1. Sachin Tendulkar: I have a strong stance on this issue. I strongly feel Osama’s death is either good or bad for us. It just can’t be anything else even though we should not rule out other possibilities. If you ask me, I think it’s essentially a relative subject and so Osama’s relatives can better answer it. Osama was apparently staying in a stone hut in Tora Bora. When people throw stone at you, you turn them into milestone. Instead, Osama turned it into a stone hut and I think that tells everything;
2. Rahul Dravid: Who died isn’t important here. One should not think about individuals, team always comes first. What’s important here is a death has taken place which means the global population has just shrunk and the air available for human consumption will be relatively higher. Besides, I think it would allow batsmen to concentrate better. I remember I was batting against Sachin’s son in Mumbai when the Americans were bombing Afghanistan and it greatly affected my concentration. The only time I had a similar problem was in Sydney when a whale rather loudly exhaled in the adjacent Tasman Sea just when I was taking guard;
3. Shahid Afridi: I’m happy like nobody’s business. When I speaked that Indians not having big hearts and we having, people moleculed me…or is it ridiculed? Whoever…Now see which country gave Laden shelter? I feel…I feel… vindictive…the media will now eat dumbbell pie;
4. Anil Kumble: I see beyond Osama’s death and what stirs me is the inequality of the contest. The US Military and the Al Qaeda were fighting and I’m sorry to say only one team was fighting in the true spirit. Our Bangalore Royal Challengers owner Vijay Mallya has naturally taken interest and promised to reduce the spirit deficit;
5. Sourav Ganguly: I’m really aghast. I think Obama is selling us dummy. I’ve been tipping them that bin Laden was masquerading as Greg Chappell but they did not listen. I’m not convinced that bin Laden is dead;
6. Shoaib Akhtar: Dude, America is not like Pakistan. America is in America and unlike Pakistan, there people don’t celebrate when their presidents die. USA losing president like Osama is like Pakistan losing me;
7. Shane Warne: Heard the guy was living with his youngest wife. Got her number mate?
Buchanan bashes Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly and Ganguly’s cocky cocker spaniel in his book.
# Now where have all those players gone?
As you took guard, revenge would gleam in the bowler's eyes. Merely the wicket won't do. They wanted to see blood on turf.
They were veritable demons who would snarl, bark and holler inside your eardrum at the end of their follow through. Giving you glare and a piece of their mind till you start trembling in your boots and show signs of shrinking.
From the slip cordon will emanate a barrage of ceaseless unflattering allusions to certain members of your family till you blush and cringe enough to miss the line.
But at the end of the day, hostilities would stay behind when they walked off the field to share a banter and beer, hands around each other's shoulders.
More importantly, they bore no grudge. If they had to settle a score, they did it head-on, not hiding behind the jacket of a book.
They did not take mental note of each and every innuendo and returned to the hotel room to dip their nib in poison and then rush to the publisher to market the malice.
0920: Welcome to WNWSACWR (What Neo Won't Show and Cricinfo Won't Report). Munaf Patel and RP Singh in the middle -- in other words, play yet to start.
0948: Ganguly faced a couple of balls and suddenly went AWOL, leaving behind the clueless fielders and baffled umpires. I sniffed delaying tactics, a friend suggested nature's call. Before speculation took obnoxious turn, here he's back. Man, India would surely and sorely miss his nuisance value.
1047: Apparently, no one told Dhoni that he was playing a Test match, hence Mahi going run-a-ball. Also apparently, no one told him that Shane Watson is a pacer, for Mahi comes dancing down the track against the blond. Well, ignorance is bliss indeed.
1102: Cameron White has been non-existent in this comatose session. No wonder he's engaged in an engrossing chat with Asad Rauf at square leg, probably discussing kebab recipe.
1621: Blame the inordinate delay to ICC CEO Haroon Lorgat who spoke at length and made hardly any point in the press conference here. He is upset with empty stands greeting Tendulkar on his milestone. "Need to ensure Test cricket's primacy" he advocated, before going on to announce 2010 T20 World would take place in West Indies. England hosts it next year, which means we didn't know it has become an annual affair!
1626: Hussey edged Ishant and Harbhajan but Dhoni, on first occasion, didn't go for it at all and on the second, didn't stoop. Some are cursing him but to me, MSD looks a man of high self-esteem who refuses to bow for anything he perceives below his dignity.
1635: Clarke broke free and came dancing down the track to hit Bhajji for four. I suspect it was the bad breath/body odour of the close-in fielders hanging around his blade like a school of piranhas.
Dented pride? Wounded ego? Tarnished reputation? Well, that's no-brainer. After Murali and Mendis molested them in broad day light, you needed Doosra, the closest you have to a clairvoyant, to find out exactly what passed through the mind of those Indian batsmen who went through the trauma.
Rahul Dravid: Well, it’s never wise to pick up a fight with someone who has been an army gunner till the other day.
Gautam Gambhir: I told Kirsten in the plane that I’m scared of flights.
S Sreesanth comes across as a likeable fellow. Hailing from the backwaters of Kerala, where people prefer feet and a bigger ball, Sreesanth is an aberration. His unbridled enthusiasm, and not to forget his nippy pace, makes you sit up, take notice and do some online sports betting. Of late, it’s unfortunately his idiosyncrasies that he’s getting attention for.
Since Sourav Ganguly taught the new tit-for-tat language to his teammates, a Team India player is no more the one who would take his eyes off the opponent, lower his head and digest the abuse hurled from, say, an Australian bigmouth. That’s past. Instead, he would now stare eyeball-to-eyeball and is often the last to blink. He does not mind giving someone double his size a piece of his mind and is ready to meet fire with fire.
Naturally, we hailed Sreesanth when he hit Andre Nel for a six and then ferociously twirled his bat before finally breaking into a war dance of sort in South Africa.
But since the tour of England, Sreesanth’s aggression has been more of a worry, ask his the then embarrassed captain Rahul Dravid. The sign was clear that the demon within had just gotten out of control. You can call Kevin Pietersen names or spurn a dinner invitation from Matt Prior. But Michael Vaughan is not the guy you would barge into. And I’m not buying the theory that it was an inadvertent effort to actually rub shoulders with the English captain.
It should worry Team India that of late, Sreesanth has become a Match Referee’s favourite and his names dominate the meetings on breach ofICC code. Instead of going back to the nets to finetune his craft at the end of a match, Sreesanth is heading for the Match Referee’s room to be harangued on something as dull as code of conduct and he seems to have has made it a habit as well.
For a nation bullied and browbeaten for ages, Sreesanth positively reflects and probably personifies our ambition to settle all those old scores and pay everyone back in their own coin. But in doing so, Sreesanth is probably digressing from what is his primary job, to bowl and take wickets.
For a fast bowler, a minority community in India, it pays to be frugal. It’s a demanding job and hence tiresome. You have to be as miser as Ebenezer Scrooge with your energy to be effective. Some of the greatest bowlers we have seen -- and Andre Nel is not among them – did not need to mouth foul words to get a batsman out. In fact, I wonder, if that ever did the trick.
Had that been the case, Dennis Lillee would not have wasted his energy in the MRFPaceAcademy trying to show a youngster how to grip the cherry for the perfect outswinger. Instead, he would have just arrived here with a truckload of sledge-lexicons and asked his wards to cram them.
In Sreesanth’s case, he is spending half of his energy on those verbal duels. It can be a huge distraction and even the most veteran player tends to get carried away. And he’s just 24!
Already he has embarrassed his captains, be it Dravid or Dhoni. Dravid had to issue a note to curb Sreesanth in England and Dhoni, on his arrival from the Twenty20 World Cup, admitted, though jokingly, that Sreesanth can become a captain’s worry.
Now, that’s the last thing you want to hear from your captain. If your skipper has to be more concerned with your volatile temper than team strategy, then you are not worth the place in the side. I mean, it still is not the case with Sreesanth but he should mend his ways.
The kind of aggression he shows actually stems from a petty selfishness. It’s like any street brawl. In such cases, ego takes over and you just go with the flow. It’s against the team’s interest, because you want to win that personal battle, even if that cost your team the war.
For Sreesanth, it’s not a major problem to channelise his energy. He in fact does not need to look beyond the team. Zaheer Khan could be a role model for him. He can learn from his elder pace colleague how to be aggressive and effective at the same time. How to have the batsmen on their toes, not because of your foul moth but because of your guiles. At the end of the day, cricket still remains a game where the bowler has to get the batsman out with the ball as his lone weapon. The sooner Sreesanth realizes it, the better.
As Rahul Dravid abdicates Team India captaincy, despite its frills and thrills, one could not help but sink into a state of depression as petty selfishness gets the better of a quintessential team man, who leaves the job admitting he is weak at heart and incapable of bearing the burden anymore.
Ian Chappell and Co. wants to believe us otherwise, but Dravid’s decision stemmed from uncharacteristic petty selfishness and its horrendous timing exposes a man who is so touchy about his own craft that he does not hesitate to sacrifice collective interest in the altar of perfectionism.
That Dravid wanted to leave head held high with his dignity intact sounds alright. He wants to concentrate on his batting sounds okay too. But it’s, unmistakably, Dravid the batsman, who is at the centre of concern and not the team!
Roll back the years and you have a Dravid who threw weight behind Sourav Ganguly, shed ego and though reluctant, stood behind the stumps on one dayers, moved up and down the batting order just to serve the team’s purpose. And he was still successful, prompting Sunil Gavaskar to say every time Dravid walked out to bat, he could see a tri-colour fluttering.
Dravid’s out-of-the-blue decision has plunged Indian cricket into deep leadership crisis. Indeed, the timing could not have been worse. Ricky Ponting’s men are packing their bag before they barge into the country for a seven-match ODI series. Thirteen days to go and Team India still does not know who’ll walk out with Ponting for the toss.
And it came when selectors just don’t have enough options around. An ageing Sachin Tendulkar, his ODI retirement being the subject of speculation till the other day, has been sounded out to take over, while Ganguly’s name is also doing the rounds.
Dhoni, meanwhile, looks certain to be saddled with the burden of ODI captaincy, whether the poor Jharkhand lad is ready for it or not. In such a case, the stumper with flowing tresses would have more on his platter than he can possibly eat. The Too-Much-Too-Early syndrome has had many a casualty and Dhoni might soon join the list.
But, you can’t actually blame the selectors. Show me the options!
Those were the days when Virender Sehwag was shoehorned into vice captaincy, hoping he would take over the reins one day. But with his form deserting him like a fickle girl friend, the Nawab of Najafgarh fell by the wayside and let alone captaincy, a comeback as a player would be like hitting the jackpot for Sehwag.
Yuvraj Singh’s story has been more or less the same. His off-the-field lifestyle has often blighted his performance with the bat and failing to cement his berth in Test side scuttled his case.
That leaves Dhoni as the last Indian hope and thanks to Dravid’s rather untimely realization, instead of being guided to the pool, Dhoni is about to be thrown into the deepest end. And he can’t be faulted if he sinks, rather than swims.
So the drama is over and Graham Ford has just landed the most exciting and demanding job one can think of in the sports world. Though not exactly chest-thumping, but still, this was exactly what had been predicted in the previous post in this blog.
Hoping Kent would relieve Ford of his duties, I have this gut feeling that though it’s never possible to satiate the Men in Blue’s Blue Billion fans, Ford would prove a better coach than the person he succeeded, Greg Chappell.
A self-effacing, low-key coach, who loves to work in the backstage, Ford resembles a John Wright walking out of a barber’s shop after a haircut. The deep, intense eyes and furrowed forehead again reminds you of Wright.
Chappell was a disaster of a coach and had no experience of coaching any national team before he took over the Team India reins. But the case is not so with Ford. As Natal coach, Ford, along with senior pros like Malcolm Marshall and Clive Rice, guided an exciting talent pool that included Shaun Pollock, Jonty Rhodes and Lance Klusener.
He joined Bob Woolmer as his deputy in 1999 and eventually succeeded the deceased Englishman. Before the Hansiegate scandal hit South Africa cricket like a catastrophe, South Africa, under Ford, won eight of the 11 series.
Ford raises hopes because unlike Chappell, a typical Australian larrikin, he is not a loud mouth. He is not the one who would thunder “My way, or the highway.” It is easy to criticize Wright for being ‘soft’. But the fact remains that it was because of the affable Kiwi’s sacrifice that Team India at least had some results to show.
Wright tried asserting himself but soon realized it was not going to work. Sourav Ganguly’s imposing clout with Jagmohan Dalmiya’s backing and a flawed zonal representation in selection committee did not amuse him but once he realized he could not overhaul the system and has to work in it, Wright adopted quickly.
Knowing a system inside out is a pre-requisite if you want to re-create it. And you have to have that authority. But Chappell was in tremendous hurry and he thought he was not the Team India coach but the Board CEO. He completely exceeded the brief. With a few senior officials -- who were probably enamoured by Chappell the batsman, rather than Chappell the coach -- pampering his tantrums, Chappell had something to say about each and everything that has anything to do with Indian cricket. He even felt that MPs are paid to say whatever they want.
Despite his vast knowledge of the game, and I don’t doubt that, Chappell had a skin deep idea about the culture of India. Unlike Wright, Chappell never looked someone who is passionate about India and the cricket team. If passion marked Team India’s Wright’s era, it was indifference under Chappell.
Ford should be a welcome successor to Chappell, the media manipulator. Chappell’s Goebbels-ian use of the media tool, abetted by some senior, cynic journalists -- including one who heads a disputed cricket association – ensured that alongside the Chappell-Ganguly broadshow, there was sideshows like Chappell-Sehwag, Chappell-Harbhajan, Chappell-Yuvraj, Chappell-Tendulkar, Chappell-Zaheer.
Make no mistake, Ford will find it a crown of thorns. To their credit, the highly inflammable Blue Billion doesn’t discriminate. Ford would be hailed with every success and hanged with every defeat.
As if we did not know it, Aaj Tak, along with its English-speaking sister Headlines Today, carried a sting operation where the selector quartet of Ranjib Biswal, Bhupinder Singh Sr, Venkatapathy Raju and Sanjay Jagdale ‘reveal’ a dressing room riddled with infighting and ego clash. And how ominous Greg Chappell was. The highlights are:
Bhupinder Singh Sr: "Greg wanted to show everybody he is the boss. He was not happy with anybody. There were instances when Chappell was not talking to senior players for 4-5 days. He was not on talking terms with Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag and Harbhajan Singh. It happened in South Africa.”
The North Zone selector says Chappell had a "divide and rule policy" and was the additional ego in a team full of egos.
He also said that Rahul Dravid had problems with Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly. They were not supporting Dravid, says Bhupinder; some players were backing Tendulkar, some Ganguly. "They are sensing that if he fails then we have a chance to become captain."
Ranjib Biswal: "Greg could not understand Indian cricketers' psyche. He was more like a schoolmaster than a friend."
Sanjay Jagdale: "I won't call it factionalism but there were some personal problems.”
Jagdale also reveals that S Sreesanth and Zaheer Khan had fought in the dressing room.
Niranjan Shah: "Endorsement money is so huge, there is a chance of a grey area. They will get money if they are in the team, otherwise they won't. That's why. it [pressure from sponsors to retain them] may be there. That's why the board has said only three endorsements per player."
(Rahul Dravid, following his bleeding nose to dressing room)
A day in the life of a conspiracy theorist.
If you just recall the freak incidents in Team India’s conditioning camp at EdenGardens, the uncanny similarity raises the obvious question. Are the juniors, reportedly browbeaten by their senior teammates in the World Cup, out there to avenge their humiliation in the Caribbean?
Reports claimed one of the junior pacers was bullied by a fellow Team India senior in the World Cup. We don’t know if it was S Sreesanth but what we know that the Kerala pacer, equally capable of earning his stripes as a dancer-actor in any South Indian movie, hurled a snorter that had the Achilles ’ heel, I mean Sachin Tendulkar’s heal, sprained. Physio John Gloster, a busy man these days, rushed with the ice pack and Tendulkar was seen cooling his heels. Healing of his heels took some time and he was left alone to count the rows at the EdenGardens.
The second incident had a gory end. Rudra Pratap Singh was perhaps led to believe that Rahul Dravid personified all the apparent injustice meted out to him. The UP southpaw duly sent down a bouncer and The Wall collapsed, hit on the visor and left with a bloody nose. Dravid was soon following his nose, bleeding one, to the dressing room.
Don’t be misled by the incident. Metaphorically, RP did not hit Dravid’s nose, merely thumbed his own at Dravid. And RP can’t feign ignorance either, for it happened right under the nose of each and every Team India member.
Now my gut feeling is that VRV, assigned to take care of another senior member, actually had Sourav Ganguly in his hit-list. The poor Punjab pacer probably mistook the Bengali-speaking groundsman for Ganguly and it was a rare classic case of a fast bowler delivering a leg-break.
Ganguly, of course, can take heart from the fact that cats have nine lives and a desperate lot still hails him as the Big Cat, the Royal Bengal Tiger. But the danger is clearly far from over.
(Fleming lbw Vaas for zero, fourth time in a row. AFP Photo)
The Lankan Lions finally brought down the high-flying Kiwis in the Super Eight clash yesterday and it snapped New Zealand's record sequence of nine ODI wins.
When Fleming was trapped by Chaminda Vaas for a duck, some interesting statistics came to the fore. This was Fleming's fourth duck in a row against Sri Lanka and it was Vaas who got rid of him on all four occasions! And, hold your breath, on each occasion, Vaas has removed him leg before wicket!
For those who has a special liking for numbers, here are details of Fleming's duck details!
Overall, we are told, Fleming has been dismissed without scoring six times against Sri Lanka - 17th time overall in ODIs.
Vaas has claimed Fleming's wicket 11 times - the most by any bowler. Brett Lee and Waqar Younis has captured Fleming's wicket seven times each.
Fleming the captain, with 14 ducks against his name, this equals Arjuna Ranatunga and the third in the skipper's duck-list is Sourav Ganguly, who had nine noughts during his captaincy.
Now that BCCI is headhunting for a full-time coach, I ponder who fits the bill and wonder how much it hinges on the captain-coach relation.
I often felt that like openers, the captain-coach duo too needs to be perfect foil for each other, at least in Indian scenario. They should be as different as chalk and cheese, acid and alkali, yin and yang. I believe it’s like an average Indian couple. One of them has to make some sacrifice, concede an extra inch, and take the backseat to allow the other to cap the initiative. It may smack of male chauvinism but the reality if you have equal number of hen-pecked hubbies as against docile wives!
I feel the Sourav Ganguly-John Wright marriage yielded the results just because of that. Ganguly’s relation with the former Kiwi captain may have dwindled towards the end but the southpaw should acknowledge that he owes much of his success, and a good drink, to the affable Kiwi.
The Ganguly-Wright pair was just the perfect combination. An assertive, aggressive, hi-adrenalin skipper in perfect contrast to a reticent, introvert coach. Indian cricket owes a lot to Wright. A divorcee, away from his two sons, Wright spent many a lonely new year’s eve in company of candles and his favourite guitar in his hotel room in the adopted homeland.
You can always accuse him of being soft, vulnerable to Ganguly’s tantrums and whims but to his credit, Wright never used media to wash the dirty linen in public. Media is a dangerous weapon, a double-edged blade that hardly serves any purpose other than mudding the water. See how Wright’s successor manipulated media to serve his purpose and left the team in complete shamble.
Wright did raise issues with the men who mattered but Ganguly, with a Godfather in Jagmohan Dalmiya, could not be reined in, the zonal selection system stayed on (till Sharad Pawar’s regime just scrapped it) and other things also ceased to change. Despite all provocations, Wright never disgraced Indian cricket.
Once he quit – on his own, no mean feat in Indian cricket – I always doubted how long the Ganguly-Chappell honeymoon would last. Both are the same side of the coins, headstrong, abrasive, combative, pugnacious.
It was obvious that two men of such strong ego can’t share the dressing room and one had to go. Soon sparks started flying out all over and Chappell won the first round. Enter Rahul Dravid and to be honest, I expected this marriage to last longer and deliver the goods as well.
Dravid is a perfect team man, a reliable cricketer and a captain’s delight. But he is not the one who would assert himself. And I’m not the only one to feel so about a player who has played the second fiddle throughout his life – his epic knocks would always got overshadowed by VVS Laxman’s class, Ganguly’s pyrotechnics or Sachin Tendulkar’s stroke-making.
Dravid needed a coach like Chappell and the combination looked a balanced one. Somehow, despite their mutual admiration, the Dravid-Chappell pair did not produce the results. You can’t really blame Dravid. I believe a captain is as good as his coach. And at times, coaches win matches.
Historic Test win in West Indies, record number of successful chases in ODIs…still Greg Chappell is not my man with the Midas Touch.
To be honest, I didn’t like him and it’s not so much about cricket, as much as culture. A cultural clash to be precise. And in such clashes, no one is right or wrong. It’s just a matter of liking and disliking. From that point of view, I dislike Greg but that doesn’t mean I’m right and he’s wrong.
Now that he’s no more the Team India coach, I embark on an obit of his first international coaching career.
I think Greg is cursed. An exceptional batsman with a ton in both his debut and swansong Tests, centuries in each innings of his debut as captain and an average of 53.86. The tragedy, however, is that the lone lingering memory of his playing days was when he came forward to advice his younger brother Trevor to bowl under-arm in the third final of the 1981 World Series Cup.
I was watching the tapes again. New Zealand needed six off the last ball to tie, and not win, the match and Greg appeared to order his brother Trevor not just to tell him bowl an under-arm delivery, but also demonstrated it how to do. Rod Marsh was shamed to death behind the stumps and screamed “No! No!”. What followed was one of the darkest chapters in the game’s history.
Even when Greg took over as Team India coach, he brought the same jinx. It was jackpot for someone who had no prior experience of coaching any international side when Greg was selected as Team India coach and it’s well-documented that Sourav Ganguly’s backing made all the difference, even though key panelist Sunil Gavaskar voted against the Australian.
Soon after the honeymoon period was over, what followed was the Greg vs Ganguly saga, which I think is another cultural clash. Gratitude is considered a virtue in Indian society, while the Aussies perceive it as a hindrance to professionalism. A way could have been found to deal the issue but that needed both parties to concede some grounds. And Greg’s media manipulation – so many instances to cite – made things worse.
He would leak things to his selective friends in the media and resorted to all sort of practices unbecoming of a coach.
While the Greg vs Ganguly broadside – it was one-way traffic with Ganguly maintaining deafening silence against Greg’s verbal diarrhea -- dominated the headlines, side-by-side went Greg vs Harbhajan, Greg vs Zaheer, Greg vs Yuvraj, Greg vs Sehwag, Greg vs Tendulkar, almost an unending list.
Even his holiday at Alappuzha landed the houseboat owner in trouble. I mean it was no way Chappell’s fault but the fact remains, wherever he goes, whatever he does, it has always kicked up a row and everything seems in mess.
Sick of clichés, I was trying neologism and that’s the gem I stumbled on, Shit Midas. Whenever Greg laid his fingers on something, it turned shit. You have Team India before you.
So India has already played the last match under Guru Greg, apparently so.If media reports are to be believed, Chappell can forget about an extension and rather pack his bag and board the first Qantas flight home.
So, who should take the hot seat now? I have some names in my mind, BCCI would do well to have a dekko at it. This is an open-end list, feel free to nominate yours.
1. Swami Ramdev: A popular, and hence not necessarily valid, view has been that endorsement has become a huge distraction and the cricketers simply have lost focus. And to right that wrong, you can’t have a better choice than Ramdev. He is no alien to cricket and he in fact had advised the players to practice Yoga before the World Cup. Dravid’s men must have ignored it and paying the price for ignoring his divine formula. At least one Team India member has been spotted visiting him once why don’t Dravid, Tendulkar, Ganguly and Yuvraj follow Dhoni? So, bye bye push-ups and welcome pranayam.
2. Lalu Prasad: So what if he messed up Bihar? See how he turned that Great Indian White Elephant, the Indian Railway, into a profit-making juggernaut. These days Mr Prasad is a sought after name even in the IIMs and Harvards. And he apparently believes he can player better than the Men in Blue. He heads Bihar cricket Association and his son, Tejaswi, has represented Delhi in Polly Umrigarh trophy. Enough link with the game, isn’t it? And haven’t you heard of railway coaches? If he can script a turnaround in Railway’s fate, what’s the heck is this cricket team?
3. Sonia Gandhi:Agreed Italy is more known for Pizza, Pasta, LeaningTower, Don Corleon and a certain Marco Materazzi. Also agreed that so far, no Italian has ever been accused of being sighted in and around any cricket stadium. But just see how she’s running the Great Indian Coalition Show. She picked a compliant, acceptable captain to
lead a team which has its fair share of in-fighting but overall, it’s producing the results. She belongs to the Bennette King genre. King never played first class cricket and yet went on to coach West Indies in the World Cup. Madam fits the bill to the T.
4. Greg Chappell Again: Read it right. Journalists and fans across the country owe him a drink. Spat with Ganguly, middle-fingering Kolkata, showing how e-mail and SMS can be used to deadly effect and devaluing phrases like “means-over-outcome”, “experimentation” etc. Indian cricket won’t be the same once he departs.
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