Archive for the 'Sport' Category

The fibbers off the field

Published on September 2, 2010 in Cricket and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Trevor Chesterfield, a cricket journalist for over 50 years, in The Indian Express:

From the time they were exposed as cheats four years ago over the ball-tampering issue at The Oval, there has been a growing stench about modern Pakistan cricket — which has developed the habit of eschewing openness and with it, integrity.

That was a moment when Darrell Hair, and the strict and fair umpiring levels employed, were questioned by those who knew they had been fiddling with the ball; then they lied about it to escape being shown up as villains in a dishonest caper, all against the tenets of fair play.

With such a background, it should surprise no one that such Luddites as these have again openly displayed how their management is as dysfunctional, maladjusted and incompetent as it has been since the early 1990s. Ijaz Butt, the current president of the Pakistan Cricket Board is as fundamentally flawed in his administration as he was over the disastrous terrorist attack on the Sri Lanka cricket team’s bus in Lahore in March 2009.

From the time they were exposed as cheats four years ago over the ball-tampering issue at The Oval, there has been a growing stench about modern Pakistan cricket — which has developed the habit of eschewing openness and with it, integrity. More:

Pakistan: sadly, there’s only one Imran Khan

Published on September 1, 2010 in Cricket, Pakistan and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Tariq Ali in The Guardian:

Poor Pakistan. Floods of biblical proportions; millions homeless; a president who pretends to be shocked by cricket’s latest betting scandal when his own persona is the embodiment of corruption. A prime minister shedding crocodile tears because of the cricketing “shame” rather than tending to allegations that flood-relief money has gone missing. And now a sleep-walking cricket captain attempting to deny the ugly truth, but without real conviction, hoping against hope that he will ride out the crisis like others before him and that his bosses in Pakistan’s cricket establishment will cast a veil over this one as well.

Even if guilty, Salman Butt and his vice-captain Kamran Akmal will try to give the appearance of having no idea of the seriousness of the allegations and will try to talk their way back, hoping, as in the past, that after a few gentle raps on the knuckles they can revert to business as usual. That would be a real tragedy, a green light to semi-legalise match fixing, and not just in Pakistan.

The Pakistan Cricket Board is a long-standing joke, its chairmen replaced with every change of government. The current boss, Ijaz Butt, is the brother-in-law of Pakistan’s defence minister, a crony of President Zardari. The International Cricket Council and the England and Wales Cricket Board – somewhat pathetic bodies dominated by political and financial interests respectively – should not fudge this one. Whether Pakistan batting collapses were psychological or based on material interests we still do not know. But the moral collapse of this team stares all cricket-lovers in the face. Any perpetrators should be on the next plane home and the ringleaders given life bans. If guilty, the teenage bowling sensation Mohammad Amir should be banned for some years. His idol, Wasim Akram, is not the best role model on this front. More:

Cricket in the dock

Published on August 30, 2010 in Cricket and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

The News of the World has smashed a multi-million pound cricket match-fixing ring which rigged the current Lord’s Test between England and Pakistan:

In the most sensational sporting scandal ever, bowlers Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif delivered THREE blatant no-balls to order.

Their London-based fixer Mazhar Majeed, who let us in on the betting scam for £150,000, crowed “this is no coincidence” before the bent duo made duff deliveries at PRECISELY the moments promised to our reporter.

Armed with our damning dossier of video evidence, Scotland Yard launched their own probe into the scandal.

Last night three players – captain Salman Butt, and bowlers Amir and Asif hade their mobile phones seized by officers.

Millions around the world watched Pakistan star bowlers Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif deliver three no-balls in the Test against England on Thursday and Friday at the historic home of cricket, Lord’s in London.

Unsuspecting fans packed the ground yesterday to watch Pakistan collapse as they were bowled out for 74 in their first innings and forced to follow on. More:

Mystery at the top of the world

Published on August 27, 2010 in Nepal and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Did George Mallory make it to the summit of Everest before he died? Graham Hoyland argues that he couldn’t have – due to a deadly combination of bad weather and worse luck. From The Independent:

His body lay half-buried in the frozen scree, face-down and spread-eagled in his last agony. Above George Mallory, a couple of thousand feet higher, the summit of Everest stood impassively waiting for other men to try to conquer the highest mountain in the world. For me, also, it was the end of a long quest.

At the age of 12, I met my relative Howard Somervell, a friend of George Mallory’s who watched him leave on his last attempt to climb the mountain in June 1924. Somervell told me about his own attempt to climb the mountain without oxygen, and how he nearly suffocated due to a frostbitten larynx. He turned back 1,000 feet from the top.

“We met Mallory at the North Col on his way up. He said to me that he had forgotten his camera, and I lent him mine. ‘So if my camera was ever found,’” he said, ‘you could prove that Mallory got to the top.’” It was a throwaway remark, which he probably made a hundred times in the course of telling this story, but this time it found its mark.

I spent years trying to prove Mallory had climbed the mountain and became the 15th Briton to climb the mountain, in 1993. In 1999, I organised a BBC-funded expedition to look for Somervell’s camera. Instead the searchers found Mallory’s body. There was no camera, though, and still no answer to the biggest mystery in mountaineering: who climbed Mount Everest first? More:

Indian golfer Arjun Atwal wins US PGA tour title

Published on August 24, 2010 in Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Arjun Atwal. (Image: pgatour.com)

From The Telegraph:

Fifteen years after turning pro, the Asansol-born Arjun Atwal has become the first golfer from India to win a US PGA Tour event. He entered the record books in Greensboro yesterday by topping in the Wyndham Championship.

The 37-year-old Atwal, who has close ties with Calcutta and the Royal Calcutta Golf Club (RCGC), spoke to The Telegraph from his Orlando residence this morning — it was then well past 1am in Florida and he’d just arrived from North Carolina.

Excerpts:

Q: What were your first thoughts after the biggest win for an Indian?

A: (Laughs) Not much, actually… It didn’t sink in immediately.

Q: But you must have been aware that you’d created history, scripted a defining moment in India’s golf…

A: It’s for you, in the media, to dwell on the history bit… I wasn’t thinking of it. Rather, I was focused on what I needed to do… Where I’m concerned, I see this win as the fulfilment of something I’d set out to achieve many years ago… It’s personal gratification… I’d been working hard, but not getting the results… Today, it feels good.

Q: So, what made the difference in Greensboro?

A: I was able to put together four rounds of good golf, I was consistent. I’d been playing well in recent months, but never for four rounds in one tournament. Things changed in the Wyndham Championship. More:

Sex and the Games

Published on August 21, 2010 in India and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Come October, Delhi will host the Commonwealth Games. There is an entire sex industry readying itself for business. Akshay Sawai and Pallavi Polanki in Open:

The man who answers the phone at the escort services office calls himself ‘Sam’. He wants a face-to-face meeting at Mahipalpur, a suburb close to the airport, before he can seal the deal. Hopefully, he is not holding his breath.

In contrast, the lady at Delhi 69 Escorts, which describes itself as an ‘Exclusive Delhi Escorts Agency’, seems a lot more at ease with phone conversations. Perhaps because this time it is a man with a European accent calling. In a recorded conversation available with Open, this is what the lady on the other side of the line has to say: “For Commonwealth Games, you will have to make advance bookings. We already have so many bookings for Commonwealth, so many bookings. We definitely recommend prior bookings, we cannot guarantee the availability of girls for Commonwealth. Rates will depend on the profile [of the girl], we don’t have fixed rates, the charges may vary according to profile… We have Russian girls, but I would suggest you go for Indian girls. They are more high profile, they speak well, they are educated, and they are fluent in English.” Currently, Delhi 69’s minimum charge is Rs 20,000. She claims it could even go up to Rs 50,000 during the Games.

All this, you’d think, is hush hush. Evidently not. Senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, in whom the CWG has found its sharpest critic yet, wondered aloud about the sexual aspect of the Games on a televised debate recently. “The media have reported that there are going to be 150 condom vending machines installed in the Games Village alone,” Aiyar said. “The report says that 3,000 to 3,300 packets of condoms will be sold every day from these machines, and that each packet contains two condoms, which means over a 15-day period, there will be one lakh condoms sold. What is the game that is going to be played at the Commonwealth Games? Is this sex tourism or sports tourism?” More:

Mallakhamb — Indian pole gymnastics

Published on August 15, 2010 in India and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Saving the polo festival at the world’s highest pitch

Published on August 12, 2010 in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sport and Travel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The world’s highest polo pitch is host to Pakistan’s Shandur Polo Festival, an annual event attended by thousands. But with one of the leading teams pulling out this year due to a land dispute, its future prospects are in doubt. Rebecca Conway in The National:

Wind whips across the 3,700m, high Shandur Pass in northern Pakistan, stirring the cobalt waters of the Shandur lake and sending smoke from cooking fires spiralling over a gathering crowd.

Dappled sunlight picks out small groups putting up tents, drinking chai and greeting friends, to a backdrop of rising and falling notes from gathered musicians. The start of northern Pakistan’s Shandur Polo Festival is bringing life to a barren land.

A silent and uninhabited stretch of ground that straddles the mountain peaks between the districts of Gilgit – to Pakistan’s east on the Karakorum Highway, and Chitral, north of the city of Peshawar on Pakistan’s Afghan border – the Shandur Pass is covered in snow for half the year.

Surrounded by ice-capped peaks, scattered with tiny teahouses, and more used to playing host to grazing animals and the northern bus route that ferries passengers over the mountains, for three days in July every year the pass takes on a new identity and welcomes around 20,000 visitors and tradesmen for a sporting event steeped in history and one which sustains a very modern rivalry. More:

Let the Commonwealth Games begin

Published on August 7, 2010 in India, Politics and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Shekhar Gupta in The Indian Express:

Demonising the Commonwealth Games just because people made money in some deals (the London limo deal, by the way, was worth a total of Rs 1.7 crore, so you can guess how much money someone would have made from it) is indeed colossal stupidity. It also highlights this worrying twitterisation of our profession where you charge without checking, and then use a broad brush dripping with black to paint whatever you feel like. Or run with viewer/ reader comments like: I won’t go to the Games because the stadiums are so unsafe there will be a risk to my life.

There is no argument that sporting events of this size and prestige are important to nations. The Congress leadership, which has dumped these Games on their squabbling functionaries, some of whom nurse vicious mutual antagonisms, would do well to remember the way Indira Gandhi showed commitment to Asiad ’82, with her call of “India can do it.” She was honoured by Juan Antonio Samaranch, the then IOC chief, with the Golden Olympic Order, the first Asian and the first woman to receive it. Now her party takes great pride in withdrawing from the 2018 Asiad bid as if India cannot do in 2018 what it could 36 and 68 years earlier (1982 and 1950). And all because you do not like Suresh Kalmadi’s face.

These Games must be saved, from Suresh Kalmadi, and from the rest of us feral beasts (apologies to Tony Blair). Indira Gandhi threw her son, then just over 35 and so new to politics, into Asiad ’82 and it became his launch pad and one of his finest moments. This has been done around the world. In the US, Mitt Romney built a national profile by organising a great Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Obama himself went to lobby for the 2016 Olympics. Here, we take on the responsibility of conducting our biggest sporting event so far, and can get no one higher than our sports minister to defend them, and that too apologetically. How far backwards we have slipped in the three decades since Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. More:

Sachin Tendulkar’s blood used to prepare special edition of his memoirs

Published on July 20, 2010 in Books and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

De luxe version of the Tendulkar Opus, costing £49,000 ($75,000), features cricketer’s blood mixed into paper pulp, tinting the signature page. In The Guardian:

Worship of cricket’s “little master”, Sachin Tendulkar, is set to cross a new boundary, as a luxury book publisher brings out a special edition of his autobiography made with the batsman’s blood.

Only for the most dedicated of fans, the “blood edition” of the Tendulkar Opus, which also includes unpublished family pictures and Tendulkar’s thoughts about his career, weighs 37kg, measures half a metre square and stretches to 852 pages edged in gold leaf, costing $75,000 (£49,000). Out next February, only 10 copies are being printed and they have all already been pre-ordered.

“The signature page will be mixed with Sachin’s blood – mixed into the paper pulp so it’s a red resin. It is what it is – you will have Sachin’s blood on the page,” said publisher Kraken Media’s chief executive Karl Fowler. “It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, it’s not to everyone’s taste and some may think it’s a bit weird. But the key thing here is that Sachin Tendulkar to millions of people is a religious icon. And we thought how, in a publishing form, can you get as close to your god as possible?” More:

Swinging away: how cricket and baseball connect

Published on July 15, 2010 in Cricket and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

An exhibition at Lord’s pavilion finds that the two bat and ball games have more in common than previously thought, reports John F Burns in the New York Times

Flickr: Duncan's photostream

There was a time when the discreet men in blazers who run Lord’s cricket ground in London would have considered it an abomination to equate baseball with cricket in any fashion. Yet, there it is, an exhibition behind the famed Lord’s pavilion, cricket’s holy of holies, celebrating the similarities — and, in case anybody thought cricket’s traditionalists had run up the white flag, the differences — between cricket and baseball.

In witness of how much has changed in English attitudes toward America’s national game, the exhibition is being jointly hosted by the Marylebone Cricket Club, for more than 200 years the rule maker in worldwide cricket, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. The Hall of Fame will host the exhibit beginning next April, representing baseball’s own start on coming to terms with a game that many baseball enthusiasts have long loved to disparage. more

 

India’s Formula One driver learns as he goes

Published on July 14, 2010 in Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

From The New York Times:

Coimbatore, India, is many hard miles from the asphalt-paved speed bowls in the United States, where a 33-year-old driver named Narain Karthikeyan has come to chase fame and fortune — and perhaps something bigger — in Nascar’s truck-racing division.

Karthikeyan is a former Formula One driver drawn to Nascar. He has a ride with a year-old team, Starbeast Motorsports, that aspires to field a stock car for him in the Sprint Cup series, Nascar’s top level.

The faster Karthikeyan, the most famous racecar driver in India, drives, the more exposure he — and racing — get in his native country, which has a population of 1.2 billion. More exposure tends to draw more corporate sponsorship, and his efforts could attract companies looking to extend their global reach.

But achieving success, on the track in the United States and off it in India, may not be easy. Akshay Sawai, an Indian sports journalist for Open magazine, wrote in an e-mail message that Nascar remains a fringe sport in India. Cricket is king, and Formula One is the most followed motorsport. Karthikeyan will have to do particularly well to make an impact in India, Sawai said. More:

Top sports salaries

Published on July 13, 2010 in Business and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

After the World Cup, this graphic comparing soccer stars’ salaries to that of other professional sports players. It would be interesting to see how our big league cricketers compare. From the online personal finance website mint.com. Click on the image for large view.

Dhoni signs Rs 200-crore (42 million) deal, beats Sachin Tendulkar [One crore = 10 million]: In The Indian Express, and at AFP

The Dhoni-Shakshi love story

Published on July 11, 2010 in Cricket, India and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Indian cricket captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni married Sakshi, a 21-year-old management student,at the weekend. From Hindustan Times:

She came, he saw, she conquered. And the most ironic part: Sakshi Singh Rawat didn’t even have to make an effort to capture the interest of India’s most eligible bachelor. The two first met at the Taj Bengal in Kolkata in November-December, 2007. Yudhajit Dutta, Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s manager and one of his closest friends, and Sakshi, who was interning at the hotel, were pals.

India were playing Pakistan at the Eden Gardens and staying at the Taj, and Dutta dropped in to meet Dhoni. He also called Sakshi up and asked her to stop by. It was, coincidentally, Sakshi’s last day at the Taj Bengal, so some would say their meeting was fated.

Sakshi dropped in, was introduced to Dhoni and they went their separate ways. Unknown to Sakshi, Dhoni asked Dutta for her phone number and texted her. In fact, say sources, Sakshi did not believe it was Dhoni texting her when he first did.

It took a few months of serious wooing on Dhoni’s part before they started dating in March 2008.

She attended Dhoni’s birthday bash in 2008 in Mumbai, but they did not spend time alone till Dhoni took an hour off from his friends to drop her back to a relative’s place.

From there on, their love story has been India’s best-kept secret, through the two years till they finally got married last Sunday. More:

Also read: Girl next door

In search of the perfect round rolling object

Published on June 28, 2010 in Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

The soccer ball brought to Kashmir in 1890 is a far cry from the hi-tech one of today – so’s the game. Ian Jack in The Guardian:

When Cecil Tyndale-Biscoe came to Kashmir in 1890 his ambition was to make men, or MEN! as he tended to think of them. As an Anglican missionary and educationist, he firmly believed that physical exercise, sportsmanship and a good sense of humour could work wonders for the Kashmiri population and bring it up to the best British Christian standards. There were some early shocks – his discovery, for example, of the Srinagar Sodomy Society – but Tyndale-Biscoe’s will prevailed; he was a delicately made man, small enough to cox at Cambridge, but a sickly childhood had made him plucky. Ignoring local traditions and caste prejudices, he taught Kashmiri boys how to swim, skate and row, which none of them was at all keen to do (swimming was wet, skating was cold, and rowing boats in Kashmir was a labourer’s occupation). He rode Kashmir’s first bicycle and chased pornographers from the bazaar. All these events were sensational, but nothing could equal the consternation that greeted the sight of Kashmir’s first football.

He brought it back from a trip to Bombay in 1891, together with a new wife who was fresh off the ship from England. Then he assembled the school and held up the ball. The boys’ reaction is recorded in his autobiography (Tyndale-Biscoe of Kashmir, 1951). “What is that?” the boys asked.

T-B: “It is a football.”

Boys: “What is the use of it?”

T-B: “For playing a game.”

Boys: “Shall we receive any money if we play that game?”

T-B: “No!”

Boys: “Then we will not play that game.”

The real protest, however, came when Tyndale-Biscoe disclosed that his ball was made of leather. Many of his pupils were from orthodox Brahmin families, for whom the skin of a dead cow was jutha – unholy, polluting – and forbidden to touch. More

The World Cup and the new PC (post-colonial) world

Published on June 26, 2010 in Economy and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

The vuvuzela heralds a new world order where colonial powers of the old world (Portugal, France an an increasingly shaky England) face-off with emerging BRIC economies. In Mail & Guardian, Lyal White finds significance in the Brazil-Portugal World Cup match.

The Fifa World Cup represents all the great virtues of globalisation. As teams, cultures and national pride come together, all vying for the top spot and global recognition, it provides a unique snapshot of the world across political, economic and religious divides and a retrospective view of the dynamics shaping our ever-changing world order.

Few games depict these changes better than the group-of-death clash between Portugal and Brazil: a former colonial power from the so-called “old world” versus an emerging global power from the developing south. While Brazil is on the rise, Portugal is the latest European basket case teetering on the brink of default. more

[pic/Flickr/Toksuede's photostream]

What went wrong with Yuvraj Singh

Published on June 13, 2010 in Cricket, India and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Sandeep Dwivedi in The Indian Express:

At the famous Mumbai maidans just outside Churchgate, the bar to judge a batsman is historically high. It is higher for those who don’t belong to the city. When it comes to cricket, Mumbai is proudly parochial and notoriously inexpressive about the batting skills of someone who doesn’t have Shivaji Park or Dada Union mentions on their CV.

But in the mid-’90s, the maidan-regulars made an exception — unbelievable for a batsman from north India. As a 14-year-old day-scholar from Chandigarh at his father Yograj Singh’s playing-days mate Dilip Vengsarkar’s academy at Azad maidan, Yuvraj Singh shattered a few myths. He belied that stereotypical image of batsmen from the North. He wasn’t dismissed as another air-head slogger but was seen as a technically perfect batsman blessed with timing with a knack for hitting big sixes.

The tales about his tall hits that sailed over the palm trees lining the maidan and landed threateningly close to the crowd of evening commuters heading home, got exaggerated after every successive narration. “Ball ko limbu bana deta hai (He turns cricket balls into lemons),” they said, describing the ball’s diminishing dimension when on the tip of the parabola that Yuvraj’s towering sixes drew. More:

When Bapu kicked the ball

Published on June 12, 2010 in Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Mahatma Gandhi was a fan of the game, and considered it more egalitarian than cricket. in South Africa, he even used football as a vehicle to disseminate his ideas about non-violence. Mario Rodrigues in Mint Lounge:

When he was young, Gandhi was not impervious to the romance of cricket. He played the game at the Rajkumar College in Rajkot, also the alma mater of his contemporary, Ranjitsinhji of Nawanagar. There are a few anecdotes about Gandhi and cricket, and the one most remembered is his disapproval of the communally oriented Quadrangular/ Pentangular cricket tournament in Mumbai during the freedom struggle in the 1930s and 1940s because of its divisive agenda. But according to existing knowledge, he was not directly involved in the game.

Unknown to most Indians, Gandhi was a huge football aficionado and his involvement with the game was long and passionate. He never became a professional or became famous as a player, but he preferred football to cricket.

When he began his struggle in South Africa, Gandhi used the game to promote his political philosophy of non-violent resistance and to socially uplift and integrate the Indian community in the “rainbow republic”. More:

World Cup — Mumbai version

Published on June 12, 2010 in Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Arun Janardhan in Mint on Mumbai’s Friendship Cup that coincides with the Fifa World Cup and intends to bring children closer to the tournament being held in South Africa:

The Friendship Cup, like the World Cup that started on Friday, will have 32 teams representing that many countries, divided into eight groups, with a final on 19 June. So Patnaik’s “Spain” will be in Group H, with Switzerland, Chile and Honduras. Each team will play just one knock-out match in its group—unlike the World Cup where every team plays the other before the group leaders advance to the second stage.

The other variation is in the names. “Spain” will joyfully be called “Spanish Idiots” and “Switzerland” is “Swiss Chocolate”, but the players will try and get their jerseys as similar to the countries they represent, including, in some cases, getting the name of the sponsor.

At a practice session on Thursday at the Goan Sports Association grounds near Churchgate, Patnaik presented a range of teenage contradictions. Dressed in a Brazilian yellow-green jersey bearing the name of Ronaldinho on the back, he says his favourite team was England, but since they could not get that team, he was happy with Spain, which had his favourite player Xavi. “I want to play like him, I want to be him,” says Patnaik, after a busy exchange of headers with a player in Argentine blue-white bold stripes. More:

Everest team forced to leave sick British climber to die

Published on June 2, 2010 in Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Andy McSmith in The Independent:

At one o’clock in the afternoon, the British climber Peter Kinloch was on the roof of the world, in bright sunlight, taking photographs of the Himalayas below, “elated, cheery and bubbly”.

But Mount Everest is now his grave, because only minutes later, he suddenly went blind and had to be abandoned to die from the cold.

As the team descended, Mr Kinloch’s guides noticed that he seemed to lose co-ordination. He would slip and stumble, then resume walking normally. After an hour, he made a surprising request to the team leader, David O’Brien, to be shown how to get down the ladders. At first he said he was having difficulty seeing, then he admitted that he could not see anything.

It took four hours for Mr O’Brien and a sherpa to help the stricken climber down to Mushroom Rock, barely 1,000ft below the summit. Two more sherpas arrived and for the next eight hours they all struggled to bring Mr Kinloch,28, down the mountain, administering drugs and oxygen. But they were now dangerously close to needing rescue themselves, and had to abandon him and struggled back into camp at 5.30am, exhausted and suffering from hypothermia and frostbite.

Mr Kinloch’s body is still in Mount Everest’s “death zone” and may never be recovered. More

The perplexing world of the Pakistan cricket team

Published on May 13, 2010 in Cricket, Pakistan and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: .

From Dawn:

GROS ISLET, Saint Lucia: They can’t play at home, they have arrived in the Caribbean without several senior players, a former coach has questioned their sanity and yet they are in the World Twenty20 semi-finals.

Welcome, to what seems, is the often perplexing world of the Pakistan cricket team, who will continue the defence of their World Twenty20 title against Australia at the Beausejour Stadium here on Friday.

Last year’s attack on the Sri Lanka team bus in Lahore effectively led to the suspension of international cricket in Pakistan and turned the national side into globe-trotters denied the chance to play in front of their own fans.

If that were not bad enough, a wretched tour of Australia, where Pakistan lost all three Tests, five one-dayers and a Twenty20 match led to seven players being either banned or fined by the Pakistan Cricket Board. More:

Nita Ambani on IPL and cricket

Published on May 4, 2010 in Business, Cricket, India and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Nita Ambani, wife of Reliance Industries Limited chief Mukesh Ambani and co-owner of Mumbai Indians, has been the driving force behind the team, right from picking up young talent from Ranji teams to travelling and celebrating with the boys. In conversation with Indian Express Editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta:

SG: You said you really learnt a lot from them.

Nita Ambani: Yes. I think sports is the greatest unifier and leveller. You look at the humility that Sachin has, in spite of achieving so much, and how dedicated he is to this game. Every time I would talk to the team before we went on the field, all I would say was give it your best and enjoy yourself and cherish every moment on the field because that’s what Sachin does. At 37, he has the energy of a 20-year-old. It’s amazing. He would be practising at the nets for three hours in the morning.

I believe you really wanted to win this one.

Nita Ambani: Yes, I wanted to. We all wanted to. But then, you may want some things but you have to be happy that you have achieved so much. We were the table toppers all through.

You have some very young people in your team.

Nita Ambani: Yes. There are amazing stories to tell about each one of them. Saurabh Tiwary comes from Jharkhand and they call him the left-handed Dhoni–he is a hard-hitter. When we celebrated Sachin’s birthday one day before the finals, everyone had something to say to Sachin. So, Saurabh goes up and says: “Paaji, main aapke liye kya bolun? Aapne jitney saal cricket ko diyein hain, I’m not even that old. I am only 20 years old.” I thought that was heartwarming. Then we have Aditya Thare who is a fisherman’s son from Palghar. He is a wicket-keeper and he played for Mumbai Indians against Rajasthan Royals. He took 23 runs out of those 13 balls. His father used to ferry him to Bombay in a boat so that he could learn cricket. And Aditya is so confident. He is a wordsmith–he weaves poetry with words, in English. He writes beautifully. And he is just 20. More:

The surprising story of the Afghan cricket team

Published on May 2, 2010 in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Cricket and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: .

The team representing war-torn Afghanistan have been elevated to national heroes by reaching the World Twenty20 finals. Patrick Kidd at The Times:

It is a familiar theme in the movies: the underdog who rises from nowhere to take on the best by dint of hard work, self-belief and an imaginative scriptwriter. In real life, though, it rarely happens that way. Not unless you are the Afghanistan cricket team.

On Saturday, Afghanistan will play their opening match in the World Twenty20 finals against India, the financial powerhouse of the game. It is the culmination of two years of rapid development by a group of raw but passionate cricketers, most of whom learnt the game as children in the refugee camps set up on the frontier with Pakistan during the occupation of their country in the 1980s by the former Soviet Union.

Ten years ago cricket did not officially exist in Afghanistan. It was suppressed, like most things, by the Taleban, although the religious rulers later relented on the grounds that the sport had frequent breaks in it for prayers. In 2008, Afghanistan entered the lowest rung of cricket’s international ladder, playing the likes of Japan and Vanuatu. Now they are one of the top 12 nations competing in the 20-over World Cup. More:

Also read: Finally, Afghanistan has some heroes

Board games

Published on May 2, 2010 in Cricket and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In The Hindustan Times, Kadambari Murali Wade and Amol Karhadkar on the Lalit Modi – IPL jigsaw puzzle:

It was March 2009. Lalit Modi had triumphantly ‘bested’ Home Minister P. Chidambaram (in his own head) and taken the Indian Premier League to South Africa.

The idea of moving the league out of India, in the wake of Chidambaram saying that providing security to both IPL II and the general elections would not be possible, had apparently occurred to Modi in the middle of yet another sleepless night. The now-suspended IPL chairman is known to survive on just two-three hours sleep a day. Modi had his eureka moment and promptly texted his inner circle to say that this is what they would do.

But BCCI officials, even then, were wary, even prophetic. One IPL Governing Council member told Hindustan Times then. He added: “The problem with Lalit is that he doesn’t know when to stop. The rock-star image has him excited and he’s lapping it up. He’s like the child who’s been given the keys to the chocolate factory and doesn’t know that too much will make him sick. And if he knows that there could be an end to this, that the knives are waiting, he’s pushed that thought away. He lives for the ‘now’.” More:

Why the IPL won’t reform itself

Published on April 30, 2010 in Politics and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Mukul Keswan in The Telegraph:

The porkers at the five-star trough have taken a strategic time-out from feeding. They’ve raised their snouts from superior swill, the better to bite the hand that fed them. The real spectacle of the last fortnight wasn’t the sorry cricket served up by IPL 3.0, nor even Lalit Modi’s fall from grace, but the sight of supple stakeholder pigs turning on a dime. News channels that gloried in partnering IPL franchises, Modi’s henchmen at the BCCI, the hitherto house-trained members of the IPL’s governing council, have rediscovered reporting, re-grown spines and unearthed scruples; these pigs have wings.

The seamless transition from being Modi’s creatures to becoming his critics and the willingness of journalists, commentators and anchors to buy into this new narrative of Wicked Modi and the Duped Establishment tell us something about the damage that the IPL has done to Indian cricket.

Notice that every criticism of Modi is qualified by praise for his creation. The IPL, we’re told, is a great ‘property’ and the way to fix the mess is to have the BCCI or the governing council or the tycoons who own the franchises take over its governance.

It’s worth pointing out that the WWF is a great television property too. It is also wrestling as showbiz and, ultimately, as charade. I don’t mean to imply that the IPL’s matches were fixed; there’s no evidence to suggest that. Dhoni’s victory celebration in the semi-final match against the the Deccan Chargers and Tendulkar’s willingness to play with an injured hand testify to a genuinely competitive tournament. More:

The parable of the vamp

Published on April 22, 2010 in India, People, Sport and Women. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

What does tarnishing Sunanda Pushkar say about our attitudes to women, asks Shoma Chaudhury in Telehka:

There are so many versions of your life floating in the media, would you like to put the facts on record first.

I don’t really want to. My son and parents have already suffered enough on this. How many times I got married, who I dated — what does any of that have to do with the IPL?

That’s true, but unfortunately the absence of facts has allowed everyone to maul your image. There’ve been reports that you divorced your first husband Sanjay Raina because you fell in love with his friend Sujit Menon. Also that Sujit committed suicide because he was in financial trouble. Even if all this were true, it still wouldn’t make you a bad person, but the key thing is to establish how much is truth, how much fiction.

(Sighs) You are right. It’s probably important to set the record straight. My first marriage was a very dark period in my life. Everyone’s saying Sanjay Raina divorced me, but that’s not true, I divorced him. It was a very painful relationship but I don’t want to go into that. It’s over; he’s moved on, I’ve moved on. I was 19 when I met him and very innocent. My dad was in the army and I had a very protected childhood. I was always sorry for the underdog. My family and friends used to teasingly call me Mother Teresa. I was helping flood victims in Ambala in grade six. When I was in Jesus and Mary Convent, I used to work with abandoned and physically challenged children at an ashram. There was a blind and spastic kid there who was particularly attached to me. No one wanted him because he wasn’t very nice looking, but I used to bathe and feed him. Curiously, many people spoke badly of Sanjay, saying he was strange. Maybe in the beginning that is what drew me more to him.

But the marriage was a big mistake. I was totally unprepared for the worst. ‘The media said, why should the Kochi team pick me? As a woman am I not good enough?’ Soon after we got engaged I told my father I wanted to break it off. I had realised Sanjay and I were very mismatched but my father wouldn’t listen. For Kashmiri Pandits, if you got engaged, you had to marry; we’d never had a broken marriage in the family. Mine fell apart within days. I had a really tough time getting a divorce in Delhi. It was a very lonely time. My parents didn’t want me to divorce even though they knew what was going on. Looking back, I understand them now, but I felt very abandoned then.

The truth is Sujit rescued me. He gave me the strength, as a friend, to quit a very painful marriage. But he was dating another woman; I was just a friend. I got my divorce in 1988 and went off to Dubai in 1989. I married Sujit in 1991; my son Shivy was born in November 1992. If I had left Sanjay over Sujit, why would I have waited that long to marry him? More:

The perils of political paratrooping

Published on April 20, 2010 in India, Politics and Sport. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

In Shashi Tharoor’s rise and fall, a Congress attempt to woo middle class. Siddharth Varadarajan in The Hindu:

The petit-bourgeois mind is superficial and fickle. It is awe struck by the accumulation and consumption that go on in the highest echelons of society, even if outside the borderlines of legality and good taste. But it is repulsed and outraged when forced to confront the tawdriness and venality on which the life it aspires to is built.

Framed by these two extremes, the long-shot and the close-up, the rise and fall of Shashi Tharoor is a cautionary tale about the dangers of entering public life through the constituency of the middle class. The ‘perils of political paratrooping’ is how a former colleague of the erstwhile junior minister pithily described Mr. Tharoor’s fate when asked for his assessment by The Hindu. What made his jump even more dangerous was that it was made without the safety net that grassroot experience or backroom goodwill provides. By the standards of Indian politics, his impropriety in the IPL affair was relatively minor; but unlike others whose warts catch the glare of the arclights from time to time, there was nobody willing to pad up for him when the media drew blood. Fatally injured, he stood his ground just a moment too long. Had he walked back to the pavilion unprompted, he might have survived to play a second innings. But he didn’t do that. Which is why his political career is today at an end. More:

Also read: Tharoor’s IPL googly is hat-trick for Manmohan: From Hua Hin to Riyadh to Washington and Brasilia, Shashi Tharoor has always brought bad luck to the Prime Minister on his foreign tours. By Siddharth Varadarajan

Got a girl, named Sue

Published on April 17, 2010 in India, People and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Vrinda Gopinath on Sunanda Pushkar, friend of Shashi Tharoor, in Outlook:

Now, why does Sunanda Pushkar sound preposterous when she says it’s insulting to present her as just a proxy for good friend Shashi Tharoor, minister of state for external affairs, in the multi-million dollar IPL franchise sale? Because it’s a bit ambitious on her part to claim she’s a businesswoman in her own right when her present job profile says she is a mere sales manager at tecom Investments, a commercial real estate company in Dubai. But you’ve got to hand it to Pushkar, for her spunk and drive that took her from a gawkish girl from small-town Jammu two decades ago, to becoming swell Sue in Dubai and Toronto, to contriving her new image as swanky Sunanda, the brassy, bold entrepreneur of the eye-popping Emirates.

The belle from Bomai, a small apple-growing hamlet in Sopore, Kashmir, was convinced she was not cut out for the idyllic life of mofussil India, as she excitedly told her pals when she landed in Dubai in the early ’90s, and like the many hick-chicks before her, she took the marriage route to escape a dreary future. The teenaged Sunanda met and married fellow Kashmiri Pandit Sanjay Raina, a hotel management graduate, while she was still studying in the Government College for Women, Srinagar, between 1986 and 1988.

But it wasn’t Raina who took her to Dubai; it was his best friend, Sujith Menon, whom she married within two years of her failed first marriage. The couple landed in Dubai in the early ’90s—Menon settled in a job with the insurance company, Eagle Star, while Sunanda worked as an accounts exec with the marketing and ad agency, Bozell Prime. Their lives would have soon settled into a mundane routine if it were not for Sunanda’s hyper hunger to rise above the plain folks. She begged her friends for invitations to glam events and then cashed in on the ’90s marketing trends of organising small-time fashion shows. More:

Also in Outlook: Shashi Tharoor and his seven sins

Annapurna air safari

Published on April 13, 2010 in Nepal, Sport and Travel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The biggest draw of Visit Nepal Year 2011 could be Pokhara’s mountain flights. From Nepali Times:

We have come a long way since a Gypsy Moth piloted by LVS Blacker made the first ever fly-by of Mt Everest in 1933. Blacker survived an open cockpit and icy gale-force winds in his flimsy canvas-winged biplane to become the first person to look down at the top of the world.

But it took former UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold to popularise what has come to be known as the ‘Mountain Flight’ when he was allowed by King Mahendra to take his unpressurised DC-3 to Khumbu and along the Annapurnas. Hammarskjold, a keen photographer himself, took the stunning black-and-white pictures that appeared in the National Geographic of January 1961. More:

Avia Club Pokhara (http://aviaclubnepal.com/) offers sightseeing flights that fly not just past the mountains but amidst them.

Headless goat rugby

Published on April 11, 2010 in Afghanistan and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Julius Cavendish in Mazar-e-Sharif. In The Independent:

A sport best described as “mounted goat rugby from hell” could soon be transported from northern Afghanistan’s dusty plains to the green turf of Twickenham, or even New York’s Yankee Stadium, if enthusiasts have their way. Buzkashi, a game supposedly devised by Genghis Khan, pits men and horses against each other in a ferocious struggle for possession of a headless goat. Now the director of buzkashi at Afghanistan’s Olympic committee thinks it is time to unleash this spectacle on the world.

Haji Abdul Rashid is looking for a Western partner to promote the sport overseas. “We want the people of Europe and America to see our game and learn to play it,” he said. “So we are looking for a company to help us show our game.”

Any impresario willing to underwrite a match would make a handsome return, Mr Rashid says. Ticket sales, corporate sponsorship and TV rights could generate enormous sums of money.

Although there are, at present, no obvious takers for the offer, Mr Rashid’s enthusiasm is nonetheless undimmed. “In other parts of the world they have rugby, they have bullfights,” he said. “Buzkashi is the same – another dangerous game – so I believe people will like it. When you’re riding the horse, struggling for the goat, and even after you’ve grabbed it, every moment is suspense. I love this. People love this.” More: