It’s business as usual

When I watched Deepika Padukone dance with Sunil Dutt and Jitendra on the silver screen in the opening song of Om Shanti Om, which was a super impose of the frames from classic movies on the current one, I thought it was a cinematography excellence. Little did I know that 4 years later we would witness the same in just concluded Eng vs Dravid test series.

10 years from now if you happen to watch the recording of the this series and you start moving from test match to test match, you see Dravid toiling and toiling hard as ever and rest of the players just kept coming and going. Just like what happened in the opening song of the movie Om Shanti Om, it was Dravid playing and moving forward from Test match to Test match, images of rest 10 were being super imposed one after the another.

As human we are all fond of patterns, and the pattern started right in the first session of the test match. Scene of Hamstring Khan limping off the field was episodic. Then we had a shades of Ishant which we saw 4 years ago, promising yet failing to deliver; supported by Sree who has limited his on field spats to 140 characters through the global medium of twitter. Praveen once said “I will swing the ball 100%” and probably was one bowler who kept swinging the ball right from the Caribbean until Oval.

Then we had a surprising move from the captain to draft a bowler who had last played the longer format during the British Raj. R P Singh, whose name had more fire than his deliveries. And the ever laughing Munaf probably on tourist visa was barred from entering the field even during drinks break. And then we had a McDowell’s `License to spin` singh, who never made it large, finally making way for a compact middle order batsman Mishra, whose leg spin landed right on the middle of the batsmen’s bat.

We then had Mukund who scored a century in practice match only when he was sure that he wouldn’t be playing any further. Then we flew in the panacea of INDIA cricket, Viru right from hospital bed, who took a quick commercial break from the dressing room twice in a match. He does every thing King's style even the ducks. Gauti was quite in Gambhir state, spent more time nursing his on field injuries.

Very Very Special looked Very Very Silly when he kept pulling it to the hands of midwicket each time; very typical of VVS, playing handsomely and getting out with a sign of disbelief. GOD finally woke up on the last day of the tour who atleast restored the 5 day cricket back, or else BCCI’s Million dollar spoke person Shastry and Gavaskar would have advocated for 4 day test cricket, to which BCCI would have convinced ICC to enforce new change. To which Michael Holding would have called International Compromise Committee.

IPL king Raina has more wickets than run in the oval test match. He sure is a true replacement for Yuvraj. If UV can’t play the short ball so can’t I, if Yuvraj can't play spin so can't I. Dhoni would be unhappy that he failed to use this test series as a practice for the upcoming CLT20. Captain Excuse had the game of his life time in the 3rd test, well of course 2 70's in a test match. Hope he doesn’t complain about too much cricket b/w IPL and CLT20 and that test cricket hurting IPL.

Despite every Wall street kept piling runs and showed the world
It's business as usual.

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Mera Gaon Seh Mera Desh

After the high profile IPL the focus now shifts from Rainbow Nation to the Nation when it always Rains, yes ENGLAND and with attention shifting to international cricket, it would a nice change to see players don their national colors. Playing for your franchise is one thing and playing for your NATIONAL team is totally different affair. The talks about value of a player, runs / dollar or wickets / dollars won’t dominate every time a player performs. Rather than having a faked City Vs City rivalry we now will have the real Country Vs Country rivalry. Matches like IND Vs PAK or AUS Vs NZ would bring back the tension and hype that existed on the field.

The IPL in rainbow nation with the local drummers and bugles’ along with the bollywood music played in the background created a carnival environment. Cloud and gloomy weather conditions in England compounded with “decent” crowds, who would either clap hands or sip bear, hopefully won’t take away the festival atmosphere that T20 brings along with itself. Bigger capacity grounds would increase crowd count.

There neither would be DLF maximums or CITI moments of success nor would the commentators thank the sponsors every 10 mins. Neither would Lalit Modi been shown talking on the phone every 15 mins. With no strategic timeouts, we would miss the glamour that was attached with Miss Bollywood South Africa and also the HEAT (Health Educate And Teach) convention which funded a lot of local student in SA. Players will miss definitely the hugging and kissing from their team owners.

Two things the players would carry from IPL; MONEY and INJURY. Money was all talked about throughout the IPL; injuries would now be talked about. No sooner would a player miss a game due to injury; an anti-IPL of statement of cricket overkill would be made. Already talks about Flintoff, Zaheer and Sehwag‘s fitness is being talked.

One thing that T20 lacked was and that IPL has provided is statistics or numbers; with so less T20 played prior T20 WC 2007 teams entered with an uncluttered mind, played mostly with instincts. Now with so many games and different scenarios and many unexpected results in IPL even the minnows would fancy their chances. 60 required in 4 overs, batting team would still fancy it, because they now have the right statistics to back them up. A sense of belief would seep in. And the memories of Rohit scoring the required 26 in the last over against Mortaza will give nightmares to every fielding captain when they arrive at a similar situation.

As they say attaining the top spot is easy maintaining that is tough, INDIA now face the burden of defending the World Cup title probably first time since 1983; this is something new to this INDIAN team. And in the recently concluded IPL we saw how Royals failed to live upto the expectation of defending the title. Hope the INDIAN team would be unfazed by the hype and would live by its expectation. Also like how Bangalore and Deccan bounced back one wouldn't mind Dutch or even England clinching the cup.

Let the focus shift on Mere Desh Ki Dharti from my Mera Gaon ki Chori.

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