During the last few years, I have not missed reading an article about cricket in news-magazines. These magazines do not have anything to do with cricket and I believe that by reading these magazines, one can get other angles to view the game from. However, most of the time I have found that such articles have a common thread. A partisan attitude is evident (barring some good pieces) and it almost seems that a witch-hunt might be on sometimes. And even the best in the team is not left alone. Not surprisingly, these pieces of criticism have come, not from former cricketers, but from writers whose connection to cricket is not evident, at least to the casual reader.

Here, I have tried to put across a coherent reply to one of the common questions raised by such articles – “Is Sachin, an all time great?” A general feeling around the media and some sections of the Indian public, is that Tendulkar, for the greater part of his career, has failed to deliver for his team when they need him the most. And a number of instances have been quoted where we were near and yet so far. These views go as far as indicating that the tag ‘chokers’ that the Indian team has earned in the last few years is because of one man alone.

The one major fact that these people have always overlooked is that there have been many a knock where he has done his bit (rather, almost the whole thing) and India has failed to win because the other ten failed to do their job. I am not a stud with statistics, but what better example to come up than the Chennai Test against Pakistan in 1998-99. Wasim Akram recently said in a TV program that the Chennai test was one of the best Test matches he had ever played. And this match is quoted by one and all as a prime example to illustrate the ‘fact’ that Sachin is not what he seems to be.

At Chennai, hasing 271, India were at one point 82/5 and then Sachin and Mongia put on a stand that got India close, when Nayan Mongia’s irresponsible hoick put the pressure back on Sachin. With just one half decent batsman to follow and back spasms racking him, he had to hit out and go for the finish rather than exposing the other end to Akram & Co. Prior to his dismissal, Tendulkar scored most of the 37 runs in just 5 overs and was the 7th batsman to get out for a score of 136.

Even though only 17 runs were required at that point (”only” is not the word to use when Saqlain and Akram are bowling, but nevertheless) India lost all the 3 remaining wickets, scoring only 6 runs in the process. A good question to ask at this point would be – What happened to the other 10 ??

Ganguly got a bad decision (bad is a word that does not convey the enormity of that umpiring slight) , but you get the sense that Tendulkar’s innings (even though the finishing was not there) was invaluable when u see the scorecard. We would just not be discussing this match if it were not for the scores of the other batsmen in the team. Only Dravid (10) and Mongia (52) got to double figures.

And surprisingly some (like the author of this article) have compared him with Andy Flower at his best. This reveals another basic flaw. While, on the outset, it is probably fair to dismiss the Zimbabweans as a one-batsman team, the team is full of dangerous floaters (as Douglas Marillier and Travis Friend amply demonstrated last week!) all of whom are capable of 30’s and 40s in any given day. And they do get these runs regularly. So the “exceptional average” of 84.5 % (which he had a couple of months ago) would lose some sheen if you look at the scores of the other batsman. I am sure you would find the above-mentioned 30s and 40s supporting the hundreds made by Flower to the maximum. So it’s unfair to use statistics as a tool to evaluate Tendulkar.

Sidhu might be partly right with his “Statistics are like miniskirts…” statement. But sometimes the hidden stuff makes compulsive reading and convinces us that the open stuff is all hogwash. And maybe the question that has been posed is answered by the usual view that these people put across. “Given his prowess, Sachin does not seem to be able to set up a victory as often as he should”. Where are the other batsmen to sometimes finish what he started?

Cricket is just not a one-man game. If you don’t have another batsman to take guard opposite you, then you cannot even bat. This is not street cricket where sometimes all the players get to bat. I hope every Indian fan realizes this and does not get into any conclusion of this kind. Sachin is just the major piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is the Indian team. Only when all the pieces fall into place, will India win.

Accountability is another factor that the Indian public and more importantly, the team and the selector need to understand. They should understand that “no member is bigger than the team” and that includes Tendulkar too. I think he has realized that. His decision to relinquish the captaincy stems from the realization that he cannot cope up with the kind of hassles that a captain has to face and then perform of the field too. But again this has been held against him too. So what more are we going to hold him responsible for? The Babri masjid issue?

So let’s not blame Tendulkar for not making “match-winning” scores. The difference between winning and losing lies in playing as a team and not as a collection of individuals. And if someone says that Tendulkar is responsible for not the team not winning, even though he has had good stints at the crease, then he cannot be more wrong. If one batsman’s score alone would win a match, I am sure India would be the only unbeaten team around, cause from his first Test to the latest, he has done his bit and would continue to do so until he feels he cannot. Then he will gracefully get off the bandwagon and let India rue the day they asked – “Is Sachin an all-time great?”

However while the introduction to the game started early enough, I don’t have any memories of watching actual games then. While I don’t remember watching the World Cup win of ’83 or the WCC win of ’85, I do remember watching the now famous Audi driven around the MCG with every member of the squad in or on it in the TV news clippings.

My first memories of watching an actual game (on TV) is quite fittingly a gripping test match played in Chennai – The Tied Test. I think the excitement of watching the final day’s play with all its turning points, along with a bunch of rabid and yet intelligent fans from the extended family, cemented my interest in the game. Soon I even started having rather vivid cricket dreams – of playing cricket with the likes of Kapil Dev bowling to me on our apartment terrace, with a crocodile infested nook where the forward short leg would normally be (Don’t ask!).

I started reading about cricket voraciously too. I devoured my cousin’s collection of Sportstars repeatedly every evening. I literally believed every word that was written there about Viv Richards’ murderous 110 at St. Johns during England’s ill-fated ’85-86 tour and got into fights after telling people that 12 runs each were given for at least 2 of the 7 sixes that Richards hit that day. I also found my cousin’s hidden copy of a 1983 English season yearbook (including the World Cup) released by Wills, hidden behind his Sportstars. The book interestingly gave me my first look at a nudie pic – a topless woman waving to the cameras from top of a chimney, from where she was watching a county (or was it a World Cup) game.

Around this time I started watching cricket on TV like a maniac. The West Indies tour of India in 1987-88 and the battering India took from the hands of the likes of Pat Patterson and Ian Bishop is fresh, and the heartbreak that was the ’87 World Cup. After Star TV and Prime Sports entered our house around the same time as the ’92 World Cup, there was an hour to be spent every day watching re-runs of the World Cup games, most of which I had seen on live TV too. In the midst of all this, I never once watched a game live at the stadium, at least not until much much later – the 2001 Chennai Test against the Australia!

Since my initiation, I have grown up to be this guy whose first thought, on seeing open spaces, is to plan where the stumps and the boundaries would be. While she hasn’t verbalized it, my mom probably blames herself for it. All my years in school, barring a few months between my 9^th and the 10^th standards (when I was grudgingly allowed to join a coaching program, she relentlessly made efforts to correct her “mistake”. She tried to put one impediment after the other – taking me to work with her during vacations, arranging for violin lessons thrice a week at home in the evening when the other kids were playing. But in spite of all this, I have stayed in love with the game. Not an hour passes without cricket being on my mind, even if it is a fleeting thought.

As most readers know, digression and verbosity are inbuilt features on this blog, but not today. Lunch beckons now. Nevertheless, while I am gone, you can tell us all how your cricket story began. Comments are open. So, will you?

I know I have been awfully silent these past few months. But to quote that BSNL employee who managed to infuriate even the unflappable me last week, past is past. I intend to start regular service on this blog in the next few days once I get past the small task of upgrading WordPress. While there is the small matter of securing gainful employment, I will keep that issue and the related activities in the background like it has been for the most part on this blog.

Here’s to new beginnings…

Ok, I don’t know why the angle is weird, but a kind birdie sent me this and a few other pics from the Endhiran set. These are probably everywhere by now, but I got them just a few minutes ago. Enjamaaai!

A half-decent book that is introduced as a collection of wizarding fables (with notes by a Harry Potter character), it soon loses its charm. When JKR buries the voices of the fables’ protagonists under the accompanying notes, the reader starts questioning the book’s length and wonders who the target audience is (definitely not *THIS* Muggle).

And in between all this, I (re)discovered Twitter. And I tweeted about all these events.

I was introduced to Twitter in April ‘07, before Twitter became what it has now become. After acting like a curmudgeon about it for the most part of 2007 and 2008, I was forced by an ultimatum from certain friends (you know who you are ) to ditch my clever G-Talk status updates [random sample: Dodge Ram: The official truck of the Sangh Parivar (post Tata takeover of Chrysler)] and switch to Twitter instead.

Since then, it’s been Twitter and thankfully my mother (I had to explain every single clever GTalk status, killing the joke in the process) is not on it and so it has been good. I have totally warmed up to Twitter and don’t seem to have any time to blog. Actually I do have *lots* of time to blog, but I totally lack the enthu and for a change it is not laziness that is the reason. All I can say here and now is that, while the reasons are rather private, I will be back for good, soon. Hopefully.

But in the meantime, i don’t want this space to be idle. My closest friends have, in the past year, heard me lament about how I don’t read *books* any more. The past year or so, blogs (and other online media) have slowly started dominating my reading time and I want to change this status quo. Besides, my (virtual) book case is overflowing with books that I have picked up and have not read at all.

So when a friend pointed me to a 20 Books in 2009 challenge, I decided to take it up. For a lot of you, it is probably not a challenge at all, but for someone like me who wants to kickstart a reading habit again, it is a worthy challenge, I think. So to start the challenge, I cheated. Yup! Conveniently I picked up the shortest book available closeby to start out the challenge.

One of the rules of this 20in2009 challenge is that I have to track the books I read with a blog post/separate page. That offers me an avenue to update this blog. I am making it interesting planning to add my own challenge too. Since I am tweeting mostly these days, I want to limit these reviews fit the Twitter character limit, i.e. to 140 characters and post them on my Twitter stream too. One second thoughts, I don’t think a 140 character tweet can do justice to a book review. So, what say, I do 55-worders instead?

Look out for the review later tonight. Needless to say, the reviews will be irreverant (which means I’ll sound dumb, actually), so don’t bother using my reviews to feed your (non-existent) reading habit.

Article 152 of the International Sporting Code states that drive-through penalties are “not susceptible to appeal”.

But why the fuck would the F.I.A wait for two weeks, schedule a hearing for an appeal, go ahead with it and THEN rule that the appeal is inadmissible because the original penalty was ineligible for an appeal?

Oh wait. Don’t we all know that the F in FIA stands for a certain competitor’s of McLaren (who shall remain un-named) and A stands for ass-lickers? Now it all makes sense!

Jokes apart, wouldn’t this rule mean that any drive-through penalty that the race stewards hand out cannot be overturned later to adjust final standings? Considering how it affected the final race standings, is this motor racing’s version of the NFL’s inadvertent whistle rule that killed the Chargers against the Broncos last week?

Then in June, I picked up the nerve to call her. I spoke to her and the first thing she told me was how bad she felt that the Woodlands, where we had met in January last year, had closed down. We spoke for a few minute and my prepared script and the PJs that I had rehearsed all evaporated. I think speaking to her that day changed me. I’d like to think that some of her demeanor rubbed off on me and that has helped me through some personal issues that I have had to face since then.

Since that day in June, it has been Kalyan’s emails that kept us all in the loop. So on Sunday night, I was pleasantly surprised to get a couple of text messages from her. I called Kalyan to confirm that it was indeed her and he filled me in. And this morning, I heard from her sister Triveni that she was no more.

Even though it has only been a couple of years since I have known her, it feels like I have lost a lot with her passing. She touched everyone in her own inimitable ways and none of us will ever forget her for that.

In June, when Triveni told me that she was looking for some older movies for Lali to watch, I sent a few older movies from my collection, movies that I knew that she would enjoy.  I hope she got a chance to watch them, because that means that I gave back to her at least a little bit of the joy that her friendship has induced in all our lives.

Rest in peace, Lali. May your larking continue in heaven…

a. flying to the US in the next few weeks…

(or)

b. flying to India (preferably to Chennai) in the next few weeks…

(and)

… would be willing to carry a 26 inch long plastic/cardboard tube (click here or see below for contents) with them.

Yes, yes, yes! I know it’s trivial, but just indulge me!

Driving on the New Jersey Turnpike is a game of strategy, anticipation and the odd pitfall. Add to it, the (not so) random speed traps and it becomes one long 2.5 hour long game of chess.

Yes yes yes! Orey Clancy-esque only! Naan engeyyo poyiitten!