Archive for the 'Sport' Category

India-born Pirates pitchers ready to debut

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on July 1, 2009
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Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, two cricket hopefuls from India who found their way to baseball thanks to a reality television show, are ready to make their debuts as minor-league professionals. An AP report in USA Today:

The Pittsburgh Pirates could soon find out if an investment of $20,000 can produce a couple of million-dollar arms.

Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, their two India-born pitchers who had never seen a baseball game before being the top two finishers in a TV reality show designed to find potential Major League Baseball arms, are nearly ready to make their professional debuts.

Neither had picked up a baseball, much less thrown one, until little more than a year ago. Aspiring cricket players, they had no idea that American athletes could make so much money playing a sport they knew nothing about.

Now, after a busy year crowded with TV show appearances, basic baseball instruction, fitness workouts, constant throwing and adjusting to a pro athlete’s life in a new country, they are about to take the mound for the Bradenton Pirates of the rookie-level Gulf Coast League. More:

NY police plays cricket to build relationships

Published
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on June 29, 2009
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From the New York Times:

The Gateway Cricket Ground in Brooklyn is a spartan place – a grass oval tucked in by the Belt Parkway, in the shadows of the towers of Starrett City and beneath the flight path of Kennedy International Airport.

But on Tuesday morning it was crowded with players, some toting paddlelike bats, and filled with the sound of leather balls struck by wood.

The sport they were playing is as ancient as it is baffling to most Americans, yet the New York Police Department has chosen cricket as a way to foster relationships with newer immigrant communities.

The Police Department established a cricket competition for young men in the city last summer; the project was a success, and on Tuesday, play began for another season. Interest has expanded, with 10 teams and 170 players involved this year, compared with 6 teams last year. More:

Click here to watch the NYT video.

Risking the Taliban to confront the deadliest of peaks, K2

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on June 28, 2009
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Graham Bowley in the New York Times. Bowley is writing a book about the 2008 accident on K2 that left 11 climbers dead:

k2peakAt midnight one evening earlier this month, I slipped out of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, heading north in a white Toyota minibus on a journey to find the second tallest mountain on earth, K2.

My purpose was to write a book about the mountaineers who dared challenge its deadly slopes – to get a taste, if not a full draught, of the danger myself. In the end, I got more than I bargained for, and not from Nature alone.

K2, which towers 28,251 feet above the border between Pakistan and China like an almost perfect white pyramid, is considered one of the most beautiful but also one of the most dangerous mountains in the world. By the opening of this climbing season, only 296 people had ever conquered its summit and 77 had died trying.

But this year, just reaching the mountain had become perilous. I had to travel, in a minibus that felt like a bubble, on a long and treacherous road that skirted Pakistan’s Swat Valley. There, at that moment, the Pakistani Army and the Taliban were fighting for control, making the lowlands south of K2 another of the most hazardous places on Earth. More:

Science vs art in a clash of cultures

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on June 23, 2009
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From cricinfo:

It’s first a clash of ethos, of philosophies and even of time, more than a semi-final. Here is truly man against machine, the art of cricket against the science of it, cricket’s future and cricket’s past. South Africa’s progress to this point has been smooth, well-planned, calculated and inevitable, as if their players were born to do this. Pakistan have got here in shambles – losing games, winning some, treating it all as a bit of fun – and the players not so much born to do this are struggling to discover why they are doing it at all.

South Africa lack nowhere and nothing. If Jacques Kallis and Graeme Smith are the efficient drones at the top, there is heart in the middle, with the ever-frail skills of Herschelle Gibbs and the creativity of AB de Villiers. Even Albie Morkel, in whom there are glimpses of Zulu, thankfully smiles more. They’ve always had pace, but now they even have spinners, who are not batsmen forced to bowl. Sure, they are a little one-dimensional (watching videos of Umar Gul’s yorkers?), but they are spinners – South African and successful; how often have we said that in the past? More:

Indian cricket fans: Please read this

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on June 18, 2009
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Mike Atherton, Chief Cricket Correspondent, in the Times:

Memo to Indian cricket supporters: it is time to grow up. Sport is not about winning, it is about losing. Twelve teams have been taking part in this tournament and only one of them will return winners. The rest will be losers.

They will lose in various ways – some thrillingly, some abjectly – but lose they will. It is what makes the moments of triumph all the more special.

After all, if winning was all that there was, what would there be to celebrate? Indian supporters, the most immature in cricket, cannot seem to grasp this simple fact.

So where once temples were erected in Ranchi to deify its most famous son, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, now effigies are burnt. Once the Army had to be called out because the mob had laid homage to a hair salon where Dhoni was having his luxuriant locks lopped off, but veneration has now turned to vituperation. More:

Premier League giants target India

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on June 10, 2009
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From BBC News:

Monday’s opening of a Liverpool Football Club-backed soccer academy in the Indian city of Pune marks the latest chapter in the quest by Premier League teams to gain a foothold in one of the world’s largest markets.

East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the US, as well as more traditional countries such as Canada and Australia, have all been explored as clubs seek to maximise returns on their brands overseas.

But until recently India was seen as off-limits because of the huge popularity of cricket there.

However, a growing and increasingly-affluent middle class, the regular broadcasting of Premier League games, and an identification of English football with youth and glamour means the door is slowly opening. More:

Who is a cricket expert?

Published
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on May 9, 2009
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In India, a billion people lay claim to this role. Ashis Nandy in the Times of India:

India has one billion experts on cricket. Most of them have not played the game or played it casually as a child or teenager. That has never deterred them from pronouncing their judgments on cricketers and cricket matches or from advising India’s national cricket team. I had a friend, an accomplished doctor, who had never played cricket. He would dismiss summarily most things well-known cricketers
said, often adding disdainfully, “He knows nothing about cricket; he has not read a single book on it.” Another, though an excellent player of chess and bridge, had his private theories only about cricket.

Cricket is that kind of a game and it invites such eccentricities. That has been one of its main attractions, particularly in South Asia. Globally too, no other game has produced the kind of literature cricket has done. And some of the greatest of them have been produced by persons with no experience in first- or second-class cricket. One of these greats, Neville Cardus, played little serious cricket but remains, till today, the model of all talented cricket writers. The play of imagination and the cadence of his writing came reportedly from his acquaintance with music. More:

Night of the screamers

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on May 2, 2009
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Why the commentators’ desperate hawking of the IPL may have started to work against the tournament. Gideon Haigh at cricinfo:

It’s working. Two weeks of the second season of the Indian Premier League and it’s finally been drummed into me who the damn sponsors are. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Now GO AWAY!

Actually, had I money to invest, I’d be wondering why DLF, presently being squeezed by slumping property values and a share price a quarter of its peak, and Citigroup, insolvent but for Barack Obama’s indulgence, were wasting shareholders’ funds on staking sixes and endowing so-called “success”. As I don’t, I’ll simply vary that old Bob Hope gag concerning the night he went to a boxing title fight and a game of ice hockey broke out: the IPL is fast degenerating into a series of three-hour advertisements through which are sometimes discernible glimmers of cricket.

Cricket, of course, has much to thank television for. How much richer is our appreciation of a Shane Warne legbreak or a Kevin Pietersen cover-drive for the luxury of studying it, frozen in time; when we can hover over each detail of the harmonious human mechanism. But either Lalit Modi is pumping nitrous oxide into the commentary box, or the IPL is bearing out JK Galbraith’s observation that television allows for persuasion with no minimum standard of literacy or intelligence. More:

The President meets the Prince

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on April 23, 2009
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West Indies batting legend Brian Lara with US President Barack Obama in Trinidad. Photo: White House

West Indies batting legend Brian Lara with US President Obama in Trinidad. Photo: White House

From cricinfo:

George Bush tried – and failed – to swat a tennis ball with a cricket bat on a trip to Pakistan in the dog days of his presidency, but the meeting between Brian Lara and President Barack Obama in Trinidad was an altogether more successful affair.

Obama took time out from attending the Fifth Summit of the Americas to meet with Trinidad’s most famous cricketer. While his sport of choice is basketball, Obama was given a brief batting lesson by Lara, although attempts to teach him to drive were slightly less successful that his lesson in playing the forward defensive. More:

In an editorial, “Obama’s six,” the Indian Express says:

So what does that photograph tell us? Does that determined jaw betray impatience with the paces of a game that unfolds over five days? Or does it convey parallel thoughts about how to harness America’s soft power with its own sports? Perhaps it’s just as simple as Obama concentrating as hard as a person must in the presence of a master.

‘Insider’ spills beans on SRK’s Knight Riders

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on April 23, 2009
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From the Times of India:

knight-ridersShah Rukh Khan has spent a lot of money building up PR for Kolkata Knight Riders. He’s hired the right firms, been out there in the public just about all the time; there’ve been parties, press conferences, cheerleaders, music and almost all the right kind of bytes given by the superstar himself.

Yet, he’s a troubled man. That’s not just because KKR got off to bad start or that relations between ex-captain Sourav Ganguly and coach John Buchanan continue to be strained. It’s mainly got to do with an unknown blogger – who claims to be a KKR team member – bent on letting the cat out of the bag all the time.

The blogger – calling himself Fake IPL Player – is sure he’ll never be a part of the playing XI. “But, there’s one thing I do very well. Serve drinks. And that’s what I am expecting do in South Africa,” he writes. Read the rest of the story:

And here’s the ink to the blog fakeiplplayer.blogspot.com

The other Plum

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on April 21, 2009
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Suresh Menon at cricinfo on PG Wodehouse’s cricket connection:

wodehousePG Wodehouse was paid half a guinea for the first piece he ever wrote: “Some Aspects of Game Captaincy”, published in the Public School Magazine. He was 19 then. His next two pieces were also on cricket, for each of which he earned half a guinea. His first Jeeves story was 15 years away, but already the connections with cricket were strong.

Wodehouse, a medium-fast bowler for Dulwich College, who might have gone on to Oxford and won a Blue if his father’s business hadn’t collapsed and he himself been forced to seek employment with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, once wrote that he dreamed of a residence near Lord’s cricket ground. “I’ve always thought that’s where I should like to live, with a garden gate opening on the ground.”

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Old and beautiful

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on April 21, 2009
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Men written off, men supposedly past their primes, have proved that the IPL, and the world, belong not to youth or any other category. Peter Roebuck at cricinfo:

aksimpleOnly in golf and marathons, individual and easily measured activities, is age not regarded as a handicap. Elsewhere the bright young things are to the fore, with their daredevilry. As much can be told from observing tennis tournaments and leading soccer matches.

Inevitably cricket fell into line. It’s not so much that teams have become younger – Australia haven’t, and India are not exactly overburdened with striplings. Just that there are fewer players staying into their late 30s. Partly it has been desire: the hectic modern touring schedules stretch the sanity of the older brigade. Partly it has been the public’s irresistible urge to find new faces. Perhaps, too, the vintages found Test cricket too hard and 50-over capers too plentiful to be enjoyable.

Recognising the signs, Anil Kumble, Shane Warne, Sourav Ganguly, Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden and others declared their innings closed. Only Rahul Dravid clung to the wreckage, and his end seemed to be at hand.

No one blamed them for taking the easy money to play in the IPL or ICL. After all those years of distinguished service, they were entitled to a last waltz. Moreover, they would bring glamour to the competition and give pleasure to crowds. Of course they might play badly, but a million dollars covers an awful lot of dented pride, and anyhow their records were written in stone.

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Everest: a risky business

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on April 13, 2009
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Climbing the world’s highest peak is the ultimate adventure, says Eric Ellis, but with trips costing up to $100,000 each and numerous fatalities each season, it can be an expensive one too. From The Spectator:

Photo Bartmani / under Creative Commons licence

Photo Bartmani / under Creative Commons licence

You exited the bank just in time. The boltholes in Gloucestershire and Tuscany look after themselves, as do the family. You’re bored with your expensive toys and you’re not even 50. You don’t paint, read or garden. So, what’s next for Mr Alpha? Everest. ‘Because,’ as Mallory remarked in 1923 before disappearing in its snows, ‘…it’s there’. No matter that you’ve never climbed anything icier than the corporate ladder, you find the expedition websites speak your language. Mountaineering, like business, is about ‘the challenge’, ‘overcoming adversity’ and ‘problem-solving’. Suddenly you’re in Kathmandu’s bohemian enclave, Thamel. It’s intoxicating. True, people can die, but surely that’s just ‘risk management’? And you’ve kept yourself trim – isn’t that important?

It is, chorused Kathmandu’s hornet’s nest of Everest entrepreneurs – as many as 500 offer expeditions – during my week in Thamel, as I effected to be a retired tycoon yearning for adventure. But if fitness mattered, no one cared I was ten kilograms overweight, arriving exhausted at their desk after mounting the summit of their back stairs. I’d dressed like Bear Grylls: Thamel’s uniform of stubble, hardwear jacket, cargo pants and an Arafat-esque keffiyeh. But if Himalayan peak time was a pre-requisite, my confession that I’d barely tramped up Primrose Hill, much less the Kanchenjungas, Lhotses and Cho Oyus, where real mountaineers serve their apprenticeships, went unheard.

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Everest: Climb to the moral high ground

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on April 8, 2009
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Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

mount-everest

He is short, wiry and shies away from the glare of publicity. And yet this 49-year-old has placed his feet on top of the world’s highest mountain more times than anyone else.

Now, Appa, a professional sherpa from a small Nepalese village who has reached the summit of Everest on 18 occasions, is heading back to the mountain to break his own record. In doing so, he hopes to draw attention to the plight of the mountain, increasingly threatened by litter and debris and the effects of global warming.

“I am not looking for recognition or doing this just to beat my own record. My objective is to highlight the environmental degradation of the mountain and draw attention to the issue of global warming,” he said yesterday, as he and his 40-strong expedition team set off from Kathmandu.

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Cricket gets serious in US

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on March 25, 2009
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Cricket is trying to register a pulse in the US with the American College Cricket spring break championship. From The New York Times:

Lauderhill, Florida: Sandwiched between a soccer game and a barbecue, the Montgomery College cricket team edged closer and closer to victory. And when at last it came, after four days of wickets, overs and sixes, the players were jubilant. Just as cricketers do from Australia to Antigua, they snatched the wooden cricket stumps out of the grass and waved them around their heads in mad celebration.

The players felt they had claimed more than the three-foot trophy for the first American College Cricket spring break championship. In their minds they had brought their sport one step closer to the American mainstream.

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On a slow trot

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on March 22, 2009
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Leher Kala in The Indian Express on the dwindling interest in polo:

poloA winding track off the Gurgaon-Pataudi Road, 35 km from Delhi, leads to the Haryana Polo Club, a 30-acre property landscaped as a polo field with lush green foliage around the stables, a small club house and a polo schooling arena. It’s a warm Sunday afternoon at the end of the polo season in Delhi and the finals of the Tiger Mountain Cup begin in an hour. Brothers Uday and Angad Kalaan, who boast a handicap of 4 and 5, are in the middle of a practice session, the rumble of their horses resounding in the air as they chase a ball. The majestic sport has attracted the fashionable set over the years and, true to that image, a few ladies wearing trendy hats have begun to trickle in, some with dogs in tow, to socialise in the last of Delhi’s winter sun.

But the serious glamour that surrounded polo matches in the last 10 years with stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan making an occasional appearance, actor Priyanka Chopra driving across the field in a studded chariot and Sushmita Sen handing out prizes to the winning team, is absent. The swelling crowds are missing as are city photographers out to do some celeb-spotting. The grounds have an empty, desolate air. The hoardings of co-sponsors that dot the field are no longer in place. The big bucks have gone.

[Photo: Japs -- TheGypsy / Flickr]

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Lahore Murder Mystery

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on March 4, 2009
in Cricket, Pakistan, Sport and Sri Lanka
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Ali Sethi in The New York Times:

“Everyone at the hospital was saying the same thing,” Ali Raza told me later that night, as we stood in line at a brightly lighted stall selling paan – a mild stimulant made with betel nuts – near the Main Market roundabout, just a short walk away from the site of the attack. “They were saying that this was done to show the Indians that we in Pakistan are also the victims of terrorism.”

“You think our own government did it?” I asked.

“No one else could get away with this kind of thing,” he insisted.

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Gunmen attack Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore

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on March 4, 2009
in Conflict, Cricket, Pakistan, Sport and Sri Lanka
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Masked gunmen attacked the bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team to the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore. Five cricketers, including the Sri Lankan captain Mahela Jayawardene and his deputy Kumar Sangakkara, received minor injuries. The attack also left six security men and two civilians dead.

In a report in Dawn, Lahore’s police chief Habib-ur Rehman was quoted as saying, ‘The plan was apparently to kill the Sri Lankan team but the police came in the way and forced the attackers to run away.’ Rehman said up to 12 gunmen ambushed the team’s convoy with rockets, hand grenades and automatic weapons, and there was a fierce gunbattle with security forces.

From The Guardian: Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, said: “This was a planned terrorist attack. They had heavy weapons. These were the same methods and the same sort of people as hit Mumbai.”

The former England all-rounder Dominic Cork, who was in the stadium to do commentary work for Pakistan TV, told Sky Sports News: “The Sri Lankan players are quite shocked. “They all fell to the floor of the team bus when the attack happened.

‘What I’m feeling most is disbelief’

Trevor Bayliss, the Sri Lanka coach, who was in the team bus when the attack took place, spoke to Cricinfo while waiting to be airlifted out of Pakistan: It all happened very quickly. We were on the bus, there were a couple of explosions and then the pop-pop-pop of the guns and broken glass. Everyone hit the floor straight away. I’m not sure how long it went on for -- maybe half a minute. The boys were yelling to the driver to keep driving, because we had come to a stop only about 100m from the entrance to the ground. Luckily the driver hadn’t been hit, and he got us beyond the cars and into the ground. We then ran to the relative safety of the dressing room.

One writer, many hats

Published
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on February 22, 2009
in Leaders, Media and Sport
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Ramachandra Guha is a polymath who happens to write superbly on cricket. Suresh Menon at Cricinfo:

ram-guhaWhen my son was graduating and looking into the future, a professor told him of the choices ahead: pure science, technology, public service, media, or, he said, “Ramachandra Guha”. This was the first I was hearing of Guha as a career option; the professor meant it as generic term for brilliance spread over a number of fields.

The challenge here is to write about Guha without dwelling on how he has been picked as one of the Top 100 public intellectuals in the world, or that he is the recipient of India’s third-highest civilian award, or that he is a historian, biographer, sociologist, environmentalist, anthropologist with profound, seminal works on each of these subjects. He is among the finest essayists and columnists around, with a range of interests that goes beyond even that list, and takes in music, science, literature, fiction, travel.

But this is about Guha the cricket writer, and – after acknowledging that his work in other fields must inform his writings on cricket, placing them in context and taking them into avenues others leave unexplored – we must descend from the general to the particular.

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In Calcutta, an Armenian rugby team

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on February 20, 2009
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Rajdeep Datta Roy in Mint:

rugbyOn a balmy winter afternoon, Ejmin Shahjani and Armen Makarian, along with a dozen other rugby players, are searing the turf at Kolkata’s Armenian College and Philanthropic Academy. Though the rugby season, which starts in June, is still a few months away, the players have already started preparations.

After all, they have an enviable record to live up to. “In last year’s side, 12 of the 15 players who represented India at the under-19 level were Armenians,” says Shahjani, an Iranian, who captained the Indian junior team in international matches at Brunei. “The Indian under-19 side is predominantly made up of Armenian boys,” says David Purdy, coach of the Armenian Sports Club rugby team, which consists largely of students from the college.

The Armenian boys, who have, in the past, beaten older teams such as Bombay Gymkhana, Kolkata Police and Maharashtra Police, aim to keep the momentum going. “Just you watch, we’ll do even better this year,” says Makarian, the school games captain.

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Peak performance

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on February 17, 2009
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Climbing Mt Everest is all in a day’s work for three Nepalese brothers. Now, they want to stay on top of the peak for 24 hours, praying for world peace. The BBC’s Charles Haviland has the story.

Three Nepalese brothers are to try to break a world record by staying on top of Mount Everest for 24 hours. Pemba Dorje Sherpa, aged 31, and his younger brothers Nima Gyalzen and Phurba Tenzing, intend to use their stay on the summit to pray for peace in Nepal and the world. They will take with them a 30cm (12-inch) statue of the Buddha to the peak. And they are vowing to stay there for 24 hours whatever the weather. Climbing Everest is almost second nature to the brothers, two of whom met the BBC at their small trekking agency in a back street of Kathmandu to explain their plans.

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What slowdown? It’s a high sixer for IPL

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on February 7, 2009
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17 foreign players sold for $450,000 on an average as eight IPL teams spend a total of $10.06 million. Ravi Krishnan in Mint:

auction1auction2Panaji: A Bangladeshi fast bowler went for 12 times his reserve price. A 34-year-old domestic South African player got six times his base price. And two others, both former England captains, became the world’s highest-paid cricketers. The Indian Premier League’s (IPL) second round auction on Friday in one of Goa’s priciest hotels seemed unaware of any slowdown.

England’s Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff were signed for $1.55 million (Rs7.55 crore) a year each, topping the $1.5 million the India Cements Ltd-promoted Chennai Super Kings bid for India cricket captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni last year. Flintoff will play for the Chennai franchise and Pietersen for the United Breweries Ltd-owned Bangalore Royal Challengers.

[Photos: Vijay Mallya and Preity Zinta]

More here; and also see story below:

Bare knuckle tales

Published
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on February 3, 2009
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For some Muslim girls in Kolkata, the future lies in a boxing ring as Dola Mitra finds out in Outlook.

muslim_boxer_1_200902091Sixteen-year-old Farida Khan is in the dressing room. She has just gotten into a pair of baggy, shiny boxer shorts. It’s the first time in her life that she’s wearing anything that doesn’t reach till her ankle, like a gown or a voluminous salwar-kameez…. Given a choice her aunt, with whom she lives in Calcutta’s cramped Khidderpore slum, would cover her up in a burqa. And now here she is, prancing around in an outfit that “would give Chachi a heart attack”.

Under her breath, Farida mutters a mantra her coach has taught her: “If you fear, you can never be a boxer.” And there is nothing she wants more than to be a boxer.

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Surfin’ Swamis

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on January 20, 2009
in India, Sport and Travel
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Catching waves, and spirituality, in India’s emerging surfer culture. Jason Overdorf in GlobalPost:

The Mantra Surf Club, or The Surfing Swamis, are a group of Krishna-worshiping Hindu monks from India's first surfer commune. Photo: Surfing India.

The Mantra Surf Club, or The Surfing Swamis, are a group of Krishna-worshiping Hindu monks from India's first surfer commune. Photo: Surfing India.

Swami Bhakti Gaurava Narasingha paddles hard and drops into a 6-foot wave off the coast of Mangalore in South India.

As the 61-year-old surfer cuts left and races down the face of the wave spiralling toward the wastewater treatment plant up the beach, half a dozen local fishermen look on with bemused fascination at the aging white dude, who also goes by his given name of Jack Hebner.

Though India has 4,500 miles of coastline and gets 20-foot waves during the monsoon season, fear of the ocean and beaches that double as toilets have prevented surfing from catching on. But Hebner and his followers – who call themselves “the Surfin’ Swamis” – are seeking to change all that with India’s first surf ashram, or religious community.

“Surfing isn’t just about getting in the water and catching a few waves,” Hebner said. “It’s about something much deeper than that. It’s about a spiritual experience.”
Hebner – a Hindu monk from Jacksonville Beach, Florida, who doesn’t drink or smoke and took a vow of celibacy 30 years ago – isn’t exactly what you picture when you think of a surfer.

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And click here and here for more about surfing destinations in India:

surf1

According to Surfing India website, “the word ’surf’ was derived from the Indian word ’sufe’ meaning the coastline. This word was picked up by Portuguese sailer’s in the 1600’s and ’sufe’ soon became ’surf’.”

A cricket lover’s lament

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on January 19, 2009
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The effects of the Mumbai terror attacks are being felt in the stadiums of India and Pakistan. Shahan Mufti from Lahore in GlobalPost:

South Asia is home to many religions but probably none more widespread and sacred than cricket.

America has always been agnostic, if not completely atheist about the sport. But then most of the world has never had much faith in baseball and has always snickered at the fact its ultimate annual contest is called the World Series.

If Americans want to understand the cricket rivalry between India and Pakistan, they must think in terms as epic as Red Sox vs. Yankees. Add to this the explosive mix of generations of bloodshed, the threat of nuclear weapons and recent terrorist attacks, and one begins to fathom the importance of the game in a region that is home to more than a billion souls.

In the 60-odd years since the sovereign nations of India and Pakistan were carved from a single piece of British territory, a shared love of cricket has often provided middle ground for improving relations between politicians, and also for regular people from all classes of society.

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Who finished off the pehalwans?

Published
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on January 16, 2009
in Pakistan, Society and Sport
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Darwaish in All Things Pakistan laments a fading tribe.

pehalwans1There was a time when being a Pehalwan was a way of life, an art and a passion.

Thousands of people used to watch Rustum-i-Pakistan which was a very popular event in Lahore (just like a one day cricket game these days). You could easily find many Ukhara’s or Akhara’s (kinda small stadiums where traditional wrestlers exercise) in the city with Pehalwans doing their routine exercises but not anymore.

I have some wonderful childhood memories of having Khalis Lassi (sorry folks, I don’t know what Lassi is called in English but Khalis means Pure) near Pehalwani neighborhoods just behind Lahore Fort. 

Going there once in a month with family for traditional Lahori Nashta+Lassi was just great. Not to mention some serious exercise was a must and we used to skip lunch after having that Nashta+Lassi. I don’t know if the quality and taste is still the same, I haven’t been there in ages which is sad.

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Street beggar to star striker: India’s football hope

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on January 6, 2009
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Gethin Chamberlain in Kerala reports on the remarkable rise of a confident, goal-getting 14-year-old. From the Observer:

Rounding the last defender, Raja Chinnaswamy looks up towards the iron frame of the goal in the lee of the white-washed wall of the orphanage behind. He pulls back his right foot and lets fly, sending the ball hurtling past the goalkeeper and out through the gaping hole in the torn netting.

Eight years ago, when he first arrived at the orphanage in the southern Indian state of Kerala, Raja had never seen a football. Today he is a rising star of Indian football, a 14-year-old already being talked about by his excited coaches as a future fixture in the national team.

Indian football’s moment may be coming. Last year the country qualified for the finals of the Asian Cup for the first time since 1984. English Premiership clubs have also woken up to the fact that the subcontinent might have something to offer the world of football. Clubs such as Manchester United and Chelsea are moving into India, hoping to unearth the same wealth of talent that Africa has offered up, and to cash in on a vast untapped market of one billion people.

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Why cricker is better than sex

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Harold Pinter, who died on Tuesday, gave his last interview to Andy Bull, of the Guardian, on a subject very dear to the playwright’s heart: cricket:

pinter“I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God created on earth,” Harold Pinter once said, “certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.” No harm, then, that the game should be the subject of his last interview, given in late October at his home in London. His health failing, Pinter was in nostalgic mood, recalling a childhood in Hackney, east London, during the blitz and his time as an evacuee. “I first watched cricket during the war. At one point we were all evacuated from our house when there was an air raid. We opened the door and our garden, with this large lilac tree, was alight all along the back wall. We were evacuated straight away. Though not before I took my cricket bat.

“I used to get up at five in the morning and play cricket. I had a great friend who is still going – he lives in Australia – called Mick, Mick Goldstein. He used to live around the corner from me in Hackney, and we were very close to the River Lea, and there were fields. We walked down to the fields; there’d be nobody about – it would really very early in the morning, and there would be a tree we used as a wicket. We would take it in turns to bat and bowl; we would be Lindwall, Miller, Hutton and Compton. That was the life.”

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Superstar Tendulkar writes the perfect script

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He’s 35 years old and owns practically every batting record in the game, but you couldn’t escape the feeling that this was probably Sachin Tendulkar’s finest hour. Dileep Premachandran in cricinfo:

sachinAs Graeme Swann prepared to bowl the second ball of his 29th over, more than 20,000 people in the stands abandoned their plastic chairs. They were on their feet, creating the sort of bedlam and noise I last witnessed at this very venue seven years ago, when Harbhajan Singh’s squirt past point clinched the most famous of India’s series victories. Swann bowled. The batsman came forward and patted the ball back with almost exaggerated flourish. The crowd was momentarily quieted but the primal scream started again as Swann went back to his mark.

Again, there was sharp turn, but the paddle-sweep that greeted the ball was emphatic. As it streaked to fine leg, the batsman ran down the pitch and punched the air in celebration, before being held aloft by his equally delighted partner. He’s 35 years old and owns practically every batting record in the game, but you couldn’t escape the feeling that this was probably Sachin Tendulkar’s finest hour.

To score the winning runs in a record-shattering chase was special enough, but when that last stroke also brought up your 41st century, it became ineffably so. Boyhood dreams are made of this, and it says a lot about Tendulkar that he has never lost that child-like passion for the game.

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How I finally passed the Tebbit test

The courage, poise and decency of England’s cricketers are irresistible. Tunku Varadarajan in the Times:

If anyone had any doubts that cricket is a magnificent game – or that England (as Britain is called when kitted out in whites) and India are magnificent, humane, manly, kind, resilient, fraternal nations – these were dispelled over the last five days in Chennai (né Madras).

There have been few Test matches more special than the one that concluded there yesterday, and cricket is only part of the reason for that. I write here as an Indian who moved to England as a 16-year-old, and who, even after becoming a subject of Her Britannic Majesty, cheered always for the Indian cricket team – especially when they played against England. Norman Tebbit, one of Maggie Thatcher’s less enlightened ministers, had contempt for my type; but with apologies to Kipling: what should they know of cricket who only England know?

And yet… as the Test match began I found that I was shouting for England. I had, for the first time in my life, passed the infernal “Tebbit test” – which, in a nutshell, decreed that immigrant Britons must not cheer for the land of their forefathers when teams from said lands were playing teams from Britain.

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God descends on the city of joy

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Football legend Diego Maradona is on a two-day visit to Kolkata. The city cannot have enough of him, reports IANS [via The Hindu]

Argentina MaradonaFootball legend Diego Maradona Saturday mesmerized tens of thousands of Kolkatans who poured out to see him and fete him all through the day.

The soccer-mad city overwhelmed the Argentine, who said: “India is far off from my country. But I had no idea I have so many fans here… that people love football so much. Long live India. Long live Kolkata,”said Maradona, famous for his ‘Hand of the God’ goal against England in the 1986 World Cup.

Some 50,000 wildly cheering soccer buffs were present at the airport to catch a glimpse of Maradona, who touched down in the City of Joy past midnight on his maiden visit here.

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