VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, [4] ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 13:44:06 02/15/03 Sat
Author: fizz
Subject: Rant

What was at one stage looking like being the most difficult of the two groups, Group A, is rapidly turning into a farce. Two months ago four of the seven teams from Group A were being levelled as potential tournament winners, now only Australia have even come close to living up to the hype. England's problems, self-inflicted or not, are well documented, but for me it is the complete failure of Pakistan and India to make the slightest impression on the Aussies that is really depressing.
Today's game was a typical example. Over the six months preceding India's tour to New Zealand you couldn't pick up a paper without some enlightened pundit tipping them as potential dark horses. Dark Horses my arse. They have a battery of top quality batsmen, have improved massively as a fielding side and have been supposedly preparing for this tournament for over two years.
Yet it wouldn't have taken an expert to notice Dravid's failings with the gloves in virtually every ODI he has kept in. You wouldn't need to know alot about the game to conclude that only playing 40 overs worth of bowlers in a 50 over match is a little bit of a risk. You certainly wouldn't need to be South African to know that only playing two quicks on South African wickets is asking for trouble.
What really gets me is that India are a really good side. Yet they seem obsessed with stacking their batting at the expense of a competent keeper and an attack with a bit of depth. They have worked so hard on their fielding and even have two decent seam bowling all-rounders, yet are being let down by a parinoid selection panel. What they got against Australia was a product of some very high quality bowling but also some very tentative stroke play. The batsmen are under tremendous pressure to post a total that their sub-par attack can protect. They moved Shewag, Mongia and Dravid around the order at the very last moment simply to stick Tendulkar up to open, a tactic they have abandoned since its relaitive failure in 1999. A team of Ganguly, Shewag, Tendulkar, Dravid, Singh, Bangar, Agarker, Patel, Singh, Srinath and Khan may at least have given the Aussies something to think about, rather than the one demensional outfit they crushed today.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.