Just Cricket

There was this thought that came to my mind while watching the first T20 International between India and England last week. The face of the English T20 squad had changed completely, whereas India were still fielding a fair amount of players who had played in the Tests. Some numbers would give one a fair idea of how the Indian and English squads compared. The Englishmen had retained just the one player, Tim Bresnan to play in the first T20 whereas India had retained six, Gautam Gambhir, Virat Kohli, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Ravindra Jadeja, Ravichandran Ashwin and Piyush Chawla. This brings us to the point that has been made a million times by thousands of cricket experts all over the world since the advent of T20 cricket and the IPL thereafter. The point being there has been too much cricket and players run out of steam at one point. The length of the IPL and the ICC's Future Tours Program have been questioned in this regard which is fair to a certain extent. But, there are teams wh...

               Captains of this era have all been the perfect ones for their respective countries, if one considers the situation that each country was in at the time of being made captain. Andrew Strauss, Graeme Smith, Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Ricky Ponting have all been good captains given the records that they possess even after such lengthy stays at the international level as captains. The thing that was common amongst these people was that they all had a good base for them to start on. Strauss was probably the one amongst these four to have started on shaky ground. Statistics as Captain for each player.                               Three people who catch the eye are Michael Clarke, Misbah-ul-Haq and Darren Sammy. All these 3 have been captain for about the same number of Tests which is on...