< 1 minute readIt’s nice to see bowlers being decisive in a Twenty20 match. Far too often they might as well just glue different mugshots onto a bowling machine and use that instead. In the Champions League final, Mumbai successfully defended 139. For a large proportion of the match, the commentators were talking
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Is Sachin Tendulkar preventing India from having fast bowlers?
< 1 minute readThis week, Zaheer Khan said: “Indian bodies are not designed to bowl fast.” Assuming that Zaheer has chosen his words carefully, this seems to indicate that he believes that humans are ‘designed’. If they are designed by God, and Sachin is God, then we can conclude that the Mumbai batsman’s
Continue readingRoyal Challengers Bangalore hit a six off the final ball to win
< 1 minute readWe’ve seen a handful of games where one team needs a six off the final ball to win – it’s hard to beat. We’ll talk you through the climax of Bangalore’s win over South Australia in the Twenty20 Champions League: Some Aussie guy ran in and bowled and Bangalore’s wicketkeeper
Continue readingWere you doing something else when England played India at the Rose Bowl?
< 1 minute readMaybe you were pipe-cleaner modelling or carrying out wig maintenance. Here’s what you missed: Vinay Kumar seemingly wearing clogs MS Dhoni keeping without a hat on Alastair Cook slogging a single to cow corner off the back foot about 40 times
Continue readingThat’s Dr Dhoni to you
< 1 minute readJust like Ian Botham, MS Dhoni is now a doctor of letters. De Montford University gave him the honour, which led to this quite marvellous photograph: You didn’t have a suit, MS? No? Nothing? No smart trousers or anything? Okay, no, it’s fine. No problem at all. It’s just, you
Continue readingWhen Dravid is better than Tendulkar and Sehwag
2 minute readWe went overboard with the Tour de France references last month, so we’ll avoid making one here, even though we want to. Just as you can win the Vuelta a Espana without winning a single stage, so you can be considered the best batsman without being the best in every
Continue readingGautam Gambhir isn’t earning much praise
< 1 minute readBanging his head two days earlier compelled Gautam Gambhir to send out a morningwatchman. The consensus seems to be that he’s a bit soft. Maybe he is still concussed, maybe he’s genuinely not fit to bat, but he might have stood a better chance of people believing that if he
Continue readingFast bowlers from India are still falling away
2 minute readIt seems a long time ago that we wrote about India’s young fast bowlers, nodding sagely and approvingly at what was on offer. That’s because it actually was a long time ago and the 26-and-under promise we saw four years ago should be something rather more than that by now.
Continue readingPraveen Kumar’s third dimension
2 minute readEmbed from Getty Images One of Test cricket’s greatest strengths over the other formats is how you get to know the players better. We’d seen a great deal of Praveen Kumar before this series, but had no particular opinion about him. This has changed in the last few weeks. First
Continue readingAlastair Cook unfazed by Indian tactics
< 1 minute readTeams have used any number of different approaches when trying to get Alastair Cook out in the last year. Pretty much all of them have failed. Of the 2,855 deliveries he’s faced in Test cricket since this time last year, 17 of them have got him out. Today, India tried
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