Tim Nielsen had the following to say about Ricky Ponting’s four matches for Kolkata Knight Riders, during which he scored 20, 19 and two golden ducks:
“I am sure the opportunities to bat outside against net bowlers over there in India will hold him in good stead.”
Not us, obviously. Our luddism is far too deeply-ingrained. Other people.
Uncle J Rod has embraced the podcast. Actually, being as it’s J Rod, he’s more molested the podcast and stuck his tongue down its ear. They appear weekly and most surprisingly, he sounds like an Australian in them. We were certain he was French.
Also overdue a mention are The Atheist’s ‘viddy-blogs’. Early efforts are endearingly haphazard. The most recent, The Vaughan Identity, is remarkably polished and sleek, like a buffed whippet. However, our favourite remains Video 7, partly for the cameo appearance of a fez, but largely because of Tim Ambrose’s dismissal. Genius.
Please don’t draw any direct comparisons between the effort that goes into either of these sites and the effort that goes into ours.
No Dravid, no Ganguly - no problem. Other players are making the step up and showing the maturity that should go hand-in-hand with seniority, but so often doesn’t.
We were unsure when Mahendra Dhoni was made the captain of India’s one-day team. The extravagant crowd favourite rarely makes the best captain - or maybe it’s just that Ian Botham gave us that opinion.
Dhoni’s character’s at odds with his batting persona however. For a man who can throw the bat as if he doesn’t have a care in the world, he’s a serious, professional captain who demands concentration from his players.
He impressed during India’s Twenty20 World Cup triumph, staying unbelievably calm when the pressure mounted and having the confidence to make unexpected bowling changes with everything on the line.
In this tri-nations series, he’s impressed again. In today’s final he demanded high standards from a fielding side who are often lackadaisical, expressing his displeasure clearly but calmly when he felt someone’s concentration had wavered. But more than that, he seems pragmatic.
Maybe it’s dealing with the ludicrous expectations about his own performances that that’s made him a realist, but he seemed to be one of the few people involved in this irritating Australia-India brouhaha who didn’t see things in black and white. His comments seemed to acknowledge and embrace the greyness that so few others seemed able to find
“If you’re getting provoked then there are ways in which you can reply, so you have to be careful about it. We have youngsters in the side who will learn all these arts.”
No right and wrong there. Just a recognition that it takes two to tango and that you can only control one half of that dance.
Namely, score a one-day international hundred in Australia.
Rohit Sharma may have played a major part, but he merely provided able and precocious support to the main man. It might be about the fifth time we’ve written this, but it doesn’t get any less true: Sachin Tendulkar is THE BALLS.
You don’t get any leeway once you’re over 30. If you’re coming back from an injury or in a patch of poor form then you’ve ‘had it’ - your eyes are going, the hunger’s gone, the body’s letting you down.
Clearly absolute testicles. Sachin Tendulkar has averaged 62.73 in 22 Test matches since the start of 2007, hitting four hundreds. In the same period in one-day internationals, he’s averaged 45.60.
He’s played swing in England, bounce in Australia and countered insane expectation against Pakistan. He’s been plodding and cautious. He’s been ferociously dynamic.
If Sachin Tendulkar’s had it, then the moon’s a giant gonad. (Three separate references to testicles - a new career best.)
Jason Gillespie has effectively retired. He’s going to play in the ICL and that C in place of a P is the difference between making millions for no real sacrifice and making slightly less for being banned from first-class cricket. The IPL being the sanctioned Indian Twenty20 league of course. The ICL being the leper league.
Gillespie was the Aussie great who didn’t get to win back the Ashes. We shouldn’t feel too sorry for him though. He won the previous four, after all. Even so, it’s a bit of a low-key exit for a top bowler who’s easily overlooked. 259 Test wickets at 26.13 are the figures that shame the quick bowlers of today.
We used to think that Jason Gillespie was stupid. He’s not. This opinion was largely based on an interview with him where someone asked where the name ‘Dizzy’ came from. Gillespie said that someone had called it him once and it had just sort of stuck.
Who doesn’t know the reasons behind their own nickname, we thought. What a moron. But looking back, it was probably just nerves.
You might think of Jason Gillespie as a line and length medium-pacer who didn’t have the wherewithal to protect his figures when English bats got bigger in 2005, in which case you’ll think there’s a faintly tragic air about the man. We don’t pity that frail, put-upon later-version Gillespie though, because we remember what preceded it.
Before one Ashes series (it doesn’t matter which - they were much the same at the time), Steve Waugh described Jason Gillespie as the best bowler in the world. This was mostly rhetoric for English ears and a bit of support for a young player. After all, Gillespie wasn’t even the best bowler in the Australia side - nor even the second best.
However, Waugh made quite a strong case and if a cricket follower had arrived from the past with no knowledge of modern players, they might have believed him. He pointed out that Gillespie was tall, accurate, seamed it, swung it and bowled at over 90mph. What more could you want?
Resilience maybe. Gillespie was almost always injured or coming back from injury and this was probably why his pace reduced. He didn’t have a choice in the matter, unlike Shaun Pollock.
His career may have ended with quite a long fade-out rather than a bang, but at least we can say his Test career ended on an up-note - albeit an odd one. Jason Gillespie, that master blocker, who’d previously hit two Test fifties in about 90 innings, hit a double hundred against Bangladesh. That was a really, really weird day.
There’s hope for all tail-enders who work on their batting there though. He added a first-class hundred for Yorkshire the next summer and another for South Australia this season. With a stronger body, he might yet have made a batsman. Or maybe not.
Australia v Sri Lanka today might be a meaningless dead rubber, but on Sunday it’s FINALS TIME.
Australia and India might have played four one-day internationals against each other already, but they weren’t FINALS. Now its serious. Previously, both teams were only concerned with getting to THE FINALS. But now they’re 100% focused on the three separate matches that comprise THE FINALS.
We all thought that the World Cup was long-winded and wearisome, but the Commonwealth Bank Series takes eight matches to remove one team, before an all-or-nothing, win-at-all-costs final. Actually, that’s not true. You can lose the first one. There are still two more finals after that.
Woeful.
“Oh no. We’re going to get DONE. And, and, and. And Mark says that he’s got a cane, even though it’s against the law and that he’s even got a special stripey cane for when you’re REALLY bad.”
So now we all know why players say ‘what’s said on the pitch should stay on the pitch’. It’s because it all gets massively embarrassing otherwise.
After one player called another player something else and the ICC got an actual judge to sort it out (A JUDGE!), even though it was essentially one player’s word against another; and after the BCCI threatened to take its bat (and players) home when it didn’t get its own way; we now get Matthew Hayden calling names as well. He called Harbhajan Singh ‘an obnoxious weed’.
But that isn’t the best bit. That was what preceded it.
This is a quote so beautiful, we couldn’t believe our eyes when we first read it. It’s BCCI secretary Niranjan Shah in response to Ishant Sharma’s fine for aggressive behaviour and it’s so good it’s getting a paragraph of its own and appearing in italics.
“Basically the Australian players are starting the whole thing.”
‘But they started it.’ Has there ever been a stronger defense than that. That ALWAYS works, doesn’t it?
During the next match, we fully expect Ricky Ponting to fire his finger into the air when Australia are in the field and shout ‘TELLING’, before marching off to find a figure of authority.
It would be tempting to look on this as Adam Gilchrist’s final international hundred, but the interminable Commonwealth Bank Series is going to provide him with a few more opportunities yet.
Australia have played Sri Lanka twice and beaten them twice now, but they still get to play two more matches against them and two more against India before the best of three finals. After that, we’ll DEFINITELY know which the best team is. Or not - England (clearly the worst team of the three) won it last year after Australia and New Zealand got bored and dozed off.
Also in this match, Lasith Malinga took some wickets and Kumar Sangakkara showed that he still loves batting against Australia unlike any of his team mates.
We’re going away for the weekend. That’s why we’ve slipped into perfunctory mode.
It’s great to have strength in depth, but surely you want some idea who your best bowlers are. India have had five quick bowlers performing well on this tour alone. The picture’s murkier than our imaginary, more colourful past.
Zaheer Khan, RP Singh and Irfan Pathan provided some sort of freakish left-arm swing roadshow early in the tour. Now it’s the right-handers’ turn.
Ishant Sharma and Sreesanth dispatched an Australian one-day line-up starting Gilchrist, Hayden, Ponting, Clarke, Symonds, Hussey for just 159. By all accounts it was the kind of pitch that brings the bowlers sandwiches and makes their beds it’s so generous, but you’ve still got to do ‘the business’ and Sharma suited-up and shook hands.
So where are we? India’s young fast bowlers are still falling over each other trying to prove that they’re the best of the bunch, while simultaneously failing to appear in more than three successive matches without getting injured. It’s chaos. It’s delicious, overwhelming, unregulated chaos out of which something wonderful keeps appearing.
That’s how we remember India as a place. It’s strangely apt.
Sickeningly wrong-handed purveyor of off-cutters, Nathan Bracken, has once again ended a one-day international with disgustingly flattering figures. Bracken took 5-46 as Sri Lanka were bowled out for just 125, chasing Australia’s 253.
We’ve long since accepted that Nathan Bracken is a more-than-useful one-day bowler, but we don’t have to bloody well like it. It’s not even his hair, it’s how well-disguised his wiliness is. He may well be a smart bowler, but it’s masked by a veneer of innocuosity and gorm.