World Cup Finals and Other Cricket-- My Take

I started this as a comment to knot2share's blog entry Sweet victory. It got quite long and decided to make it a separate blog entry.

You can see the highlights of the finals here.

Virat Kohli (I think it was him) gave one of the stumps to Tendulkar, instead of keeping it as his own souvenir. This was touching.

When Dhoni hit the last six, Yuvraj was one the other end and was coming to hug Dhoni. Dhoni's first thought was to get a stump for souvenir. ["We can do hug-vug later" he wrote ] He should have gotten all the six stumps and given it out to the deserving players. Surely Gambhir deserved one too. Of course, he (or anybody else including me) could hardly think straight.

To me, the following were the highlights:

1. Dhoni's batting. (He promoted himself in the batting order so that they could maintain the left-right combination. He also wrote that he wanted to take on Murali, being able to spot his doosra, having kept wickets for him in Chennai Super Kings. Yuvraj is suspect against spin, I think.)

2. Gambhir's batting. I wish that he had gotten that 100. It was a short, straight ball. He probably was tired. Adrenalin was also probably working overtime.

3. India's (especially Zahir's) bowling and fielding in the first 45 overs. We had them in a choke-hold of sorts. Jayawardene got them out of it. 276 was a daunting total.

4. The whole personality of Yuvraj. [He used to call Tendulkar grandpa, until Tendulkar threatened to call him names too ] He seems so unspoiled. There used to be a time when only city-boys took up cricket. This has changed a lot now. I get the impression that Yuvraj is a country boy.

5. Virat Kohli.
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During the post-match ceremonies, Sehwag said something about hiding 38 year old Tendulkar in the outfield. [I need a smiley here but am allowed only 4 per blog entry.]

Ravi Sastry asked the Indian team to come and pick up their medals in alphabetical order, calling for Ravichandran Ashwin. Who walks in first? Sehwag. Ravi Sastry made some joke about Sehwag always opens the innings and is used to walking in first.
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In the end, we were rather lucky. It could easily have gone the other way.
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Seeing how happy I am, my wife has been saying all morning that the next time the Indian team comes to England or the West Indies, I should go see the matches live.
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I live in a small town in the US midwest. There is a bigger city about 60 miles from me. The India Association there organized the viewing of the match, which was to start at 4.30 AM our time. If I left from home, I had to leave at 3 AM or so, which I didn't want to do. I went and stayed in a motel about 15 minutes from the announced site. I left the motel without checking out and reached the site only to find out that there was nobody there. This whole area was not a good (but not necessarily the worst) part of town. There was a small sign saying that the site was moved. I drove to the new site, which was a banquet hall in a restaurant. Fortunately, there were about 20 cars there.

They were projecting the picture from a Web site on to a big screen. Initially, the picture would go into 'buffering' mode a lot. After a while, they somehow improved the picture. They also projected the video from two different sites. Most of the time, at least one site was "moving". There was also about 30 seconds time difference between the two. If I missed seeing one one screen, I could always see it a few seconds later on the other screen.

I went by myself. My wife is not that crazy about cricket. There was a Telugu family sitting next to me, a man, a woman, and a twelve-year old child. They made the watching enjoyable. The woman -- a very friendly one -- was an ardent fan, making requests like "Gambhir, hit a six", "Dhoni, do something" For me, this was like going back in time. We were all high fiving each other, when Dhoni hit the first six. He is Mr. Cool on the outside at least. (He said that Yuvraj for one was constantly throwing up in the dressing room.) I wondered whether this lady is a member of IL.

This restaurant is having a party tonight where they are showing replays. They also have dancing scheduled. The point is that nobody wants to go back to real life. (I am not going to the party though.)
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I grew up as a cricket-lover. The main competition for my high school in Chennai was St.Bedes High School in Mylapore (though Don Bosco was also a bit of thorn on our side). We all believed that, during a close match, the Don Bosco priests caused rain to occur by praying and sulked collectively in the unfairness of it all. Almost every year, my school played both the junior and senior finals against St. Bedes. The finals were invariably played on a Saturday. Buying an English newspaper was a luxury my family could not afford. I would be highly anxious the whole weekend, dying to know the results. Come Monday, I could go to the school library and see the results in its paper. Once in a while, I would accidentally find out the results during the weekend itself, while playing tennis-ball cricket, for instance. If my school had won, my spirits would soar. Of course, I couldn't tell my colleagues that my family couldn't afford to buy The Hindu, for fear that they would stop associating with me. I was a good student and most families encouraged their kids spending time with me, but I always feared that there were definite limits to their tolerance.

You know the routine:

அருள் புரிவாய், கருணைக் கடலே

 

Indeed.

Cricket brings us together like very little else does.

 

> Forgive me if I am blabbering

You were not blabbering.

> hey, 38 is not old!

Agree

> I don't quite understand what a "dusra" is and felt quite inadequate to write about

In the days of the Net, you shouldn't feel inadequate about anything. Just about anything can be looked up. [Exceptions are of course theoretical physics and the behaviorism stuff I have been writing about, to mention a couple ]

An off spinner normally bowls off breaks -- it pitches to his left and moves to his right. Doosra is an off spinner bowling leg breaks with almost the same action -- this would pitch to his right and then move to his left.

Here is more information on the doosra.

A couple of interesting tidbits from the above link:

Bruce Elliott, the UWA professor who is also the ICC biomechanist, had made an interesting discovery in his dealings with finger spinners. "He said he had found that a lot of bowlers from the subcontinent could bowl the doosra legally, but not Caucasian bowlers."

Saqlain Mustaq, the developer of the doosra, claimed to have developed a new variant called the teesra, which is a top spinner disguised as an off spinner. [Top spinner has no side spin. The ball spins only in the forward direction.]

> But final overs are always like that with anybody isn't it?

Yes. I wish that they would do something about it. It makes the game a mockery sometime. Zahir's initial figures were something like 5-3-6-1, if I remember right.

Later.

 

> Sehwag said something about hiding 38 year old Tendulkar in the outfield

The Tamil association in a nearby town has a summer picnic each year, where we play tennis ball cricket. I played a couple of years ago. I have always thought of myself as this suave guy though I don't quite dive. After I gave away too many runs due to my slow running, one of the young guys said to me with a smile,

"Uncle, you better move here"

and hid me at the point position (close to the batsman), where I could cause only minimal damage

 

An old joke about cricket [the game played by eleven fools but watched by eleven thousand fools ]

A man is at the Lord's cricket ground. His son joins him a couple of hours later. This is how their conversation goes:

"I have bad news for you, pop. Our house burnt down."

"Oh?"

"And that's not the worst of it. Mum forgot to renew the home insurance."

"Awful news here too."

"Oh?"

"Hutton's is out."