Showing posts with label Brearley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brearley. Show all posts

Friday, 19 December 2008

Mohali Test...Day 1

0909: Welcome to WNWSACWR (What Neo Won't Show and Cricinfo Won't Report, for the uninitiated). The sky is laden and light is so low that upire Daryl Harper is groping in his pocket for the light metre. Finally it's out but Harper is struggling to read the reading. The press box, however, looks more illuminated, more so with the presence of Mike Brearley, Mike Atherton, Angus Fraser and the massive Derek Pringle.

1005: Sehwag proved third time lucky. After two botched attempts to edge Stuart Broad, he nicks it third time and lays the egg -- his 10th Test duck. Grateful Broad adimts even teammates didn't greet him better on his return.

1012: Brearley offered tips to KP in the flight from Chennai to Mohali. I think he is still contributing. A registered psychoanalyst-cum-psychotherapist, I suspect he is a hypnotist as well. Just before the dismissal, Brearley picked up a binocular and gazed at Sehwag who looked in a trance and nicked it.

1043: If Chennai was a great advertisement for Test cricket, Mohali missed that commercial. Crowd is sparse, you have more hair in Sehwag's bullhead. Organisers blame low turnout to exams in school. Flimsy excuse no doubt. Dravid faces the mother of all exams and even he turned up for the match!

1230: Every time a plane passes over the stadium, English fielders look up, as if ECB was supposed to airdrop their saviour. Derek Pringle was overheard saying one of those had Steve Harmison inside. Planes are flying really low, apparently after BCCI assured the airlines that Sehwag is out and there's not much aerial threat for the flying machines.

1538: Nursing a fractured rib and probably a broken heart, KP tried to do a Denis Compton. Compton had famously ran out Vijay Hazare in an Eden Gardens Test with a deft kick from mid-on. But then Compton had also won 54 caps for Arsenal as a footballer! No wonder, Gambhir is safe home.