A Documentary Based on Tehelka's Sting Operation in the late 1990s

A Must Watch

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5


Part 6

Tweet

On Spot Fixing In The IPL

There are several well written commentaries on the revelations about spot fixing in the IPL. In this post, I will take a more skeptical view of the morality play that we have seen in the last 24 hours. Expressions of shock and devastation from Rahul Dravid and others, wall to wall coverage on cable news (jostling with an story involving Sanjay Dutt returning to prison), discussions about "education" (as if taking money from illegal bookies in return for doing something crazy like bowling badly is some complex ethical grey area!), and the standard quota of blame that is reserved for BCCI (but not for the IPL, which has its own CEO, just like the individual franchises do). The CEO of the IPL was brief in his response to the episode. The IPL's official website and its editors must be inspired by Pravda. The Rajasthan Royals are slightly better. Of the four stories that flash in sequence on their main page, one is a statement by the Rajasthan Royals which basically says that they knew nothing (of course, if they knew something and did nothing - now that would be worth a statement!), another is a statement by Rahul Dravid about how his team is hurt. Its always nice to have a seriously great player to be the face of your grief after you've been caught with in an embarrassing situation. The Royals are well endowed in this respect. Not only do they have Dravid (as opposed to, say the inexperienced Virat Kohli), they also have a glamorous owner.

Tweet

On The Figure Of The Cricket Geek

When I was in school, there was this perennial distrust of the "scholar". The "scholar" was the kid who actually bothered to study. It was cool to make fun of this person. Even kids who did reasonably well in school tried hard to play down their scholarship by doing things like sitting in the back of the class and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Taking school work seriously was seen as a sign of elitism.

Tweet

DRS, ICC Cricket Committee, And Siva's Election

In the aftermath of the apparently controversial election of L Sivaramakrishnan to the ICC's Cricket Committee, Cricinfo has published an FAQ about the Cricket Committee. Neil Manthorp reported that there were two votes for the position, the second one was necessary because the first one elected Tim May. He also suggests that this maybe because BCCI is unhappy with the ICC's attitude to DRS. My post here is concerned with one question on Cricinfo's FAQ and the relationship between this controversial vote and the future of DRS. This is important because I think there is reason to be cautious about connecting BCCI's actions to DRS, and assuming that the Cricket Committee has been doing good work on DRS - work which BCCI is trying to stymie. First I reproduce the relevant question and the answer in the FAQ below. The emphasis on the second paragraph of the answer is mine. I will then show that content of the answer is substantively wrong. This can be shown not based on speculative, informal or anonymous sources, but based on the ICC's reporting of its meeting.

Tweet

T20 Is Not Cricket, Neither Is IPL, On Couch Talk

Subash invited me on Couch Talk to discuss T20 Cricket and the IPL this week. This is the third time I've been on Subash's show. The interview ended up being focused on the matter of T20 not being cricket. It didn't get into the IPL much, and several things which easily belong in a reflection on what T20 is and isn't, and what the IPL is and isn't - such as the IPL's attitude to women viewers, women presenters, women cheerleaders - as a group with a decidedly second class status, its claims about nurturing talent and its intrusion on the international calendar, to name just three, did not come up. Such a discussion would require multiple hours.

See a transcript of the interview here

Here are a few posts which provide some context for the interview:

After 130 odd years of international cricket, a team lost a game without losing a wicket in the T20 format. This hadn't happened in over 5000 international Test or ODI games.

My most recent argument against supporting the IPL
On Commentary in the IPL
On Rahul Dravid's international debut
On the 2010 IPL Final
On Holland "upsetting" England
On a dismissal by Anil Kumble
On some reporting of a bowling spell by Rohit Sharma
On AB deVilliers batting against Dale Steyn
On a spell by Morne Morkel
On Ambati Rayudu's "Miandad moment"
On an innings by Tendulkar in T20 cricket
On the propensity for home wins in T20
On a brutal stand between the Pathan brothers

Five wickets in Six Balls in T20 over
An attempt to describe the logic of a T20 contest
An attempt to see how T20 innings develop

On what I consider to be the classic T20 apology

On the role of the IPL in India's tour of England 2011

Tweet

On Commentary in the IPL

On April 22, Harsha Bhogle, Jarrod Kimber, Sharda Ugra and Nitin Sundar appeared in a video podcast on Cricinfo's show "The Huddle". The subject of the show as it's title indicates was commentary, in the IPL in particular and more generally. I suppose Kimber's experience at Test Match Sofa makes him a good addition to this broadcast.

Tweet

Tendulkar at 40

On his 40th birthday, I saw Sachin Tendulkar play down the wrong line to a flighted off-break from the Trinidadian off spinner Sunil Narine and get bowled. He faced six balls over 5 overs. The ball that got him was flighted well above his eye line and the great man found himself reaching for it, off balance. He was beaten in the flight and the fact that blocking with a dead bat was not a realistic option in the 20 over match did not help.

Tweet

Test Match Ratings, April 2013

The ICC publishes Test Match Rankings which are based on Ratings developed by David Kendix. The method used in the ICC's rankings has also been used to develop historical rankings. I have periodically published ratings (see a modestly interactive chart here) developed using a different approach. The basic difference between the approach I use and the approach the ICC uses is as follows:

Tweet

Murali's Wickets and McGrath's

Muttiah Muralitharan ended his Test career with 800 wickets at 22.72. Glenn McGrath ended his with 563 wickets at 21.64. I've been curious about the quality of batsmen the each of them dismissed. There are multiple ways to find this out. Ideally, you would want to know who McGrath bowled every single delivery to in Test Cricket, and what the batting average of the batsman facing him was before every delivery.

Cricinfo tells us that McGrath dismissed Michael Atherton 19 times in Test Cricket for an average score of 9.89. It also tells us that McGrath took 95 wickets at 19.88 in 17 Tests in which Atherton also played, and 70 wickets at 15.78 in 15 Tests in which he dismissed McGrath 19 times. For his part, Atherton averaged 20.51 in Tests against McGrath. Against another of his great adversaries, when McGrath first dismissed Lara in a Test (the famous 1995 Test at Bridgetown, Barbados), Lara averaged a mighty 57 in Tests. When he dismissed him in the 1st Test of the 2000 series (at Brisbane), Lara averaged 49.

Tweet

On the Ryder Assault And Alcohol

Over at the Cordon, Samir Chopra insists that the incident that included a violent assault on Jesse Ryder had "everything to do with alchohol". This is a real person he is talking about, one who got beaten within an inch of his life in an attack eye witnesses described two days ago as an ambush. The wonders of twitter give us a lot of context about Mr. Chopra's argument. As he reveals here, it was "the rush to say 'this has nothing to do with booze'" that set him off. He saw this rush on the part of the NZCPA (the players association) and Cricket Wellington - two groups who have a clear interest in protecting Jesse Ryder, as a move borne out of sensitivity to Ryder's past problems with alcohol abuse. I know the feeling. I've often found myself writing blog posts on impulses of this kind. It is the best type of motivation for an argument.

Mr. Chopra is right to point to out the double standard in the way alcohol is treated in professional sport compared to say marijuana. I broadly agree with him on this. It is a fairly standard argument made by advocates for legalizing controlled substances like marijuana that some controlled substances like alchohol or cigarettes are legal, while others are not despite convincing evidence about the harmful communal effects of the former, and the lack of evidence of harmful communal effects of the latter.

Where I disagree with Mr. Chopra in his use of the Jesse Ryder incident. He makes the abductive inference that alcohol must have been involved in the matter based on the following facts as I understand it.

Tweet