Low-hanging fruits
Are the wheels coming off Rahul Dravid's wagon or is the elegy premature? Let's be honest, if not for Runako Morton's leaning for thrillers, West Indies should have romped home by the 48th over. As Samuels square-flapped Ajit Agarkar for the winning runs, Dravid's face pulled a customary scowl. Thursday's defeat might not impact the Richter scale. But surely, somewhere, Dravid feels the weight of the stakes involved after his persistent fidelity to unrewarding trail-runs. We hurried the memoirs on a few careers under the pretext of....
Posted by Deba Prasad Dhar at | 17 comments
Futile excursions?
Isn’t it strange that only Indians are hauled over the coals for being poor travellers? Australia apart, scarcely has any side set the grass aflutter on sub-continent wickets. This is not to suggest that a country must lower the bar against poor yardsticks but somehow Indians are often hurled into the ovens of acrimony for being Plain Janes on overseas tours. So why should other teams get away with lukewarm hearing? Especially since they too don’t set the Thames on fire on their tours but contend that sub-continent teams....
Posted by Deba Prasad Dhar at | 8 comments
Moments for bookmarks
Fast bowlers have an appreciation for the insane, but Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif seem to have stretched that brief too far. Misfortune comes back like Frankenstein to bite and sting Shoaib; he can scarcely tear himself from strife. And Asif, too, seems to be catching up with him on this score. As the doping charges broke out, cricket lovers, who had warmed themselves at the hearth of these two showstoppers, could feel their dreams dampening into cold white ash. As if that was not enough, the sapless....
Posted by Deba Prasad Dhar at | 4 comments
Time to dust jackets and move on
With power cuts looming large on the city, MERC (Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission) might be the only team, apart from Sri Lanka of course, to be satisfied with the outcome of this match. At least Mumbai saved on the floodlights. It’s a different matter that spectators are fretting over the chicken-feed returns of their tickets that range anything from Rs 700 to Rs 3000. After a wormwood first week in the Champions Trophy, the last preliminary game between West Indies and Sri Lanka promised a contest. But we were....
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