Archive for the ‘India vs England 08’ Category
Why no usage of flood lits for Mohali Test ?
To avoid all this why didn’t the BCCI and ECB opt for usage of flood lights when BCCI knows that in winter the mornings in North India are foggy and cold. Plus the sun sets early.
10.20am Latest news, the umpires will look again in 10-15 minutes time. The light isn’t good enough yet, but it’s slowly getting better. The players are out in the middle preparing. So it’s still a waiting game.
10.15am Still waiting for a word on the start time, it doesn’t look like we’ll underway at 10.30 like yesterday. I will try and bring you news in a moment.
10.05am The fog continues to lift, albeit slowly, and we still don’t have a start time. A few players out on the outfield warming up, but with plenty of layers on as it’s quite chilly.
9.50am “I don’t understand why England has given up and will now be playing for a draw??,” says Saurabh. “Understandably their position is not the best, but wouldn’t fighting and playing to win the game will be a way to go?” Indeed, they were odd comments from Pietersen but it’s refreshing, in a way, to here an international speak the truth. He didn’t sound best pleased after his lbw decision, either.
Rahul Dravid makes it….A Hundred!!
Go march on MAN. Get back the runs, get back the coveted title. Get back the groove. Get back the Elite. Get back the spree of hundreds and treat us with your silken drives….
Might not be pretty, may be its scratchy or lucky, the runs matter, the 2 or 3 figures matter, no one would remember if you got 40 and if it was very fluent or if you got a 140 and it was a scratchy. All matters is the contribution you make to the team’s cause and the conditions you bat in. Many times you might not score runs as you might like, but you might neutralise the bowler on fire or the pitch’s tricks….
Dont know if Dravid would carry on after Mohali and would retire on a high. Dont know whats in his mind. He has been a changed man after the 2007 World Cup failure. Skipped the captaincy after a hughe high of beating England in England 1-0 after 21 years. Since then he has lost his place in ODIs, struggled in Tests and since last 2 Tests suffered huge loss of form.
And then there you go….Hundred for Dravid….26th of his career, 4th against England, 2nd of the year. One of my wishlists come true….Now next a big partnership with SRT — the next 🙂
Dravid saves his career
A slow 150 ball 50 perhaps helps Dravid save his career for at least a tour. This should give the man some confidence.
He should carry on tomorrow, forge a big partnership for 3rd wkt with his favorite Tendulkar, score a career boosting 100, hit back at the critics and ask them to fuck off…..
The TEST batsman of year for India has certainly been Gautam Gambhir who began his revival from Lanka series, when all other big shots failed. 3 of the 4 hundreds coming against likes of Australia and England in 4 Tests is no mean achievement.
He is one find of the year for India in both forms of game…..Rock on Gauty!!!
Great Leveller and 4 Batsmen on decline…………..
Cricket is a game of great leveler. If a day you fly high, the next day in a test match you are back to ground. That’s what happened to Viru Sehwag. If he set up the historic Indian chase on 4th day of Chennai Test, then today he fell for 0. A harsh irony indeed.
4 Strugglers are occupying the crease right now in different parts of world. They are :
1. Rahul Dravid
2. Mathew Hayden – has fallen. Perhaps has also fallen for last time. Is that the end of the Big Matt ?
3. Ricky Ponting – Duckling in the first innings : )
4. Jacques Kallis – Made a 63, but never looks intimidating against top class teams.
4 of this millenium’s prolific batsmen on their way out.
History in Chennai
Close to full crowd in last 2 days, the Test cricket won. Nobody spent a tear on cancelation of Champions League. The test cricket returned in the venue of the country which has seen classics like 1986 Tie test, 1999 Test against well Pakistan, 2001 against Australia. And defying the weather and terror threats out of Terroristan the Chennai crowd won once again.
Having being outplayed for 4 days, Indians bounced back in style to win the Test match. This is the pinnacle. Doesnt get better than this. Indians defied the 4th innings jinx, the turning pitch, menacing Flintoff, dangerous Swann, turned Panesar to Warne and won the Test in style.
Yuvraj was the stand out in the 4th innings. Not only he sealed his place for a while in the XI, but also showed sense of urgency after Laxman fell. Indians are fast becoming the supreme Test playing country and they would be the worthy replacement for Aussies as # 1.
And this was set up nicely on day 4 by Virender Sehwag and helped in the morning by good knocks by Gambhir and Laxman, followed by Yuvraj Singh.
But the man who did it today was nobody but Sachin Tendulkar, the GOD of Indian cricket. He was being pressurised to retire post Lankan series. Since then he has hit 3 100s in 5 Tests in India. He was having supposed bad 4th innings record, doesnt play in crunch situations and he is selfish.
The man dedicated this 100 to Mumbai victims. So little and irrelevant is cricket before what happened in Mumbai, but the man rose above the grief and showed the way to the world. I salute the man for his excellence. I know critics (read bloggers) would still raise some doubts and point to flaws of his innings, but then who bothers. Tendulkar is GOD and he has shown it today by his excellent 100, which could be his BEST.
Dhoni led the team, but it was again a team effort. Himself and Bhajji in batting in 1st innings, Zaheer and Ishant in bowling in 2nd innings, Ganbhir, Viru, Yuvraj, Laxman in 2nd innings….Team effort….
Well done Indians and you have made us proud once again, a momentary relief from the immense pain of 11/26. More stuff for the neigbhours to bark on.
We rock, India rocks and so does England. For their spirits, for their resilience and for their love of Test cricket.
English Media on Day 5
English media cannot leave its typical attitude, the rants on the Ashes and the quality of innings of Sehwag played. Here is the media trail :
All that planning, all that concentration, all that toil. England had labored for nearly four days to force an impregnable position in the Chennai Test and then along came Virender Sehwag. In his wanton presence, all logic was lost, all outcomes were imaginable. Now anything is possible. England set India 387 to win in a notional 126 overs, a fourth-innings total far in excess of anything achieved at the Chidambaram Stadium. It should have represented absolute security, but Sehwag the batsman is consumed by disobedience. He responded with 83 from 68 balls, with 11 fours and four sixes. India, 131 for one at the close, need 256 on the final day. England’s bowlers, Andrew Flintoff apart, were mugged. If Sehwag played like this at Lord’s, a shirt-sleeved constable would probably stroll on and serve him an Asbo for rowdiness in a public place. Someone should have told him that the one-day series is over. Such is Sehwag ‘s reputation that England stationed their best fielder, Paul Collingwood, at third man for the uppish carve. On 26, he hacked through Alastair Cook’s hands at gully, the place where Collingwood would normally have been standing. Over-theorizing perhaps.
Sehwag ‘s disorderly magnificence was entirely out of keeping with an enervating first two sessions in which England moved somberly towards a declaration. Andrew Strauss and Collingwood completed immensely worthy hundreds, all temptation was eschewed and India indulged in shameless timewasting. Harper made a few efforts to chivvy things along, but the umpires generally looked impotent.
Lord Snooty Mike Atherton in Times Online.
Will he ever learn to look at non English stuff with praise and with a neutral’s eye ?
If Test cricket is about sending messages to the opposition, and to a large extent it is, then India and England spent the fourth day of this game sending each other mixed ones. A typically meandering third-innings performance from England contrasted with the most thunderous message of all, which came towards the end of the day from the frenzied blade of Virender Sehwag. His blistering assault on England’s bowlers means that both teams return today in the knowledge that all results are possible.
An Indian victory remains the least likely, given that they will have to make more runs to win in the fourth innings than anyone has made in India before, and 232 more than any team have chased successfully in Madras (Chennai). With only seven wickets falling yesterday, a draw is still a possibility, although India do not enjoy batting in a defensive manner. This may play into England’s hands since wicket-taking opportunities are more likely to present themselves against batsmen taking a chance or two.
That India have been sucked into a run chase at all today is solely down to Sehwag, who blazed away in exhilarating fashion, so that by the close India had managed to reduce their deficit by 131 in a little under a session’s worth of batting. Sehwag fell 17 short of what would have been one of the most brilliant of Test hundreds, but his failure to reach three figures, perishing leg-before while trying to paddle-sweep Graeme Swann to fine leg, should in no way diminish his achievement. There were two other hundreds to celebrate, but Sehwag played the innings not just of the day but of the match.
He played with glorious freedom, unconstrained by the situation, the reputation of the bowlers and the pitch, at one end of which the topsoil is completely worn away. England’s batsmen had managed two boundaries throughout the afternoon; within 15 balls, Sehwag had found the rope six times. The merest hint of width outside off stump saw the ball skimming through the arc between backward point and third man, mostly along the ground, and once all the way over the rope for six. If England’s plan is to bowl short and wide at Sehwag, it needs revisiting.
To restore some sanity, he acknowledges Indian crowd’s petite for the Test cricket :
Test cricket is a remarkable game because of the speed at which things can change and until the mid-afternoon slackness, England were in total control thanks to an epic performance from Strauss, who added another hundred to his burgeoning collection, and a typically doughty century from Collingwood. Strauss’s second hundred of the Test occupied 394 minutes, giving him more than 12 hours at the crease in total. Without match practice for two months, he is making up for lost time. He became the tenth Englishman to score two hundreds in a Test and the seventh to do so against India. It was a feat of extreme endurance and high skill and rarely can he have played better than he did from lunchtime on the first day onwards. The “Little Master” Sachin Tendulkar thought so, too, offering a handshake in congratulation. High praise indeed
OPENING the batting in all forms of the international game has to be one of the toughest jobs around. It must take a tremendous mental toll tailoring your game to the many situations these different formats throw up and the recent emotional problems of Herschelle Gibbs and Marcus Trescothick bear testimony to this. Unsurprising, then, that there is something slightly unhinged about the way Virender Sehwag, India’s 24/7 opener, goes about his business. He certainly plunged England into shock as he tore into their bowling. Sehwag has not so much pushed the envelope containing the rules on how to open the batting as punch it to shreds. His great gift is synthesis of approach. One minute he is batting as you would expect someone to bat in a Test match, the next he has flicked a switch and has gone into one-day mode, or rather one-day mood, and every ball looks set to end up in the stands.
Earlier this year, on this very ground, Sehwag spent most of the first day of a Test against South Africa batting as though he were in the first powerplay of a one-day game, and raced to the fastest triple- century in Test history. He beat the previous record by a cool 84 balls, so it was something of a Bob Beamon moment. He is also the owner of three of the seven fastest double-centuries in Tests. Like Trescothick and Gibbs, Sehwag has had his ups and downs. He went through a bad trot in one-dayers in 2004 and spent most of last year unwanted in Tests. You could pick a pretty good World XI from people who were not playing Test cricket this time last year, given that Andrew Strauss (this game’s twin centurion) was left at home while England were touring Sri Lanka, and Andrew Flintoff was still in the rehab room.
Now, the idea of leaving out Sehwag seems like an act of lunacy. Apart from his huge effort against South Africa, he also made important runs in the series against Australia, but unarguably his finest innings of the year was a double-century in Galle when the rest of the Indian batsmen could make neither head nor tail of Ajantha Mendis. Sehwag ‘s risk-taking approach seems contrary to his modest background. Raised in Nafargarh, a satellite town of Delhi, as the son of a storekeeper, he might be forgiven for adopting a thriftier approach to his day job. Yet it is actually the likes of Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, middle-class children both, who calculate every risk three times over before taking it.
But Sehwag now deserves to be properly recognised for what he is: since the retirement of Adam Gilchrist, the most exciting batsman on the planet.
Intriguing Day 5
Virender Sehwag has set up the day for India to go and capitalize the start. 256 runs needed to score the win and its close to 2.8 runs per over. We have stroke makers in the team with an exception of Rahul Dravid who is now being touted as a night watchman than a WALL. His failures are beyond comprehension. I just couldn’t imagine what would have happened if Sehwag wasn’t given out when he was not. Match over in 3 hrs ?
Gotta make sure we keep runs coming and not bog down. If runs freeze, the chances for victory would freeze too.
Go India Go!!
Two Bad decisions
…In an over make a career out of Swann and perhaps might end career of a GREAT WALL………..
Chennai Test, Day 1
As I predicted that this is the test going the Lord’s 2007 way, it came true. After Strauss was dismissed (then and now) England collapsed. 164 for 1 to 229 for 5. Big guns like KP, Colly and Bell failing putting the onus on Freddie and then on Prior to salvage the team to a respectable score.
350 should be a decent score. England were defensive. Hell they scored at a rate of 2.5 runs an over. Just like what Aussies did and see what happened to them. For India too, once the openers are gone, there comes a tendency to slow down and that where the opportunities arise and the floodgates open.
4 more mins to go for 2nd day s play to begin @ Chepauk. Thank god, no rains till now.
Harbhajan got it right in saying England were defensive. I mean its of no use to be circumspect and cautious in the start to go to 1/164 and then end up the day @ 5/229.
Chennai Test, Day 1, 1st session
The test match got underway in Chennai albeit to scare attendance and zero chances of rain with sunny clear skies. Perhaps heavenly omens for the Test match to happen. Now that it has happened, the wicket played to its true nature off late. Batting beauty with no leeway to the bowlers. England got off to slow start, cautious. 67 runs in 27 overs, with nothing flashy or significant to write about. Bowlers rotated, but no success. Mishra brought in late, something which happens regularly with Dhoni as skipper. Even in Nagpur after the Mohali heroics, the Harayana lad was brought in late. Not much difference though, not that he is a great bowler as of now and would turn it around like Mendis. Has gone for 49 runs in 10 overs. Well that’s not pretty much like AK. AK in his prime until late last year would hold back to runs if not wkts on a flat track. But this lad needs a turner to get a wicket on. That’s why we need a leggie who doesn’t turn the ball much. May be we have been pampered and spoiled for choices after 19 years of Anil Kumble flavors and 619 wkts.
The Test match is shaping like the Lord’s Test 2007 when England got off to flying start only to lose way later in the day and before being Zaked and RP’ed on day 2. Strauss was the man then, as is now. He came from wilderness in the Lord’s and so is now. So is history going to repeat itself ?
Besides what is the use of a flat track ? Its further going to kill the game of cricket in the country. England going strong on 1/138 just half way through the day. The over rate is pretty much decent with 14.x overs per over. Better than what Ponting managed entire month of Nov and Oct or even now.
Switch Hit 