{"id":324,"date":"2011-03-15T14:20:23","date_gmt":"2011-03-15T04:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wildcard.gnubies.com\/?p=324"},"modified":"2015-03-20T01:00:54","modified_gmt":"2015-03-19T15:00:54","slug":"surprising-loss-but-no-hint-of-foul-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/?p=324","title":{"rendered":"Surprising loss but no hint of foul play"},"content":{"rendered":"

WHEN Australia played Zimbabwe<\/a><\/strong> in the World Cup cricket tournament preliminary rounds, the openers, Shane Watson and Brad Haddin, took an awful amount of time to score their runs.<\/p>\n

Haddin, one of the more adventurous openers in one-day cricket, took 66 balls to make 29 while Watson made 79 off 92 balls. Their opening stand of 61 took 18.5 overs.<\/p>\n

As a result, soon after the match the International Cricket Conference. world cricket’s governing body, began an investigation to see whether the slow scoring had been done to aid the good work done by bookies in the subcontinent.<\/p>\n

Spot betting is big business during tournaments of this kind and the Australian pair is not normally known for anything other than aggression.<\/p>\n

The story was broken by an Indian paper, the Indian Express, and made big news all over the cricketing world. <\/p>\n

As it turned out, there was smoke, but no fire and everything settled down as well as it can when a cricket tournament is being played in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.<\/p>\n

As the tournament is still running through its preliminary games, most of which are quite lopsided as they pit established sides against minnows, there was much interest last week when India played South Africa<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The Indian batsmen got off to a good start and at one stage the board read 267 for the loss of one wicket with about 13 overs left. The lower-end estimate by observers was that India would get 350. The more ambitious evaluations were that 400 was within reach.<\/p>\n

But 29 runs later, India was all out. Most of the batsmen played really stupid strokes and threw away their wickets. The top three batsmen, Virender Sehwag, Sachin Tendulkar and Gautam Gambhir scored 73, 111 and 69 respectively.<\/p>\n

The remaining 43 runs were scored by other eight men in the team. South Africa, which has a reputation for being a side that chokes when confronted by a task such as it faced that day, held its nerve and chased down the 297 it needed for victory.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, nobody has even raised the possibility that there might have been something more in the game than just careless batting. It smacks of double standards.<\/p>\n

Both countries involved have a history<\/a><\/strong> of being involved in match-fixing; India’s Mohammed Azharuddin, Ajay Sharma, Ajay jadeja and Manoj Prabhakar had to end their careers after being found guilty. <\/p>\n

South Africa’s former captain, the late Hansie Cronje<\/a><\/strong>, was found guilty and two other South Africans, Herschelle Gibbs and Nicky Boje, have avoided going to India after Cronje was caught.<\/p>\n

The ICC has not raised even an eyebrow at the way the Indian innings collapsed. Such are the mysterious ways of the world’s cricket administrators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WHEN Australia played Zimbabwe in the World Cup cricket tournament preliminary rounds, the openers, Shane Watson and Brad Haddin, took an awful amount of time to score their runs. Haddin, one of the more adventurous openers in one-day cricket, took 66 balls to make 29 while Watson made 79 off 92 balls. Their opening stand … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Surprising loss but no hint of foul play”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,2,44,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia","category-cricket","category-india","category-south-africa","category-world-cup-cricket"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":22,"url":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/?p=22","url_meta":{"origin":324,"position":0},"title":"Is Haddin fit to be Australia's Test keeper?","date":"December 5, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"FOR any wicketkeeper to take over from the multi-talented Adam Gilchrist is a difficult task. When the replacement is a man who quickly sets an Australian record for byes conceded in a Test, it becomes all the more difficult to escape scrutiny. Brad Haddin is playing his 21st Test for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Australia"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":30,"url":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/?p=30","url_meta":{"origin":324,"position":1},"title":"Why is Chris Broad still a match referee?","date":"December 18, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"ON A day when the fifth fastest century in Test cricket was scored, there was a sharp reminder of how the white man still rules what is essentially a colonial game. The West Indies captain, Chris Gayle, put the Australian attack to the sword in the second half of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Australia"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":33,"url":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/?p=33","url_meta":{"origin":324,"position":2},"title":"Shane Watson knows no shame","date":"December 23, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"HIS captain is embarrassed. Senior cricket writers have poured scorn on him. Past cricketers have called his actions juvenile. Yet Shane Watson, the Australian all-rounder, is out there trying to defend his behaviour on the fourth day of the third Test against the West Indies. Watson dismissed the West Indies\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Australia"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":31,"url":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/?p=31","url_meta":{"origin":324,"position":3},"title":"To understand the term 'the ugly Australian' you need to watch cricket","date":"December 20, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"THE ugly Australian. That's a term which is pretty common in the cricketing world, simply because one sees a great deal of evidence on the field. Yesterday, there was one more instance of the kind of boorish behaviour that serves to make every decent citizen of this country wince in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Australia"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":14,"url":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/?p=14","url_meta":{"origin":324,"position":4},"title":"When sports bodies dictate the agenda...","date":"November 18, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"RUGBY matches telecast in New Zealand on Sky TV are made highly watchable by the two commentators - Grant Nisbett and Murray Mexted. Nisbett follows the game and Mexted, a former All Black, adds some spicy comment. But that is all in the past. Mexted has been shown the door\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Australia"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3732,"url":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/?p=3732","url_meta":{"origin":324,"position":5},"title":"Bangladesh should never have got Test status","date":"February 14, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"After Monday's loss to India in a one-off Test, Bangladesh has now played 98 Tests and won just eight, after being given full Test status in the year 2000. That is a rather dismal record for any team. They have only beaten Zimbabwe (five times), the West Indies (twice) and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cricket"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}