Some thoughts on the on going India – SA test in Kolkata:
- Ishant Sharma was inspirational. No two ways about it, on the first day, India were getting hammered, were it not for his spell after lunch, South Africa would probably be close to victory now. Daryll Cullinan said South Africa were about 1.5 hours away from victory, I agree. If things pan out as normal, Ishant Sharma may well have saved the test [and the series].
- I hate to say it, but yes South Africa are prone to collapse. I mean 7 wickets for 25 runs, seriously ?
- Finally, we have pace bowlers who can rattle the opposition. Not so long ago, the only purpose our seam bowlers served was to take the shine off the ball. Ishant and Zaheer are a real threat now a days, which poses the new problem that we can’t prepare dustbowls and get away with it.
- Harbhajan is so much more effective when he gives the ball some air rather than his usual ploy of cynically firing it into the pads to save runs [and his place in the team].
- South African commentators are under rated. They’re not full of macho nationalistic BS like our friends from down under [Healy, Taylor, Lawry], and they don’t parrot cliched drivel like messers Sivaramakrishnan, Lal, Singh.
- Virinder Sehwag and VVS Laxman can not be explained, seriously, these guys play the ball a foot away from their body and still make ridiculous amounts of runs against the best teams in the world, there’s no rational explanation why.
- People are being waaaaaaay too hard on the new guys – S. Badrinath / M. Vijay. The fab 4 had plenty of failures before their recent success. We went to Australia with Sachin as captain and lost almost every match and prior to that had our posteriors handed to us in South Africa. So spare me the future of the Indian team is scary crap. The gap between domestic and international cricket is so huge that the only long term fix is to increase the level of domestic play. Short term fix is to select players who have potential and back them for a run of games.
- Test cricket is frankly the most interesting form of the game at this point. Maybe I’m getting older (25 this year) but personally I feel test cricket is the only form of the game that offers a serious examination of a cricketers ability.
- The advertisements shown have become progressively worse over the years. Bring back the old ad-writers, the ‘youngistaan’ generation of ad men have the imagination and creativity of database administrators.
- This may well be the last time we see VVS and Sachin at Eden Gardens, privilege to see it.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/irishwildcat/ / CC BY 2.0
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