Crucket

Paul Ford blogs very infrequently over at Cricinfo (and merely infrequently at Stuff), and in his latest Cricinfo post he has deconstructed Mark Richardson’s article. It’s a nice read and I wish I had gone straight to this rather than trawl through the comments in Richardson’s article looking for a decent rebuttal.

However, I couldn’t help but trawl the comment of Ford’s post. Not much going on there, so I wouldn’t recommend it. Though I did find this piece of verbiage which, even allowing for English being the poster’s second language, is quite unique:

Am I missing something here! You guys have a strange way of welcoming visitors (read India). You humiliate a visiting sports person because his Shoes were “Dirty?!!!!!?”. A “humble” former player-turned-writer forgets to mention that the pitches were deemed very Bad for Cricket by several pundits. His “critique” forgets to observe His “humble” mate never faced a Bond in unfamiliar conditions on his way to getting 48 runs before he was out everytime!! Everyone forgets that 15 oC is At Least 20 oC less than what is faced anywhere in India – the limiting definition of “unfamiliar conditions”! All this, while there Are no complaints from the visitors about the pitches last time!! I quite don’t understand this attitude! Do you guys want to do an Oz? Or is it because you are the latest to suffer the monitory inferiority complex – or just now got a chance to exhibit it?! Or is it because you are self-guilty of having hosted a bad series last time. Or is it because you want to spice up a no-entertainer of a series? Or is it because you never wanted to host us, but are doing it only for the money? Or is it because you really want some free money without playing – but are ashamed of getting (begging for) it from India? Or is it because you guys are afraid of winning and so finding ways of covering your “posteriors” a prioi?! If it is any one of the above reasons, or any other, there is always a single different way of addressing your fears and recentments or goals. In India we call it honest front door entry with civility. Especially, since cricket is no Rugby! The story of Swan and Fox is as stupid and irrelevant as it gets. A Swan only has vessels that suite its eating habits. It takes money, resources, a while and more than a few visits by the Fox, for the Swan to be able to serve on anything other than is naturally available to it! With Money and resources, the Swan has consistently been serving more Fox-favoring vessels over the years! Well, the Fox is yet to design ONE Swan-favoring vessel!! It is quite not clear what is it that is pricking you guys?! God bless you guys to cool down! Or may be Dhoni can help you guys. But ask him Nicely!

Dhoni has led his team to two defeats in the 20-20s, the second by a whisker, but apparently he’s not that bummed – certainly less than devastated. I guess he properly understands the value of 20-20s.

While writing a little piece for the Herald, Mark Richardson found a phrase he really liked: “playing your boss at golf”. His point in this article was that while we can prepare wickets here in New Zealand that would gift us easy victories, if we want to be invited to play with India again, we have to prepare pitches that will give us close fought victories so that the Indians think they had a chance against us – just like if you were playing your boss at golf. (Though really, he just had a phrase he wanted to use and needed some context for it.)

He liked his little phrase so much that he used it again in an article for Cricinfo. But this time he overcooked his metaphor. In case we weren’t going to get it, he spells out that “New Zealanders and New Zealand cricket understand who pays the wages nowadays”. What seemed a bit cheeky in the Herald, became petulant and accusatory on Cricinfo.

And it ignited a firestorm in the comments, with rising anger towards Richardson, then tempered with some crowing about the strength of India’s new-ball attack and new-found likeness for pacey conditions, followed by some defences of Mark before degenerating into sniping amongst the commentors, with the thread culminating in what appears to be an Indian delighting in the Indian loss in the first 20-20 as it proves Richardson wrong.

Cheap Opening Shot Mr Richardson!

Oh this is a new low. The pre-emptive-whine strike – “We lost because India will not come back if we beat them”.

Wow! Shocking article. If I understand it correctly, Mr. Richardson is saying the following: NZ can beat any side in the world if it so chooses but since it is a poor cricketing nation, it has to kowtow to the countries that have money.

It is good to read your comments Mark, but pray tell me what is your achievement in cricket field. Have you done anything in any of the sub continent countries. How many centuries have you scored?

I can tell you what is brown, dry and steaming: Mark’s article.

I personally as an ardent Indian fan am PRAYING that NZC dish out greener tracks than in 2003. Regardless of the batting strength India are bringing with them, the bowling attack in India is unimaginably better than the last one which arrived in NZ.

Hilarious. Loving this. the so called slightest slight regarding indian cricket and all the trolls come out. Lets ignore the fact that most of what Richardson said was true.

The Indian reaction to this article is just bizarre – I am Australian, and I think Mark Richardson is spot-on. He points out that India are much stronger than NZ in most conditions (obvious), and that NZ’s best chance would lie in greentops a la 2002-03 (also true). Yes, India have Zaheer and Ishant this time, but can they use the conditions as well as the NZ guys who have grown up in them? Maybe, maybe not – but we won’t find out this time! NZ will prepare wickets India considers “fair”, no matter what disadvantage to NZ, because NZ Cricket knows it can’t afford another 6-7 year gap before India returns again. (They know that India would have returned much sooner than this had they experienced good batting wickets last time, rather than embarrassment!) Nowhere does he suggest match-fixing or anything like it. His only criticism of India is that its famed top six was outshone by their NZ counterparts on green pitches last time, which is a fair and accurate assessment.

Your so called boss actually lost in first T20 and proved the backbne of your theory completely wrong. Uhh.. I will pray for you Mark, so Boss can win the second T20 and you can save your face..hehehehehe

Best finish to a 20-20 that I’ve ever come across. Amazing last two overs: a wickets, 23 runs, a near walk-off, winning run scored off a dropped catch.

And frankly, after the shenanigans of their administrators today, it is only fair that India get beaten. (Eat a bag of dicks, BCCI!)

Old Crow Medicine Show (playing NZ next month; anyone going?):

Game 1:

1.2 I Sharma to Guptill, no run, stunning ball from Ishant, jagged back viciously from outside off, Guptill bravely decides to not offer a shot is struck outside off, but that was going on to hit the stumps, Guptill is a very luck man to still be there, Ishant can’t believe it

Game 2:

8.5 Harbhajan Singh to Guptill, OUT, very bizarre decision! Guptill aims to pull a short delivery and gets a thick inside edge onto his thigh, the Indians appeal and the inside edge was obvious to the naked eye, umpire Gary Baxter doesn’t appear as if if he’s going to give it out and then all of a sudden raises the finger, Guptill doesn’t want to go and McCullum can’t believe it either

A nice start to the tour, NZ beat India by 7 wickets in the first 20-20, and already Suhas’ quite reasonable predictions are off (he predicted a 0-2 NZ loss in the 20-20s).

I missed the game, but the scoreboard seems to show that we achieved the win with the same kind of single-minded efficiency that we bring to our ODIs. After about the 6th over, we never seemed to be more than 1 rpo off the pace.

Looking at the Indian scoreboard however really reveals the important factor in India’s inability to post a score to challenge New Zealand – cheap wickets. Gambhir, Sharma, Singh and Dhoni all went cheaply, getting 16 runs between them but using up 23 balls, a run rate less than half the overall rate – so that’s nearly 20 lost runs.

CSS:

So India come to New Zealand even stronger than last time. All the talk is of them nabbing the no. 1 spot in the near future. And we’re well aware of where we sit in the rankings. However, the Indians have been notably short in bluster in the lead up the series. All the talk has been coming from Andy Moles. A tour of New Zealand is just the sort of experience that can bring a team back down to Earth. And the Indians are well aware of that and are perhaps even – could I be right in saying – a little scared.

Regardless of how the pitches are prepared, conditions in New Zealand will not favour India. This will go some way towards evening the odds. Suhas has made predictions for the results in the various rubbers. He’s probably got them all right. I am hoping that we can steal a test, but I’m not sticking my neck out and predicting that.

Players to watch

Martin Guptill/Tim McIntosh: I’m making a bold prediction of our test openers here, but both these players have impressed earlier in the season. What sort of a difference will it make to our test performances if we could build some decent opening partnerships?
Chris Martin/Kyle Mill/Mark Gillespie: If we have exciting promise at the top of our batting line up, our opening bowling spot is practically non-existent. A serious problem.

Ishant Sharma: He’s still learning the game really, but even his natural ability – and his height (1.95 m) – could make him devastating in bowler friendly conditions.
Virender Sehwag: Has been down in form over the past couple of years but has been keeping in touch with some massive scores. Averages 27 against New Zealand, so needs a lot of runs to fix that.

The problem of whether the Black Caps should tour Zimbabwe, pull out of the tour and face penalties or be forbidden from touring by the government has gone away, at least for a year. It seems that NZC and Zimbabwe Cricket have agreed to postpone the tour until next year.

That is hardly a satisfactory solution, but given the significant consequences of the other options, it is welcome.

A bit of editorialising in the Cricinfo article I linked to suggests that by next year Mugabe might be out of power. That idea quite seriously underestimates Mugabe’s ability to survive (who thought he would still be here after his defeat in last year’s election?), but it is true that it would solve the problem as far as cricket is concerned. Zimbabwe won’t be free from Mugabe and his legacy unless and until there is recompense for the victims of Mugabe’s crimes, but that is not an issue for cricket to worry about. (There is still the issue of corruption within Zimbabwe Cricket, but that is an issue for the ICC.)

India are finally back to play cricket on our pitches. It was 02/03 when they were last here. Everyone else has toured in that time, except Zimbabwe. They’ve been a long time away from New Zealand shores. They were supposed to tour in 2007 but, well, they didn’t come.

There have been comings and goings in both teams since then, to say the least. By my reckoning, only two current New Zealand selections have any experience playing tests against India, Vettori and Oram. And the Indian team likewise is largely changed.

A significant change for both teams since the 02/03 series and the return series in 03/04 is that we have both moved on from epochal captains. Those series both occurred at the peaks of the careers of both Fleming and Ganguly. This season’s series will be a contest between the new generation captains Vettori and Dhoni.

Ganguly was India’s most successful captain by a big margin. He was an inspiration. I was in India for a year during his reign and it really felt that for once hero worship and fair analysis had got it right in believing that Ganguly (along with John Wright) was the driving force behind India’s continued success. Of course, he had his quirks. Sportsfreak has a good summary of Ganguly’s snooty antics, which goes a long way towards explaining why JRod calls him a giant alien lizard freak. Flintoff described playing with him at Lancashire: “It’s a struggle with him. He wasn’t interested in the other players and it became a situation where it was 10 players and Ganguly. He turned up as if he was royalty – it was like having Prince Charles on your side.”

Dhoni is a real contrast with Ganguly, with his Bollywood good looks, comparatively humble background and Sehwagian approach to batting. He is a captain for his time like no other captain has been at any other time. He is also, 5 tests into his career, many times more successful than Ganguly. He has captained 4 wins from 5 tests.

With an appointment with Zimbabwe looming in the touring schedule, I’ve been following events there in the hope that things are improving in the country so that our tour won’t be the moral minefield it was when we last toured in 2005. The recent formation of a unity government has given me hope, but the subsequent arrest of one of the Movement for Democratic Change ministers on terrorism charges indicate that things aren’t going to change that quickly.

The fact is that while Mugabe is in power, Zimbabwe is no place for us to be visiting. The abuse of human rights will continue and democracy will continue to be trampled upon. We should not tour Zimbabwe in July.

Thankfully then, the government is concerned about the impending tour. There may be a chance that they will step in and ensure the tour will not go ahead.

You will recall that we were last scheduled to tour Zimbabwe in 2005. An unholy stink was raised amongst opponents and supporters of the tour. Mike and I had a minor punch-up over it on Mike on Cricket. I think that neither NZC or the government wanted that tour to go ahead, but cancelling the tour without penalties would require the government to legislate to make touring illegal. Essentially, the solution was for the government to block the players’ passports were they to try to leave the country. This was a step too far for the then Labour-led government, and at the time I had to agree that while it was morally objectionable for us to tour Zimbabwe, it would be a violation of the players’ rights to forbid them to travel. Basically, the ICC had set the bar too high for governments to prevent tours.

Since then however, both England and Australia have prevented tours of Zimbabwe in exactly this way. Also, our current National-led government seems to be prepared to play loose with our rights (at least two bills presented by the government have been deemed inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act by the attorney general). There are calls for the government to ensure the tour does not go ahead.

I still think that banning the players from travelling would be the wrong thing to do, but for the right reason. Some believe it would be possible to legislate against the tour without going to such extremes, so who knows, it may be possible to do it the right thing for the right reason. I note however that recently John Key has been trying to suggest that security and health risks are equally important reasons not to go to Zimbabwe. Both of which strike me as spurious – as far as I can tell the only people threatened by violence in Zimbabwe are those targeted by the government, and the players are in no danger from cholera from their bottled water. It sounds a bit like he is trying to find excuses for the tour to be abandoned without a government order. Which would mean that the tour would be abandoned for the wrong reasons.