Spare A Thought For Manjural

All the hype and hoopla, fanfare and foofaraw, glitz and glamour – everything suddenly seemed trivial, lousy and even vulgar as 30 cricketers, of Indian and Bangladeshi origin, stood in silence near the boundary rope of the Queen’s Park Oval, thinking about the fragility of human life.

Instead of any war cry, there was this pall of gloom before the Group B opener in Port of Spain. Team India and the Bangla Tigers observed two minute’s silence to mourn the death of promising 22-year-old spinner Manjural Islam, who, along with his cricketer-friend, died in a road accident in Khulna yesterday.

Manjural was part of the original 30 World Cup probables but the left-arm spinner could not make the cut when the list was pruned to 15. So despite failing to be in the final 15, Manjural did make it to the Caribbean. Physically? No, but definitely in the minds of his former teammates and cricket colleagues.

Not The Perfect Start As Team India Bus Breaks Down

Most of the cricketers are admittedly superstitious and Rahul Dravid’s men are no exception. So when their team bus broke down on the way from airport to the hotel in Port of Spain, some of them certainly saw it as a bad omen.

The Men in Blue, who landed in Port of Spain last night, was being escorted by a procession of police vehicles to the team hotel from Piarco International Airport when the bus broke down on the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway near El Socorro Junction. Instantly, police personnel blocked the area and helped the cricketers relocate to a back-up bus and took them to the Hilton Hotel in St Ann's.

The cricketers need to go out for the matches in a positive frame of mind and fans can only hope that they don’t read too much into what seems a routine technical hiccup.