Cricket - The Greatest Game of all

[Oracle]

Till Dhoni is there in the team, all useless Chennai Super King players will get into the International team. Murali Vijay/Ashwin/Kedar Jadhav/Vijay Shanker.......while good players will remain in the sidelines like Karthick, like VVS Laxman. Dhoni is responsible for retirements of Sehwag/Gambhir/Yuvraj. Dhoni is a destroyer of good cricketing careers, to spin up his own. Very very selfish.



This is Vijay Shanker's stats. Marginally better than Ravi Shastri's. Fools run the BCCI. Ganguly was right in showing Shastri his place. The last 2 matches that India won was because of our bowlers. That too, we could have lost. Don't these people have any shame left in representing 1.3 billion Indians?

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Pakistanis were praying for India to win this match against UK. There were a lot of messages in cricinfo from the Pakistanis wanting an Indian win. The support was just for this match though.

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How the British forged the first Indian cricket team

Cricket, it has famously been said, is an Indian game accidentally invented by the English.

By a curious historical irony, a sport that was the exclusive preserve of colonial elite is now the national passion of the formerly colonised. What is equally extraordinary is that India has become world cricket's sole superpower.

It is a status much savoured by contemporary Indians, for whom their cricket team is the nation. They regard "team India" as a symbol of national unity, and its players a reflection of the country's diversity.

Cricket Country
"In this last decade," former cricketer Rahul Dravid noted in 2011, "the Indian team represents, more than ever before, the country we come from - of people from vastly different cultures, who speak different languages, follow different religions, belong to different classes."

But the link between cricket and the nation was neither natural nor inevitable.

It took 12 years and three aborted attempts before the first composite Indian team took to the cricket field in the summer of 1911. And contrary to popular perception - fostered by the hugely successful Hindi film Lagaan - this "national team" was constituted by - and not against - empire.

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A diverse coalition of Indian businessmen, princely aristocrats and publicists, working in tandem with British governors, civil servants, journalists, soldiers, and professional coaches made possible the idea of India on the cricket pitch.

Because of this alliance between colonial and local elites, India was represented by a cricket team in imperial Britain more than a hundred summers before Virat Kohli and his men embarked on their campaign for the 2019 ICC World Cup.

The magical Ranji
The project to construct an "Indian" cricket team had a long and tortuous history. The idea was first floated in 1898, following the stunning rise of Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji or Ranji, an Indian prince who bewitched Britain and the wider imperial world with his sublime batting.

Indian cricket promoters sought to capitalise on Ranji's celebrity in putting together a team. But Ranji, who used his cricketing prestige to become the ruler of Nawanagar, was wary of a project that might raise questions about his nationality and, in particular, his right to represent England on the cricket field. There were some in the English establishment - notably, Lord Harris, the ex-Governor of what was then Bombay - who had never reconciled themselves to Ranji's astonishing cricketing success and continued to regard him as a mere "bird of passage".

Four years later, a different imperative was at work. Now, Europeans in colonial India, who sought to attract teams from home, collaborated with powerful local elites to create an Indian team that would showcase the country's potential as a cricketing destination.

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But the venture failed because of fierce divisions between Hindus, Parsis and Muslims over the question of their representation in the proposed team.

A subsequent attempt in 1906 met with the same fate as previous failed ventures.

The years between 1907 and 1909 saw a wave of "revolutionary" violence by young Indians who targeted British officials and their local collaborators. And there were strident calls in Britain to prevent the free movement of Indians into the country.

Curious Cast
Dismayed by the negative publicity generated by these acts, leading businessmen and public figures, along with prominent Indian princes, sought to revive the project of sending an Indian cricket team to London. This was the historical context within which the first "all-India" cricket team took shape.

The men who were chosen to represent India on the imperial stage made for an improbable cast of characters.

The captain of the team was 19-year old Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, the pleasure-seeking, newly enthroned maharaja of the most powerful Sikh state in India.

The rest of the team was selected on the basis of religion: there were six Parsis, five Hindus and three Muslims in the side.

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But the most remarkable feature of the first Indian cricket team was the presence of two Dalits from what was then Bombay - the Palwankar brothers, Baloo and Shivram, who overcame the resistance of upper-caste Hindus to become top cricketers of their time.

The composition of this team shows how in the early 20th Century, cricket took on a range of cultural and political meanings within colonial India.

For the Parsis, the cricket field acquired new significance at a time of deepening anxieties about the community's supposed deterioration. As Hindus and Muslims became more competitive on the pitch and elsewhere, Parsis began to fret about their own decline.

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Among northern India's Muslims too, cricket came to embody a new relationship with the political order established by British rule in the subcontinent.

Notably, the game was an integral feature of the one of the most important educational initiatives in colonial India: to forge a new Muslim political identity. Of the four Muslim players named in the first Indian team, three came from Aligarh, whose most well-known institution - the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College - had been established by the social reformer Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan to promote western learning within his community.

And finally, cricket also became a prism through which Hindu society was forced to reassess the insidious effects of the caste system.

At the heart of these debates was the stirring example of an extraordinary Dalit family, whose cricketing ability and achievements questioned the pernicious system of inequity and exclusion practiced by upper-castes Hindus.

For the Palwankars, cricket made their struggle for dignity and justice against discrimination possible.

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Baloo, in particular, became one of the most well-known public figures among his downtrodden compatriots. He was also the hero of the great BR Ambedkar, the architect of India's Constitution and a Dalit icon.

For Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, on the other hand, the imperial game was an important instrument in furthering his political interests. The embattled ruler sought to use his position as captain of the first all-India cricket team to quell growing imperial doubts about his abilities as a ruler.

Empire loyalism
For the empire loyalists who financed and organised the venture, cricket became a means of promoting a positive image of India and assuring authorities in Britain that the country would remain a loyal part of the British Empire.

That was the principal aim of the first all-India cricket tour of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The timing was not a coincidence: it was the year George V was formally crowned king-emperor in London and then travelled to India for the Delhi Durbar.

It is salutary to recall this long-forgotten history at a time when cricket in the subcontinent has become the vehicle of a shrill hyper-nationalism that views sport as "war minus the shooting".

Dr Prashant Kidambi is associate professor of colonial urban history at the University of Leicester and author of Cricket Country: The Untold History of the First All India Team (Penguin Viking)

BBC

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World Cup 2019: MS Dhoni, Kedar Jadhav draw flak for 'lack of intent' during run-chase vs England

Just this game? All games in the WC, these 2 showed lack of intent. I don't know why Dhoni is even in the team. His days are past his prime, should have taken retirement long back.

There was a time when batsmen would win matches for us, if we won matches. Now bowlers win matches for us. How things change.

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While Dhoni has been the villain in many matches in recent times I feel blaming him has become fashionable these days to the extent that the mistakes of others are overlooked. Kohli himself played with a less than 100 SR yesterday and then got out at a crucial time. He has scored a fifty in nearly every match in the WC but hasn't been able to convert even one of those to a big score. The chase is what he excels in and yesterday was a perfect opportunity. So blaming Dhoni and Jadhav alone is pointless.

Perhaps it wasn't as easy to score in those conditions as England made it look. Especially against fast bowlers. Both Shami and Bumrah had much better figures than our spinners who had a truly horrible day. Not sure if Bhuvaneshwar was fit but Kohli should maybe look to play 3 fast bowlers and rest either Kuldeep or Chahal. These aren't slow, turning subcontinental tracks. Blaming Dhoni and Jadhav masks the fact that the failure of the spinners is what caused us to end up in that situation in the first place.

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Blaming Dhoni has not become fashionable, it's to the point. Kohli, yes, he should play like a captain, take decisions like a captain. Kohli should click, it's high time. In a country of 1.3 billion, where cricket is the religion, we don't have fast bowlers in reserve? No one wants to talk how regional and national cricket politics is taking the oxygen out of this game.

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Waqar Younis questions Indian team's sportsmanship after England loss

Everywhere these people see conspiracy. We lost because we played like crap. Plain and simple.

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This is nice.

'Cricket saved me after my family was murdered'

Morteza Ali fled Afghanistan aged 14 after the Taliban killed his family. He eventually made his way to England, where he met the man who would become his second father.

Welcoming the teenager to Cumnor Cricket Club, a village club on the outskirts of Oxford, chairman Roger Mitty took Ali to the pavilion where he had laid out some kit for him.

"He looked at me as though I had given him lottery winnings or something. It was just a wonderful feeling," Mr Mitty said. "He couldn't speak much English, but he was obviously so pleased to be there."

Ali had arrived in England after a perilous journey lasting more than a year, and went to live with a distant cousin in Oxford. He had been obsessed with cricket in his homeland, playing for hours with a broom handle for a bat, but it was in England that he got the chance to develop as a cricketer.

The image of this "very shy boy", who was "obviously mad about cricket" is a first impression that has never left Mr Mitty.

As their relationship developed, father-of-three Mr Mitty treated the young Afghan as a fourth child, throwing him birthday parties, helping him through his education and celebrating Christmases together. The Mitty family and Cumnor's members began to learn snippets of how this young man with the engaging smile had come to arrive in Oxford.

Smuggled out of Afghanistan due to the mortal danger posed to him by the Taliban, Ali endured a brutal trek across Europe. At one stage during his journey, he was halted by illness and started vomiting uncontrollably as he crawled up the side of a mountain with a group of fellow migrants in Ukraine.

"I was praying that I would just die because I couldn't walk. Somehow I would get energy and I would just crawl and crawl," he said. "I had one shirt and jeans and was crawling in the snow. I thought I was finished."

But he finally made it to the refugee camps in Calais and, from there, on to the UK in the back of a lorry.

"I didn't know where my journey would take me," he said. "I think now... the cold weather with one shirt and jeans - how did I do that? It was amazing. I learned a lot about people."

"His journey from Afghanistan was extraordinary and I just felt I wanted to try and show him some love and concern and support and encouragement," Mr Mitty said.

"He just stole our hearts, really."

Ali would spend the next decade playing at Cumnor. "There is nowhere else in the world where there is a ground like that. It is in my heart," he said.

As the teenager grew into a man, his flamboyant batting style and penetrative bowling saw the all-rounder rise through the ranks to become one of the club's greatest talents. His approach on the field could be compared to his life off it - he was always up for the fight.

And Ali needed to draw on his inner strength again when the Home Office threatened him with deportation.

He had been given a two-year emergency visa when he arrived in the UK in 2002, but as he approached his 18th birthday Ali was told he would be sent back to Afghanistan. It sparked a campaign led by Mr Mitty and the community of Cumnor, which included lobbying MPs and obtaining evidence from Afghan leaders about the threat to Ali's life.

"There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that if he had gone back that would have been the end of him," Mr Mitty said. "I remember saying to my wife, probably at one of the worrying moments when it wasn't looking terribly good, that if I didn't save him I would never forgive myself."

Crucially, the campaign group was able to obtain a fax from Kabul.

"It was a declaration signed by all the elders of the village that Ali had come from declaring he would certainly be killed if he was ever returned," Mr Mitty said. "That was the best evidence - straight from the horse's mouth."

Eventually, Ali was sent a letter by the British government with his "passport for freedom".

During the time his future in the UK was in doubt, Ali had learned English, sat his GCSEs and secured a place to study accounting at Oxford Brookes University.

Mr Mitty, who is now president at Cumnor Cricket Club, said what struck him about Ali was that "he wasn't portraying himself as a victim".

"He would often say to me 'it's just so wonderful that even though I have a different culture, background, race and religion, people like you and people at Cumnor have shown me all this support, love and affection'."

Mr Mitty said cricket "drove" Ali, adding he had a "natural talent, a natural gift" for the game, with his excellent technique in part a product of his early days playing with a broom handle.

Ali's performances caught the eye of Oxford Marylebone Cricket Club University, which selected the all-rounder for a game against Worcestershire County Cricket Club in April 2009. He thus became only the second Afghan to play first-class cricket in England, after current national team star Mohammad Nabi in 2007.

Following a trip to Melbourne in Australia, in 2013 Ali was given the chance to play club cricket there, an offer that proved too good to turn down.

After 11 years in England, Ali left behind his adoptive family in Cumnor, and in Australia would go on to marry a woman from his homeland. As a record for their two children, he has written a book - Staring at Death - to document his past.

The 32-year-old has now spent more of his life out of Afghanistan than in it, but he still harbours hopes of being able to visit his village of Dah Murdah in Ghazni province - although he's been told it remains too dangerous for him to go there.

And while Ali has made a life for himself in Australia, he said he still considers Cumnor to be his home.

"Roger is my father," he said.

"I will always remember him and what he did for me."

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As of today this is the current standing of teams.

Remaining matches are:


Some predictions:

Eng Vs NZ: Let's assume England loses this match as the Pak fans want. NZ goes to the semi-finals with 13 points, and England remains with 10 points.
If Eng wins, they go through to the semi-finals. Pakistan then has to beat Bangladesh to match NZ on points. It's NRR then.

Pak Vs Ban: Time for some bold prediction. Who wants to take a bet that Bangladesh is winning this match.

Afghan Vs WI: Both teams out of the semi-final.

Ind Vs SLanks: India has qualified for the semi-finals.

Aus Vs SA: Australia has qualified for the semi-finals.

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Okay, so England qualifies for the semi-finals. It's going to be India Vs Eng again in the semis. India lost the game against England in the league match.

Now Pakistan must win against Bangladesh, and even then the question of NRR will arise.

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Sandeep Patil, this a**h***, look at his record. These are idiots who run Indian cricket. Takes a dig at Ravi Shastri the moron.

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Blaming Dhoni has not become fashionable, it's to the point. Kohli, yes, he should play like a captain, take decisions like a captain. Kohli should click, it's high time. In a country of 1.3 billion, where cricket is the religion, we don't have fast bowlers in reserve? No one wants to talk how regional and national cricket politics is taking the oxygen out of this game.

My point was Dhoni wasn't doing so much worse than those around him. Look at Rahul's SR in the Bangladesh game for example.

As for fast bowlers, I think Bhuvi was fit against England but leaving him out in favor of 2 spinners was a conscious decision. England were expected to find it tougher against the wristspinners, as they have in the past. Why the team mgmt did not look at what England did to Rashid Khan and co. and change their plans I don't know.

Reserve fast bowlers are available, perhaps for the first time in Indian cricket history. If I'm not mistaken, Navdeep Saini and Mohammad Siraj are in England as net bowlers. Deepak Chahar waiting in the wings. But the selectors in their wisdom did not select any of them in the 15 man squad.

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Waqar Younis questions Indian team's sportsmanship after England loss

Everywhere these people see conspiracy. We lost because we played like crap. Plain and simple.

Hilarious. I suppose the cunning New Zealanders are in on the conspiracy too.

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My point was Dhoni wasn't doing so much worse than those around him. Look at Rahul's SR in the Bangladesh game for example.

I don't understand why KL Rahul was selected as an opener in the first place. Rishabh Pant was the best fit in place of Dhawan. We don't want the India team of the 2000s who used to get 1 run per ball as openers. Times have changed, openers should smash the best bowlers around with no mercy, and respect good deliveries.

At number 4, Karthick was a good fit. Dhoni wanted to play, that is why he's in the team. Entitlement, not because of his current form. And this WC is big FAIL for Kohli. I think he doesn't have a captain's mind.

As for fast bowlers, I think Bhuvi was fit against England but leaving him out in favor of 2 spinners was a conscious decision. England were expected to find it tougher against the wristspinners, as they have in the past. Why the team mgmt did not look at what England did to Rashid Khan and co. and change their plans I don't know.

This. Adapt and survive. I don't think that chutiya Shastri watches other games and takes a decision. He's there to have fun. Indian team doesn't need a coach, we have enough good players to have 3 test teams, and still win. And if we need a coach, that player should have stats backing him up. Kumble was that coach, but Kohli fought with him. The management should have warned Kohli he should either play with Kumble as a coach, or forget representing India. Manmani nahi chahiye.

Reserve fast bowlers are available, perhaps for the first time in Indian cricket history. If I'm not mistaken, Navdeep Saini and Mohammad Siraj are in England as net bowlers. Deepak Chahar waiting in the wings. But the selectors in their wisdom did not select any of them in the 15 man squad.

I heard about Saini and Siraj, never saw them playing though. Are they good?

Fun innit', earlier our batsmen would rescue our bowlers, now our bowlers rescue our batsmen.

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If we have 11 good players from Sikkim, we should play these 11 Sikkimese in the National Team. This is what Gavaskar said once, and I totally agree. There should not be masked reservation/regionalism in cricket - 1 player from Karnataka, 1 from Maharashtra, 1 from Gujarat etc.