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 New Zealand (311/7 in 50 ovs)
Pakistan (254/10 in 44.1 ovs)
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Showing posts with label Pakistan Cricket. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pakistan Cricket. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
6th ODI, Pakistan tour of New Zealand 2010/11
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Shahid Afridi Profile
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Sunday, January 9, 2011
Couldn’t she just find a nice Indian boy?
Now the Shiv Sena has a problem with Indian tennilebrity Sania Mirza marrying Pakistan’s cricket captain Shoaib Malik. To quote the right-wing Hindu party’s octogenarian chief Bal Thackeray: “Had [Sania’s] heart been Indian, it wouldn’t have beaten for a Pakistani. If she wished to play for India, she should have chosen an Indian life partner.” No surprises there.
It kind of reminds me of a comedy sketch in BBC’s Brit-Asian show Goodness Gracious Me. An Indian boy decides to come out of the sandooqcha with his British boyfriend to his middle-class Indian parents. They drop hint after hint to the clueless parents, who keep missing the lobs like Maria Sharapova on clay, until the gay couple declare the full nature of their relationship. The parents forbid him from being gay. Desperate for his parents to accept him, the boy goes up to them and says: “Look, I’m still the same person.” The mother hisses to her son: “You couldn’t have found a nice Indian boy?”
Fine, the Shiv Sena hardly represents benign, traditional, passive-aggressive parents. The punchline, on the other hand is an ace. (No more sports metaphors I promise, not even the very tempting one about Sania playing for ‘love’.)
But the question really isn’t about Hindu nationalism, or it isn’t just. Certainly, the far-right party’s brickbats hurled the way of Shah Rukh Khan would suggest that the Shiv Sainaks have it in for Pakistan-lovin’ Indian Muslims. Here’s the catch: would the reaction have been the same if Mahendra Singh Dhoni decided to marry Naseem Hameed?
Let’s take Bollywood films as a rough social gauge. They would have us believe love conquers the most recalcitrant of parents and transcends societal norms. Poor and rich. South and North. Police officer and the mafia don’s baby girl. But when it comes to cross-border love, the wilting Pakistani girl melts into the arms of her Indian saviour. Take the 1991 film Henna starring Rishi Kapoor and Zeba Bakhtiar (the Kapoors even bagged a bland Pakistani actress for the role!): Kapoor lands across the border and charms a dewy-complexioned Kashmiri in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Cut to 2004, when Shah Rukh Khan stutters his way into the affections of the Pakistani Priety Zinta and carries off his bride 20 years late into the Indian sunset. Male chauvinism meets nationalistic chauvinism? I doubt if any if these films would’ve resonated with the Indian masses had the genders been reversed.
This also explains why the response on the Pakistani side has been so laudatory. “Parliamentarians hail Sania-Shoaib engagement” says one headline; the “FM felicitates Shoaib, Sania” says another. The latter goes on to quote Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureishi: “I would like to say mubarik to the couple…. This and other steps taken by civil society actually strengthens the hands of the Foreign Office.”
My favourite by far is the Pakistan Tennis Federation (PTF) President Dilawar Abbas, breathlessly hoping Sania will play for Pakistan because “Asian women traditionally follow their husbands, which is why I’m hopeful that someday she would be inspired by Shoaib to play for Pakistan.” There you have it: traditional Asian brides following meekly in the footsteps of their consorts. I doubt if the mini-skirt wearing Mirza would be able to play for Pakistan, let alone want to.
In Dubai – where the couple plans to settle – Sania Mirza gets to keep her wardrobe and her passport; her identity doesn’t have to be consumed by her marriage. But when she’s checking in her wedding trousseau at the Dubai airport, she’ll find it hard to leave behind the baggage of history, nationalism, and gender.
U-Turns please, we’re Pakistani!
From lofty and very lonely heights, the foreign writer tries to decipher what went wrong with the game of cricket after the glorious days when the Imperial Sun used to shine all day from East to West. As the westerner purposefully sips on his mild cup of Twining’s Earl Gray tea with spice and cinnamon extract at a small cafe overlooking the grandiose Lord’s Cricket Ground, he racks his head as he struggles to understand the Pakistan Cricket board (PCB). How it is that the PCB could go ahead and ban all of their talented – albeit scoundrel – cricketers, then go ahead and completely reverse that decision, unbanning all previously banned cricketers along with their tainted reputations?
Of course, at some level he realises that the complexity of the issue is far beyond what his pasty-white civilised mind is capable of. And then all of a sudden – SNAP! He gets a great idea for a cricket satire piece (because everything we can’t understand we tend to satirise), and he diligently begins typing his piece for CricInfo. Originally titled ‘U-Turns Please, we’re Pakistani,’ the title was shortly thereafter changed to ‘U-Turns Please, we’re the PCB,’ after a couple of upset Pakistani commentators expressed how hurt they were at being stereotyped and how that might borderline at racism.
The article was a grand old laugh and Alan Tyers, that old boy, had written a fabulous piece but it was even more of a grand old laugh, because it displayed the utter lack of understanding of the inner workings of the Pakistani-mentality by the innocent Englishman. To his credit though, I thought the title ‘U-Turns Please, we’re Pakistani’ was completely apt, until CricInfo had to step in, much like the PCB, and reverse its original decision in favour of diluting the title in a disgusting cesspool of political correctness.
While he did get the inner complexity of the U-Turn phenomenon, what our British subject completely failed to grasp was that we’re Pakistani! Not only are we fond of spontaneous U-Turns, but we’re excessively drawn to double-U-Turns, W-Turns, viscous cuts, and killer swerves. We’re one dastardly nation, that finds it extremely inconvenient to play by the rules. We didn’t come up with traffic rules and certainly didn’t draw out the ‘Gentleman’s Guide to Cricketing Etiquette’ either. We conveniently inherited them from our gracious colonisers who came here all the way from the west, to try to teach us the fruits of civilisation.
However, if you just look at how we’ve adapted to the system of traffic as well as cricket, it is quite evident that we threw both the rule books in the bin and simply tried to figure things out as they made sense to us. So, just like ferocious overtaking from the left isn’t considered one of the deadly sins, rather an incredible talent on Pakistani asphalt, the ingenuity of cricketing innovations like reverse-swing and the deadly doosra (the one that spins the other way) only bare further witness to how the Pakistani way of thinking is simply ulta (the other way around).
Now I don’t blame Tyers, the poor chap, for he possesses what I would call a rather linear faculty of looking at things. Our non-linear, ulta way of thinking is something that’s simply, well, beyond him. Forgive me for using a cricketing analogy for explaining this rather non-communicable idea, but just how cricket itself had its not-so-modest beginnings as a ‘gentleman’s sport’ between the Lords and the commoners (whom do you think batted and who fielded?), cricket in the subcontinent had its beginnings in smelly narrow lanes and puddle-ridden inner-city gullies.
While in the gentleman’s variation of the sport, one had to use the powers of the intellect to out-wit the batsman into throwing away his wicket, the objective in street cricket is to hit the batsman as hard as you can in the ribs or the unmentionable parts, so that he doesn’t dare stand to face the next ripping delivery. Even in batting, where the gentleman would calmly wait and defend the ball with a straight bat, the unruly colonial subject would look to slog the well-flighted ball out of the ground with as cross a bat as possible.
This different approach to the sport is, no doubt, all due to our lateral-thinking abilities. And while test cricket may have been the original format of the game where a gentleman’s straight bat gets the reward of a well-played innings, the tide has since changed towards the likes of the T-20, where a ruthless cross-bat shot is the only thing that could help you win when six runs are needed from one ball. The high and lofty sport of cricket has no doubt suffered from the infamous phenomenon known as ‘reverse-colonisation,’ yet another reversal. Cricket is no longer about being gentlemanly or being honorable or a good sport. Cricket is now about being cut-throat to the bone, taunting and swearing at the batsman, distracting him with all sorts of cross-chatter in strange tongues which he fails to understand.
Back to where it began Pakistan Cricket
Has it really been only about 12 months since we were last in New Zealand? At the conclusion of the Twenty20 series which officially kicked off the six-week tour, it’s hard to deny a distinctive, surreal feeling about being back here.
Within the span of a year, we’ve been subjected to a lifetime of grief. So if there is any place to start burying the ghosts of our past it’s right here. New Zealand was effectively our gateway into hell last year and now we are back, perhaps to finally exit through that same gate from whence we entered.
The way I see it, this tour is important for two reasons: (i) to figure out our best combination for the World Cup, and (ii) the exorcism of our various demons before heading into that tournament.
In that light, our fortunes in the Test matches are fairly subordinate to those in the ODIs. In fact, I’d be tempted to refrain from attaching any relevance to the Test matches because of the pointlessness implicit in a two-Test series. In a test match, where the touring side needs at least one five-day game to come to grips with the format and its demands, it’s a joke having to decide a contest in the space of two Tests. As far as I’m concerned, a 1-0 loss in the tests wont matter a toss as long as we are able to get in some solid batting practice and allow our more inexperienced seamers to get some overs under their belt.
Whereas our last New Zealand tour was dominated by our bowling resources, it’s likely that our batting will define this visit. Our recent form would suggest we’re up to the challenge. By our standards, we had an excellentTest series against South Africa, albeit on docile pitches. However, it still takes discipline to maintain one’s wicket for a stretch of time and our batsmen have too often been serial culprits when it comes to losing focus. Which is why it was heartening to see our top order and, most commendably, Misbah and Azhar Ali stave off the South African attack for sustained passages of play. I look forward to seeing how the batting fares in the trickier conditions of Hamilton and Wellington and any confidence that Hafeez, Younis, Shafiq and Umar (if he plays the Tests) can extract from their test batting will be priceless when carried over to the ODIs.
Speaking of our batsmen, it was good to see Ahmed Shehzad in the Twenty20 squad and his sumptuous half-century in the final game (http://www.espncricinfo.com/new-zealand-v-pakistan-2010/engine/current/match/473920.html) was the highlight of the series for me. His performance may have propelled him into World Cup reckoning and hopefully he will be given a decent run in the six-game ODI part of the tour. With Umar Akmal keeping competently, I’d opt for slotting him in to open at the World Cup with Hafeez at the expense of Kamran.
The New Zealand team is vulnerable right now and their softness was on ample display during their meek capitulation in the final game. This is the same team that got the stuffing pummeled out of them by India and those wounds cannot possibly have healed. For all the cross-border rivalry, India may have presented to us the perfect antidote for our infected system. A couple of comprehensive performance against our traditional bunnies would put us in the perfect frame of mind going into the Word Cup. Forget Southee’s hat-trick and Guptill’s assault. Chalk those down to our habit of being slow out of the blocks. What matters is how fast we can catch up and a weakened New Zealand provides us the perfect opportunity to make up lost ground and more.
New Zealand have always been there when it mattered to give us a morale boosting victory when we need it. Their inevitable trouncing has been the one relative constant in Pakistan cricket and if there was ever a time for them to deliver, it’s now.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
India vs Pakistan test match second day first
Hi all its was all Wasim Jaffer show at Eden Gardens, Kolkata, on 30 November 2007. India have won first test match from Pakistan already and inthe secong test India have score a huge score on day first. At stumps India was at 352/3 (84.3 overs) with Wasim Jaffer scoring 192 alone on day first. Hopefully he will score his double century tommorow. Saurav Ganguly is playing at 17 runs at his hoem ground, crwod must be expecting a lot from him. Master blaster Sachin Tendulkar also score quick 82 runs in just 109 balls. Rahul dravid score half century. SO it was all Idnian batsmen day only Karthik was unlucky to got out at 1.
Here is the Indian scoreboard so far:
W Jaffer not out 192 255 32 0 75.29
KD Karthik c Khan bTanvir 1 3 0 0 33.33
R Dravid c Akmal bKaneria 50 118 7 0 42.37
SR Tendulkar b Kaneria 82 109 12 0 75.22
SC Ganguly not out 17 25 3 0 68.00
Extras (b 4, lb 3, nb 3) 10
Total (3 wickets; 84.3 overs) 352 (4.16 runs per over)
T20 World Cup Match - Pakistan Vs Bangladesh
India wonthe match again debutant team Afghanistan, well for Afghanistan team I saw some good performance with both with bat and ball. In the batting Noor Ali scored a half century and he looked very confident from the first ball he faced. Also there was fifty runs partnership between Noor and Stanikzai. In bowling Zadran bowled a superb spell giving just 8 runs and took a wicket. Now he might by very happy with such a great bowling figures in his first match that too against worlds number one batting line up.
Second match of the day will begin in new few minutes between Pakistan and Bangladesh at the same ground. Pakistan have won the toss and elected to bat first.
Now see will they be able to post a high scre or this one will also be a low scroing match as previous three encounters.
T20 World Cup Match Today Live Score
Today is the day three of the ICC T20 World cup and two matches will be played. The match umber 5 and 6 of the twenty twenty cup tournament will be played among "India Vs South Africa" and "Pakistan Vs Australia".
Both India and Pakistan have won their first matches of the tournament, whereas Australia and South Africa will play the first match of the world cup T20. Both the two teams have still to prove that they are the best in this format of the cricket.
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