The news from Afghanistan tends to be uniformly depressing and so I perked up when I read that Afghanistan has taken up the sport of cricket and currently has a national team playing against the Netherlands in Sharjah. It is true that neither team is an international powerhouse in the sport, but it is surely a welcome sign of a possible return to normalcy for a country to indulge in such a leisurely activity like cricket. [Read more…]
There is perhaps no more graceful sight in cricket than to see a great fast bowler in action. The long flowing run up, the planting of the feet and the swiveling of the body before the arms wheel and delivers the ball at high speed, is really something to see.
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The World Cup final will be played in India on Saturday between Sri Lanka and India. The teams are fairly evenly matched. Although I am rooting for Sri Lanka, I think India is the slightly better team and given that they have the home field advantage, they have to be considered the favorites. You can see a live video stream of the game here, with the game starting at 5:00 am Eastern and ending around 1:00 pm. That pretty much takes care of my Saturday morning.
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It turned out that only three of my four quarter-final predictions were correct. Pakistan and Sri Lanka trounced West Indies and England respectively. India beat Australia (who had won the three previous world Cups) in a more evenly balanced game. The one upset was New Zealand who won in dramatic come-from-behind fashion over South Africa, the country that I thought would become the eventual champions.
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No, not basketball. For all the cricket fans of this blog (yes, both of you), this of course refers to the 2011 World Cup currently taking place in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. The group round-robin qualifying matches have just been completed with no upsets, leaving the eight top-seeded teams to advance to the quarterfinals. From now on, it is sudden death format.
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The cricket World Cup matches start on the 19th and will be played in venues in Sri Lanka, India and Bangla Desh. While I like the game of cricket, I could never have imagined that this game that originated with the idle rich of England would catch on with gangsters, ex-cons, street kids, and the homeless of Compton, Los Angeles.
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The vast numbers of cricket fans out there in my blog’s readerland are no doubt anxiously wondering what is going on in the World Cup of cricket currently taking place in the West Indies. As I wrote earlier, the end of the first stage of group matches saw the shocking defeat of the strong Pakistani team by the lowly Irish, and the surprising elimination of the Indian team by the Bangladeshis. The murder of the Pakistani coach Bob Woolmer following his team’s defeat still remains unsolved, with no arrests.
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March madness in the cricket-loving world is the World Cup currently being played in the West Indies. But the big story has not been the game itself but the murder of the coach of the Pakistan national team who was found dead in his hotel room the day after the shocking elimination of his team, which failed to qualify for the second round of the tournament.
Initial reports said that 58-year old Bob Woolmer, a diabetic who had once played for England, had died from a heart attack. But authorities started backing way from this and rumors began to swirl of suspicious circumstances, first of suicide, before the authorities said that he had been strangled. There was no sign of forcible entry into his room and nothing was stolen.
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I am a lifelong fan of cricket and spent an enormous amount of my youth devoted (many would say wasted) to the game. As a boy, much of my free time was spent playing it, reading about it, watching it, or listening to it on the radio. I was such a devoted fan that I would set the alarm to wake up in the middle of the night to listen to crackly and indistinct short wave radio commentary of the games from distant time zones in England, Australia, and West Indies. Such was my fanaticism towards the game that I was going to all this trouble to listen to games involving other countries, Sri Lanka achieving international Test playing status only in 1981. And now with the internet, I have been able to renew my interest in the game since the lack of coverage in the US media is no longer a hindrance, so the time wasting has begun anew.
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