Ishant Sharma to skip Delhi's first two Vijay Hazare Trophy matches

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="text-align: justify;"> Out-of-favour India pacer Ishant Sharma has excused himself from Delhi's first two Vijay Hazare Trophy (North Zone one dayers) matches citing fatigue after having bowled a lot of overs during the recently concluded Test series in New Zealand. Delhi will open their campaign against Jammu and Kashmir at the Feroz Shah Kotla ground on Thursday and will play the formidable Punjab side in their second game on March 1. Ishant will be missing both the matches. "Ishant has just come back from New Zealand. </div> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikpuxd5HvY9peW1jnRMvUKuRrVpV1uzalbqAMLnrHVK8olRLZ4WbULXx06iaD-yxYX7RWgk1UwR9jrKSAF26J0rJcybSovsODUi0We4ATIVouy1QIt2RprHsKsOiP2hT6xXs5C_MZ0IiJ2/s1600/Ishant+Sharma+to+skip+Delhi's+first+two+Vijay+Hazare+Trophy+matches.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikpuxd5HvY9peW1jnRMvUKuRrVpV1uzalbqAMLnrHVK8olRLZ4WbULXx06iaD-yxYX7RWgk1UwR9jrKSAF26J0rJcybSovsODUi0We4ATIVouy1QIt2RprHsKsOiP2hT6xXs5C_MZ0IiJ2/s1600/Ishant+Sharma+to+skip+Delhi's+first+two+Vijay+Hazare+Trophy+matches.jpg" /></a></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> He has bowled a lot of overs and had asked us for rest. That's why the team management has decided to give him rest for the first couple of games. That's why, he is not even training currently," Delhi's chief coach Sanjeev Sharma told PTI on Tuesday.</div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;">  Ishant has bowled 96 overs in two Test matches in New Zealand where he took 15 wickets including two six-wicket hauls. He was good in patches but overal very inconsistent. He bowled 62 overs in the second Test including 45 overs of wicketless bowling in the second innings when Brendon McCullum and Bradley-John Watling took the game away from India. Asked whether Ishant will be available for Delhi's third match against Himachal Pradesh, coach Sharma sounded positive. "We expect him to play in the match against Himachal Pradesh," Sharma said about the bowler who has taken 164 wickets from 55 Test matches. </div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;">  The other senior players like skipper Gautam Gambhir, Virender Sehwag and Ashish Nehra however went through the paces as it will be the start of some serious match practice before Indian Premier League kicks off in another 6-7 weeks' time.</div> </div>

Indian Cricket Vijay Hazare Ishant Sharma to skip Delhi's first two Vijay Hazare Trophy matches

Out-of-favour India pacer Ishant Sharma has excused himself from Delhi's first two Vijay Hazare Trophy (North Zone one dayers) matches...

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Cricket: I am so not done with it, after all – A Team India fan

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> As an Indian cricket fan, I have to admit, I am guilty of a few quirks. Every time my team wins, it doesn’t take any time for me to jump around like a maniac – like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone – screeching myself hoarse in the process. Age and maturity don’t enter into the equation and to be fair, they never have in all these years that I have been a fan of the Indian cricket team.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> Over the years that I have been a cricket fan, while relishing and reliving the ecstasy and spark of India’s victory, I have also had innumerable opportunities to experience the bitterness of losses as well. Glaring losses these have been too, humiliating the very construct of my – a fan’s – existence.</div> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXB3QVooHBorya8yzKjAuvJw-7EGk-IWFJ5wc8LZuF1lTiunZN_csmMjNpDAhbE3Zft-pquaxkTlVIjVytIeIrM5MFjsvTuJzuSnjOjuWwaBGAJ0KfSWvDZdeyt6d1ldAVS0dyFyCvQyKD/s1600/A+Team+India+fan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXB3QVooHBorya8yzKjAuvJw-7EGk-IWFJ5wc8LZuF1lTiunZN_csmMjNpDAhbE3Zft-pquaxkTlVIjVytIeIrM5MFjsvTuJzuSnjOjuWwaBGAJ0KfSWvDZdeyt6d1ldAVS0dyFyCvQyKD/s1600/A+Team+India+fan.jpg" /></a></div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> <br /></div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> Like the one suffered against New Zealand, not so long ago which piled too many insults on top of a very long list of injuries.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> Was it demoralising? Incredibly so. Was it demeaning? Absolutely. Was it the straw that broke the camel’s back; making me turn once and for all from Indian cricket and all that it entailed? No, definitely not!</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> Call me a masochist for emphatically deciding to continue to follow the game that has only brought forth agony and frustration in the past few months. But no matter what tags may float around me, it isn’t going to bother me or detract me from being a foul weather fan for my team and by extension, the sport that most of my countrymen revere. For, supporting the Indian cricket team has always meant going through an indescribable roller-coaster ride where losses invariably tag along the wins in close succession, much to a fan’s chagrin.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> But, despite the inexplicable vagaries in Indian cricketing fortunes, I still believe the team can and will be able to overturn these humiliations into something positive and concrete. It’s not blind faith that makes me say so. But testimonies from various events in the past where the Indian cricket team has gone on to turn tables on all the teams that abased them in the first place.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> My surety however isn’t lackadaisical in nature and nor do I wish to defend the outrageous insipidity of the Indian cricket team while at New Zealand. If I were to say it bluntly, they were beyond pathetic in the way they lost the second Test despite having a commanding lead to start with.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> The whole defensiveness in their game reeked of casualness and nonchalant over-confidence as if they had nothing to lose. But no matter with whose assistances Brendon McCullum heaped on the runs, the situation is going to get salvaged by doing the blame game routine.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> Yes, changes are needed – more forceful than ever before – and I totally accede to this, but honestly, this scenario isn’t at all unlike old wine in a new bottle. One horrifying series; crucify the captain and his tactics. One miserable run overseas; discuss the potentiality of getting a new guy onboard who will perhaps do better in the next couple of tourneys and then fall short in some other country.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> The piece-by-piece, meticulous dissection of team members – names who otherwise were the reigning favourites – does give some sort of satisfaction by allowing pent-up emotions to be vented out.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> But I realised one thing that I could never be frustrated with the sport or with the sportsmen for long. Because, at the end of the day, no matter how savage the satisfaction gained by nailing the cricketers’ mistakes, cricket shall the first sport that got me hooked to the genre – if I could call it that – in the first place.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> The enigmatic attraction of all those years ago that kept me glued to the TV set even when I was so young that I could barely distinguish offside from onside or a leg spinner from an off spinner or clearly define the various fielding positions.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> The one thing that never failed to make me pause everything else in my life to watch a bunch of people create an unsurpassable clarity on the field, in the midst of incessant chaos prevailing all around it; like now, with all these chaos hovering around.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> However, there seems to be no clarity anymore giving me all the more reason to put all other stuff on hold and follow the sport in anticipation that better things and better days will soon follow for Indian cricket, repeating the queer cycle that seems to hound Indian cricket, time-after-time and generation-after-generation.</div> <div> <br /></div> </div>

Cricket News Indian Cricket Cricket: I am so not done with it, after all – A Team India fan

As an Indian cricket fan, I have to admit, I am guilty of a few quirks. Every time my team wins, it doesn’t take any time for me to jump a...

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What Indian cricket needs, but doesn’t want

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_2118728" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 1px; width: 604px;"> <div class="wp-caption-text" style="color: dimgrey; font-size: 10pt; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> India coach Duncan Fletcher</div> </div> <div class="first" style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> They say a cat has nine lives. Despite the existence of numerous speculations on reincarnation and rebirth, a man cannot have more; that is, if you are not Duncan Fletcher – the tutor who seems to have consumed the nectar of immortality. The Indian cricket team or rather its fortunes have taken a turn from bad to worse and worse to hopelessly pathetic. The misery and misfortune suffered in foreign shores for three horrendous years and four baffling tours are enough to rip open a coach’s heart, clatter his ego and smash – not dent – his self-confidence. But Fletcher is in a trance, his stance depicting one of total obliviousness to the happenings around.</div> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFs-vZ7GYTWWZUPs_cjfOZBwZ5rU7ul9H-Zui1p9OlhTkZENVkXJC2jnr1ShRZm_dnnU3MfWrVYAjk-4NprykcRK4KyJQVRY0JsYGprrvnagcP7-wbCuz3fGYO5av0P17Kv4lCRlwxocfC/s1600/What+Indian+cricket+needs,+but+doesn%E2%80%99t+want.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFs-vZ7GYTWWZUPs_cjfOZBwZ5rU7ul9H-Zui1p9OlhTkZENVkXJC2jnr1ShRZm_dnnU3MfWrVYAjk-4NprykcRK4KyJQVRY0JsYGprrvnagcP7-wbCuz3fGYO5av0P17Kv4lCRlwxocfC/s1600/What+Indian+cricket+needs,+but+doesn%E2%80%99t+want.jpg" /></a></div> <div class="first" style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> <br /></div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> Coach Duncan, though sporting an unflappable and unassuming demeanour, isn’t exactly oozing confidence at the moment, but rather making a mockery of himself by donning the cloak of unscrupulousness. Fletcher stood his ground and stuck to his job despite suffering humiliating whitewashes against mighty oppositions and embarrassing defeats from lowly ranked counterparts. Where others in his shoes would have voluntarily disappeared into ignominy before getting their heads chopped, Duncan neither called it quits nor received the sack. He was gifted gilded flowers, not the guillotine.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> The BCCI has been an embodiment of consistency. So stubborn and consistently faulty with its decisions, putting to shame even the players, for whom consistency seems a word too hard to spell of late. One is at his wits end trying to figure out why BCCI seems so ‘immune’ to change. And it is the employer’s reluctance to swim against the tide that has affected its highest paid employee, too. Indian cricket is blessed with a skipper who has forgotten the art of innovation, who is becoming dangerously risk averse by the day and shoves suggestions to change his baffling tactics, down the drain. The ‘junta’ is screaming, the fans are yelling and the game’s connoisseurs are pleading. They need aggression. They need flair. They need captains who can conjure up victories from the jaws of defeat.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> Most importantly they need a coach who can knock some sense into the skipper’s skull when he isn’t ticking the right boxes. What isn’t wanted by any stretch of imagination is a tutor who sings a lullaby to the skipper who is already in a deep slumber. Duncan Fletcher needs to, or more appropriately, should have asked Dhoni to take the bull by the horns when the ship was half sunk during the shambolic overseas campaigns. Fletcher was the guide who was expected to imbue imagination and aggression into a jaded outfit and a drained skipper rather than joining hands to play it safe, dull draws and astounding defeats from winning positions being the unfortunate result. The BCCI doesn’t want what the game in the country needs.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> What is bewildering beyond belief is the fact that the BCCI persisted with Fletcher after the Zimbabwean had the most abysmal couple of years in 2011-2013. A team in transition, a truckload of legends calling it a day and a highly successful predecessor made it unfair to compare or judge Fletcher at that juncture. Fair enough. But it has been too long a run – three springs to be precise – too unsuccessful a tourney for Duncan Fletcher with Indian cricket. India has seen enough of Duncan. His coaching pedagogy is no longer a one Indians would buy at face value. He doesn’t possesses the innovative man management skills of a Kirsten, the demeanour of a strict taskmaster like an Andy Flower or even the plain, unabridged aggression of Darren ‘Boof’ Lehmann.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> Whatever the reason is, just like runs over a period of time are an accepted testimony of a batsman’s quality and wickets the yardstick to a bowler’s greatness, it is the results that speak for a coach’s contribution to value creation.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> Duncan Fletcher’s contract is all set to expire on the first of April. In one way or the other his comeuppance for enduring erratic performances for an eternity was nigh. That he has been brought to mortal grounds is all but evident by the fact that the BCCI has begun its search for a new man at the helm of things. Now, here is another example of BCCI’s recalcitrance, the obstinacy to embrace a change. The board’s obsession with foreign coaches is a fact that is as big a secret as a marketplace gossip.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> The question is – is the trade-off BCCI is doing by roping in foreign tutors over local gurus worthwhile? We pay imported tutors double the money. Indian cricket’s governing body is richer than probably the entire cricketing world put together, so bucks aren’t the brooding issue. But bucks spent should be an investment, not an expense. For the record, India won its lone ICC silverware in T20 when Lalchand Rajput and Venkatesh Prasad were the men in charge. Same goes for the historic triumph at Trent Bridge in 2007.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> The barrier begins from the medium of communication and the difference in culture compounds the lack of a proper conduit for free exchange of thoughts and ideas. Take the case of an Indian heavy weight like a Sourav Ganguly for example. Men like a Ganguly or a Dravid who know the Indian dressing room culture inside out seamlessly fit into the scheme of things right from the first day on the job, know where to draw the line and when to take it easy. It is in no way brushing aside the value that an internationally acclaimed personality like Kirsten or Flower brings to the table, but when Indian legends are taking it easy on the couch, it only makes sense to leverage their expertise to the fullest.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> Indian cricket is at the crossroads. The road towards lost glory is certainly the one that hasn’t had the maximum of footfalls. At least it is an alien territory for Indian cricket or rather its bosses. Status quo, if maintained is akin to embarking on a voyage in the quest of deeper pitfalls. Indian cricket needs a change at the helm, which most of the bosses and vested interests find it difficult to digest. Variety is the spice of life, the ultimate verity that should drive our decisions by every move or word. At least for the time being.</div> <div style="background-color: white; color: dimgrey; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 3px; text-align: justify;"> <i style="color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 12px; text-align: start;">Author : Prashant C</i></div> </div>

Cricket News Indian Cricket What Indian cricket needs, but doesn’t want

India coach Duncan Fletcher They say a cat has nine lives. Despite the existence of numerous speculations on reincarnation and rebirth...

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