. N Srinivasan. In fact, I have never even had a conversation with him. But I do enjoy hearing him talk at press conferences or in those rare television interviews he agrees to do. He appears unflappable, speaks in perfectly constructed sentences with a voice that exudes calm, intelligence, logic and authority. I am reliably told he has a raging temper but his public persona is admirable. He is the sort of erudite man the BCCI presidency sits well on. Yet, he finds himself boxed in a corner these days - a corner of his own making. It is ironic that the 'conflict of interest' Mr. Srinivasan has been reminded of over these last few years is now chewing away at his authority as BCCI president. Consider recent events. As his board's most valuable commercial partner was throwing a tantrum and walking out in a....

The convenient IPL bogey

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Let me get this straight. Every time a ball crashed into Rahul Dravid's stumps this Australian summer, it was because stints with the Royal Challengers Bangalore and Rajasthan Royals had corrupted an otherwise flawless technique. And when those edges flew from VVS Laxman's bat into the slips, it was safe to assume that his static feet were a curse from the Deccan Chargers and the Kochi Tuskers. Gautam Gambhir has become so accustomed to dabbing the ball for a single to third man in his Kolkata Knight Riders uniform that he can't resist the temptation against a red ball with a slip cordon waiting. And surely it has been ingrained in Virender Sehwag's head that replicating his dashing cameos for Delhi Daredevils while taking strike against a rampaging attack is the only method to open a Test innings. Yes, even these wretched Mumbai Indians have sneaked into fortress....

In Adelaide, shock it up and shake it up

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I know a man who was once ravaged by a vicious depression. His doctors tried it all. Tweaked the dosage of his medication. Attempted various combinations of mood stabilizers and anti-depressants. Sent him off for therapy. Offered counseling. But to no avail. Left with no alternative, they advised a radical step: Electroconvulsive therapy. In common parlance we know this as ECTs. To the uninitiated, that is just a fancy medical term for 'shock treatment'. The idea is to pass electric currents through the brain, deliberately triggering a brief seizure. The intention is to cause changes in brain chemistry that can immediately reverse symptoms of the illness. It often works when other treatments are unsuccessful. In this man's case it didn't really, but that is beside the point. For the Indian cricket team, and in particular it's much feted batting line-up, Adelaide is the ideal setting for....

Why the 100th is a worthy obsession

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Television news is the whipping boy of choice these days. It gets accused of every possible digression. Of playing judge, jury and executioner. Of stoking unrest. Of reducing public discourse to a farce. Of ignoring issues of substance for frills and celebrity. Of reducing news to theater. Some of this of-course is true and this is meant to be no defense of the chaotic world this writer is very much part of! For the past few months venom has been spewed on our ilk for the obsessive wait for Sachin Tendulkar's 100th international century. Every time the great man has arrived at the crease and failed to reach the landmark, fingers have been pointed in the direction of breathless news anchors. The burden it seems rests heavier on Tendulkar because news channels simply can't stop talking about it. Every time the milestone nears, it is almost as if his....

Losing with the winners

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Chew on these numbers for a minute. Just re-read them. Rub those eyes and do your own searches for confirmation if you are still in disbelief. When the last wicket fell on Day Four of the Melbourne Test, here's how they stacked up. India's top seven batsmen between them had played 685 Test matches and scored 52,328 runs. So we are clear, that is fifty two thousand, three hundred and twenty eight runs. They had scored 140 centuries and 256 half-centuries. Go on, munch on those figures again. One can conclude with a reasonable amount of certainty that a batting line-up of such monster feats hasn't featured in a Test XI before. Now the stark contrast. Australia's four-man bowling attack had played a grand total of 57 Test matches, claiming 202 wickets between and sharing eight five-wicket hauls among them. Yet India lost. Australia won. How? At its....