Sunday, March 18, 2007

momentous day for south asia at world cup

pakistan is out. india is not but if they get to super 8 it would probably be at our expense.

of the three south asian teams in group b bangladesh is the best placed in that they are sure of two wins now. we are better placed than india in that we have two games and probably need to win only one. if all three win two, our big margin of victory against bermuda will come in to play. that is why even remaining matches against bermuda are crucial.( but we need to win both anyway to make sure we carry points through to next round since we cannot know which of the other two will come with us) india of course has to win both their remaining matches with big margins if they want to get through.

i am not a fan of current indian cricket team (i am a fan of india the country but that is a different thing). i never liked ganguly in particular (hard to explain why but never liked the fellow). so i do not have much pity for them (esp when they can still push us out) but i do have lot of pity for sponsors of world cup. most of the top sponsors and lot of lesser ones are indian based. without them we would not have the world cup in the current scale. indian success is important for the sport.

that is why there is a real danger of undue pressure being put on our team and even on umpires before the next games by both official and unofficial quarters. (this is of course only speculation on my part). our board should take action to preemptively counter that.

anyway it is great that bangladesh is claiming its place in the top table. i was always surprised that they did not do that earlier. they have a cricket loving public of 150 million for devil's sake. they should be ahead of us by rights.

anyway at this rate we could well have bangladesh, ireland, and even kenya, in super 8 at the expense of india/us, pakistan, and england. that would be fun (if india not sri lanka is the one missing out)

full scorecars of saturday matches
bangladesh v india
ireland v pakistan



ps


the official worldcup website is down at the time of writing (for several hours in fact). stupid.

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btw it is also good that ireland is probably through. the fact that they are a rich country (they have a higher gdp per capita than england) and not good at other sports (except perhaps rugby) means that their success now (esp when it comes with st. patrick's day) will do nicely for cricket in the long term.

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i hoped to avoid writing anything on world cup but after spending a week in outstations ( mostly in trinco) and nights watching cricket, i am too tired to write anything else today. so since a week has passed since my last post i gave into temptation.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

it's a total turn around ain't it? deshies rock. i wonder to what extent the 'Whatmore' factor has influenced this uplifting of b'desh. don't know whether it's fair to say this, but i think whatmore has the charisma than any other cricket coach in the international arena. he seems to build teams out of scratch.

it feels as if the WC will see more surprises for the coming month. but one thing i saw as being unfair in some of the websites relating the WC (i don't if this is the case with the official website as well) is that when displaying the timetable, they have omitted the lesser known teams from the super 8 matches assuming that they will never get into that stage. those time tables carried the 8 best known teams and had requested the readers to replace appropriate teams if they didn't make it to the super 8. i think this is being unfair of the new comers. they should have displayed the timetable using group initials (A1, D4 etc) rather than using absolute names. So i guess b'desh has taught them that they will not be left off.

Anonymous said...

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