Category: Cricket

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How long has Australia been cheating to obtain reverse swing?

Australia’s Test series against India has ended in a 1-2 series defeat thanks to rain — else the Sydney Test may also have ended in defeat, making it 1-3 — but though many questions have been asked about the home team, the elephant in the room still remains.

Nobody has told the public how a team which managed to extract prodigious reverse swing during the 2017-18 Ashes series against England — played in the Australian summer — was unable to get even a fraction of that kind of swing in the series against India.
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Australians will whinge, but the Boxing Day pitch was just fine

A great deal has been said and written about the pitch prepared for the Boxing Day Test between Australia and India – but in the end the game only lasted 27 balls into the fifth day, with India winning by 137 runs. Is that a result-oriented pitch or what? Or is it as it was painted, unsuitable for a Test? I think not.

The Australian complaints were (and always are) that the pitch did not afford the faster bowlers any assistance. But then as former Australian fast bowler Dennis Lillee pointed out during a lunch-time interview on day two, the MCG has always been a dead wicket. Who is expected to take wickets – the bowler or the pitch?
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Appointing Justin Langer as coach will not solve Australia’s problems

In March 2018, the Australian cricket team was in serious trouble after some players were caught cheating on the field.

The captain, vice-captain and the player who was the executor of the cheating that had been planned all lost their places and were ejected from cricket. Captain Steve Smith and vice-captain David Warner were banned for two years and Cameron Bancroft for nine months.

Coach Darren Lehmann retained his job but resigned soon thereafter.
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Steve Smith has no ethics. No shame. He should be sacked

Steve Smith, Darren Lehmann and the whole lack-of-leadership group of this Australian cricket team should be banned for life. Cameron Bancroft can be spared – he was just made the fall guy.

The most shameful aspect of this episode is that Bancroft, the juniormost, was made the fall guy. That’s good “leadership”, Steven Smith.

Darren Lehmann has to go. If he knew about it, then he approved and should go. If he didn’t, then he has no business being coach.
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Cricket Australia needs to get player availability policies sorted

Australian cricket authorities are short-charging fans of the national Twenty20 competition, the Big Bash League, through their policies on releasing players from national duty when needed by their BBL sides for crucial encounters.

The Adelaide Strikers and the Hobart Hurricanes, who contested Sunday’s final, were both affected by this policy.

Adelaide won, but had they failed to do so, no doubt there would have been attention drawn to the fact that their main fast bowler, Billy Stanlake, did not play as he was on national duty to play in a tri-nation tournament involving New Zealand and England.
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Black money continues to pour in to IPL

A little more than a year ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that 500 and 1000 rupee notes would be removed from circulation as a step to flushing out all the black money in the country.

He made the announcement on TV in prime time on 8 November 2016 and gave people four hours time to be ready for the change!

But judging by the amounts which cricketers were bought for in the Indian Premier League Twenty20 auction last week, there is more black money than ever in the country.

Else, sums like US$1.5 million would not be available for the Kolkata Knight Riders to buy a cricketer like Mitchell Starc. This is black money being flushed out and made ready to be used as legal tender, the main reason why the Indian Government turns a blind eye to the process.
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Too much of anything is good for nothing

Last year, Australia’s national Twenty20 competition, the Big Bash League, had 32 league games plus three finals. It was deemed a great success.

But the organiser, Cricket Australia, is not content with that. This year, there will be 40 games followed by the two semi-finals and the final. And the tournament will drag on into February.

This means many of the same cricketers will be forced to play those eight extra games, putting that much more strain on their bodies and minds. How much cricket can people play before they become jaded and reduced to going through the motions?
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Australia taking a big risk by playing Cummins

AUSTRALIA is likely to regret pushing Patrick Cummins into Test cricket before he has had a chance to play at least one season of matches in the Sheffield Shield to test out his body.

That Australia is not good at monitoring its players is evident from Mitchell Starc’s breaking down in India. Starc was ruled out of the India series after two Tests, with a stress fracture in his right foot.

As the cricket website espncricinfo has detailed, Starc is no stranger to injuries: he has been suffering from a spate of them right from December 2012.
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Steve Smith cheated. Admit it, and move on, mate

ONE of the big problems that people from Western countries have is that they are unable to admit to any wrongdoing when they are caught out in a confrontation with someone from the East.

They are never wrong even when they are caught red-handed. Remember Lance Armstrong?

It is this mentality that prevents Steven Smith, the captain of Australia’s cricket team, from pretending that he was not trying to consult members of his team in the pavilion before deciding whether to have an LBW decision reviewed during the final innings of the second Test against India in Bangalore on Tuesday (March 7).
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‘The terrorist has got another wicket’

Dean Jones is one of those many former Australian cricketers who now earns big bucks as a commentator on the sport. Like many others, he has little of import to say, but takes up 700 or 800 words to do so.

Jones was sacked by Ten Sports in 2006 for making a racist comment about South Africa’s Hashim Amla. But he has slowly crept back, with the Melbourne newspaper The Age helping in his rehabilitation by giving him a weekly column.

One would think that a man who goes around referring to Muslim players as terrorists would be shunned by publications that claim to have standards.
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