Tag Archives: twenty20

Too Many Close Matches at the Champions League Twenty20

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So here are the results of the matches played so far:

  • Warriors won by 3 wickets (with 0 balls remaining)
  • Cape Cobras won by 7 wickets (with 16 balls remaining)
  • Mumbai Indians won by 3 wickets (with 1 ball remaining)
  • Warriors won by 50 runs
  • Somerset won by 5 wickets (with 2 balls remaining)
  • Mumbai Indians won by 1 wicket (with 0 balls remaining)
  • South Australia won by 19 runs
  • Match tied (New South Wales won the one-over eliminator)
  • Chennai Super Kings won by 4 wickets (with 2 balls remaining)

Out of 9 matches so far, 6 matches have gone to the wire with the match being decided with 2 balls or less remaining and one match even going to the Super Over. What the heck is going on? A few theories:

  • Unlike national teams (Australia v Bangladesh), players of the same level of skills are not playing on the same team, so teams are more evenly matched.
  • Twenty20 is a format that allows teams to come back from the dead. So the chasing team can attempt a dying burst of crazy strokes after being placed in an impossible position and still come back to win.
  • There is massive fraud happening so that the organizers can make this a more meaningful tournament.

I am more inclined towards the last theory, but I cannot see how you can get so many people to play along without any rumors leaking out. Still the whole thing makes little sense statistically.

Dhoni’s Misfortune Continues

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I was not intending to post much on the Champions League. For some reason, it doesn’t seem as compelling as the IPL. But they had a few interesting games, especially the one between Chennai Super Kings and Mumbai Indians, where the latter seemed all at sea until some lusty hitting by Lasith Malinga in the last few overs took Mumbai past the finish line.

When the tour from hell ended for India in England where they failed to win every single international match, I thought the nightmare was over for Mahendra Singh Dhoni. It was the only major aberration in a spectacularly successful captaincy career. So perhaps he would get back to India and then captain CSK to the Champions League trophy and set everything back on track again. And then beat England in the return ODI series and so on.

But things don’t seem to be going according to plan back in heaven. Chennai lost their first home game of the season. And Dhoni missed a stumping of the eventual match-winner Malinga at a crucial time in the match. In the England series, there were times when India had the upper hand, but failed to take advantage. The story seems to be repeating.

Hopefully, this is not the start of a trend. CSK did show good form throughout the match and they should be able to take it and win the next few to reach the semis. Mike Hussey has been able to carry on the good form in the Sri Lanka test series to the Twenty20 match. As long as Chennai can win the next few, …

America Will Like Test Cricket When America Likes Cricket

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Ducking Beamers writes a post about why Test cricket has no future in America because of its length. I find the question and reasoning rather strange for a variety of reasons.

First is that the New York Times is totally, completely, absolutely wrong when it says, “a slugfest that takes forever to finish makes sense; a game that goes on and on with only six, or seven, runs doesn’t quite compute.” Hello, does anyone remember the 2004 ALC Series? The Boston Red Sox down 0-3. So what do we have in Game 4?  12 innings and Red Sox winning by 6-4. What about Game 5? 14 innings and Red Sox winning by 5-4, the match taking almost 6 hours to complete. The turnaround finally culminated in the Red Sox finally winning the World Series after 86 years and the matches became part of history. Does anyone think that those matches would have been better if the Red Sox had bludgeoned the Yankees into submission?

The thing that makes sport meaningful is narrative. If you don’t know soccer, when you see a soccer match, you see two teams running back and forth on a ground and you think what an aimless sport where they cannot even put the ball in a big net most of the time (I mean, how could they when their main aim is to break the legs of the opposition players). Or if you don’t know basketball, you see the opposite. Each team goes and puts the ball in the other’s basket and the other side repeats this. Ad nauseum.

But if one of the sides is your home country and it is a knockout match at the World Cup or the Olympics, suddenly there is meaning. You cheer every forward movement by your team, you yell at the referee for not punishing the opposition’s foul hard enough (why not a red card, you scream), every advance by the opposition sinks your heart. Even if you know nothing about the sport, you learn everything you need to know during the match.

There are different ways why a match might acquire more meaning. As mentioned above, a home team or an important match could make it so. For example, you might have watched Spain v Netherlands in the World Cup final even if you didn’t care about either team. Another factor is the opposition and how you factor against them. India v Pakistan is always a huge draw not only because of the politics involved, but also because each team is capable of defeating the other on its day. For the same reasons, Sri Lanka v Bangladesh is not an attractive match.

When it comes to Test matches, the main attraction for viewers is anticipation. I remember watching Kumble’s first home Test series against England. When each ball left his hand, I would expect him to take a wicket. Or Tendulkar. Even though he never did it for a long time, I would watch him hoping that this time it would a Test double century. Test cricket is about the journey – the hope, the anxiety and the depression!

Now, one-day cricket and Twenty20 cricket have their own appeal, but ultimately the form of cricket is irrelevant to the watching experience. You are there to enjoy the sport and living life through the experiences of the sports players in the field. You vicariously enjoy their ups and downs. Sometimes it is short, sweet and a bit dirty (Twenty20), sometimes it is prolonged, draining, but satisfying experience (Tests), but it is the same thing that drives us to watch moving pictures, whether it be a 20-minute sitcom or a 3-hour feature film.

If and when America learns to appreciate cricket as a sport, perhaps when the photos of President Kal Penn playing cricket instead of golf on the weekends are plastered across the then-Drudge home page, then the cricket fans will learn to love cricket in all its dimensions. In fact, we will see American cricket lovers at that point bemoaning the cultureless creatures of the younger generation who find joy in the shorter versions of the game instead of the nuanced thrills of the five-day match.

Is Twenty20 a Sprinter Version of Tests

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I had a short exchange with Golandaaz on Ducking Beamers about T20 versus Tests. He suggested that Twenty20 versus Tests was like sprints versus marathons. I said that they didn’t make much sense as those are individual events. Then he countered that a 4 x 100 race was a team event. So I thought I would write a post about it.

First, the analogy to athletic races is wrong. A 100 meter dash is obviously an individual event. And a 4 x 100, while being a team event, is actually a collection of individual events, the only team aspect of it being the order in which the sprinters run and at the moment they pass the baton. Each sprinter is supposed to run as fast as they can in their leg. And when they are doing their stuff, the other persons in the team just watch. It is just aggregating the individual performances.

But a cricket match is not like that. It is a match played by 11 players with different players having different roles and contributing at the same time to the outcome. This is especially true and obvious while fielding, but also true during batting. How many times have you got run out because your partner was ball watching? How about when a team tries desperately not to give away a single off the last ball of the over so that they can get the worse batsman on strike?

In a Test match, the collective performance of the team matters a lot. As the match is spread across several days, you see the strengths of the team members adding up. 1 + 1 becomes greater than 2. That is the reason why a strong team like Australia rakes up whitewashes after whitewashes while Bangladesh cannot win a match to save their lives. In a Twenty20 match, an individual lucky performance can make a huge difference regardless of the team’s capability. That is why you saw Zimbabwe beating Australia in a Twenty20.

Why is that? It is because of the shortened time duration. In Tests, you have an option to “do nothing”, i.e., don’t score runs and just wait, or don’t try to take wickets and bowl wide. But in Twenty20, you don’t have that option. You have to do the maximum off every ball. If there is a small chance you can hit it for a six, you better do it. Whether the ball deserves the treatment or not is completely irrelevant. Even if a bowler is bowling the perfect line and length, the batsman has to do something. That increases the element of luck. It is true that talented batsmen like Gayle and Tendulkar are doing well at the IPL, but you also have someone like Valthaty scoring more than Sehwag, or Dhawan scoring more than Gilchrist.

The length of a Twenty20 can confuse this issue sometimes. You may look at a 90-minute soccer match and think that a T20 match is similar to a soccer match. That is not so. Since soccer is a continuous game unlike a ball-by-ball as in cricket, you cannot compare the two. In regular time, the teams have enough time to appraise their opponents and look for strategic openings or rapid counterattacks. If you treat a regular-time soccer match like a Test match, a Twenty20 match is like an overtime half of a soccer match using a Golden Goal eliminator. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own charms, but it is a different game altogether.

All About the Champions League Teams

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I cannot believe that the Champions League is starting just days after the Champions Trophy. What the heck?

Anyway, the only teams I know properly are the Indian sides from the IPL: Delhi Daredevils, Bangalore Royal Challengers and Deccan Chargers. What I am not sure of (and perhaps everybody else) is who will play during the competition, especially with all the injuries going around.

For your comprehensive guide to all the teams, visit our friends at Holding Willey to get to know your Twenty20 Champions League teams.

I am expecting one of the IPL teams to win considering that they cornered most of the talent. But you cannot rule anyone out in T20 matches.

How Twenty20 Destroyed One-Dayers

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India scored 101/2 in 20 overs and West Indies 123/2. Terrible scoring.

That is when I remembered it was a 50-over match. That is what a heavy overdose of the Indian Premier League and World Twenty20 will do to you.

One-dayers will never be the same because you can never again look at a batsman and not curse him for conceding a dot ball.

Waiting for an entire day for a match to be completed? Why cannot it get over in three hours?

You keep expecting the ball to hit or cross the boundary, and the repeated anti-climaxes are too much to bear.

End the torture already! Replace ODIs with Twenty20.

Australia Join Esteemed Company of Scotland & Bangladesh

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australia-sri-lanka-over-worm

So Australia exit the tournament while England go on to the Super Eights. What a turnaround of fortunes! The individual losses to West Indies and Sri Lanka are not surprising in themselves as both teams have the capability, but Australia not being able to make a comeback from the first loss is. As it is, they have nothing to do except practise for the Ashes while the T20 specialists will return back to Australia.

australia-sri-lanka-over-runs

Australia’s troubles began with a poor start and their inability to come to terms with the Sri Lankan spinners. They were meandering until the Hussey brothers put together a good stand which Johnson and Lee used to launch a destructive attack at the end of the innings. Australia’s 159 was not a big score, but it was more than they would have hoped for after 15 overs. Sri Lanka will have to be wary of this, because the lack of a proper fifth bowler could pour water on the best efforts of their mainstream bowlers.

australia-innings

The Sri Lankan chase was perfectly managed. They stayed just ahead of Australia’s progress and did not take any undue risks, Dilshan’s scoop not withstanding. There were only 4 sixes in the whole innings and they came towards the end. The new captain Sangakkara did well to stay right through the innings and get the Lankans home.

sri-lanka

In the end, a disappointing end to Australia’s Twenty20 campaign. Depending on how critical the Australian Board views this result, there could be a few developments. If they are serious about having Australia perform better in Twenty20, there has to be some separation between the Test and T20 teams. Ponting will definitely be out. But so should Clarke, who seems to be ill-suited to the format.

This is perhaps good news for India and South Africa. Their Group of Death will now have England and West Indies, teams against whom they will fancy their chances against. Sri Lanka, of course, will go to Group F where they will join Ireland, New Zealand and either Pakistan or Netherlands.

Unfortunately, because of the whole seeding issue, it doesn’t matter who tops the groups. So a few of the next games, India v Ireland, Sri Lanka v West Indies and South Africa v New Zealand, have lost any significance, and can be treated as warmup matches for the Super Eights.

India Coast to Victory Against Pakistan in Warm-Up

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It was touted as the most important match of the Twenty20 World Cup, albeit a warmup match that was not part of the World Cup. Because of the seedings problem we talked about, the only way Pakistan and India can play against each other in this year’s edition of the World Cup is if both of them reach the finals. Possible, but perhaps unlikely.

In the end, it didn’t even turn out to be close. Pakistan won the toss and elected to bat, but were soon reeling at 63/5. Thankfully they had kept their run rate up while all the wickets were tumbling, and Younis Khan, Misbah-ul-Haq and Yasir Arafat took them to a respectable 158/6. Under the circumstances, it was very commendable and India perhaps missed a trick by failing to keep the pressure on.

But that was all soon forgotten when the Indian openers slowly, but surely made their march towards the target. A 10-wicket thrashing was in the works when Rohit Sharma fell to a top edge with 19 required. Dhoni once again came in at No. 3 and finished the match off with a couple of quick blows. Pakistan will be pretty disappointed with this outing.

A few quick comments:

  • Pakistan’s batting was better than that in their previous outing when they were all out for 127 against South Africa. They were 65/5 then too, but today they managed to score a few more. Since Sri Lanka only scored 109 against South Africa today, Pakistan’s grade is somewhere like “B-” instead of an “F”. But they have to step up. Thankfully with England and Netherlands in their group, they have time to recover.
  • Bowling is a different issue altogether. Conceding 186 yesterday and 159 in 17 overs is a failing grade. And Pakistan was supposed to have the better bowlers.
  • India too has some bowling problems, especially in the death overs. That is why they lost the New Zealand match. And today, they gave the Pakistani bowlers something to defend. They need to keep the pressure on.
  • Is Dhoni going to be the official No. 3? If so, great. If not and he has been using these warm-up matches for experiments the results of which he is not going to use, then India are going to risk facing some unpleasant surprises.

In summary, good comeback for India after the fiasco against the Kiwis. Some more thinking for the Pakistanis before their first match against England on Sunday.

What Dhoni Should Do

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In a must-read article, Sam at Arm Ball writes:

The guy in focus is MS Dhoni. A loss in inconsequential warm up game to T20 world cup ended the honeymoon for MS. A man who before IPl could do nothing wrong, now stands in a witness box to answer the critics why he promoted himself to # 3. Man to man basis, he is a better batsman than the regular # 3 in T20s — Raina boy. So what if he had been failure yesterday? All this talk wouldnt have arose if he had scored runs and hadnt got out to the awkward stumping (read it somewhere) to Vettori boy and McCullum uncle.

Although he was not directly responding to my previous post, I would like a moment for rebuttal, your honor.

Basically, the problem with Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s tactics on a given day is not whether it succeeds or fails on that given day. Every tactic is a risk. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. For example, driving at 100 miles per hour on a winding mountain road is a risk. You may still reach your destination safely, but that does not mean your method of driving was correct. Sometimes, winning can be “in spite of” something rather than “because of” something.

Here are the questions that we should ask about Dhoni’s promoting himself to #3:

  1. What was Dhoni’s intention for promoting himself? He came in at 42/1 after 5 overs with India chasing 170. India was not in any particular difficulty as they were up with the required run rate. Did Dhoni come as a pinch-hitter or did he come to shepherd the team to victory?
  2. If he did come to play an anchor role, why could that role not be performed by Raina, Jadeja, or Yuvraj? Shouldn’t Dhoni’s role as captain be to empower his teammates instead of trying to spoon-feed them and corner all the glory?
  3. The way Dhoni played (6 off 4, a boundary off the second ball) meant that he came in to attack the bowling (although that may seem redundant in Twenty20). If so, why do so with India well-placed? Secondly, why not send someone expendable like Harbhajan Singh who can hit a few?
  4. Is Dhoni always going to come in at #3? Or is he going to keep everyone guessing when he is going to come in?

My main point is: There should be a master plan to any tactics. Otherwise it is not risk-taking, but gambling. If shuffling the batting order works only every other time, it is a low percentage game. As I wrote to Sam, I am not against Dhoni batting at any position permanently. I am not even against him for changing the batting order as needed. What I am against is changing it in an ad-hoc fashion with no rhyme or reason.

Consider the example of a fielding team which puts a fielder in each gap discovered by a batsman trying to score runs. The right solution obviously is to get your bowlers to set the right field in the first place (which may vary with the batsman at strike) and bowl according to that. And when a bowler misbowls and gives away a few, both the bowler and the fielding team should have the confidence that they can get the next ball right. This doesn’t preclude adjustments when the batsman changes his tactics mid-stream, but you have to have an overall gameplan.

This is what the random shuffling does to the Indian team. It sends a message to the team members that they cannot adjust to the different conditions on the field as needed. It lowers their confidence and destroys their sense of responsibility because why should they worry about leading the team to victory if Captain Dhoni can step in? When the match situation is ambiguous, the batsmen may be confused what to do. The next time India is 40/1, should they slog or milk the bowling? If Dhoni doesn’t promote himself then and the team loses, would that be a mistake?

The real time for tinkering with convention is when the status quo is risky. Remember the World Cup T20 semifinal match against Australia two years ago. Dhoni decided to bowl out his more experienced bowlers and let Joginder Sharma bowl the last over. Hayden was blazing away and had to be stopped. To stick to the bowling order would have been crazy and Dhoni rightly shuffled his bowlers to perfection. In contrast, what he is doing now with the batting order is silly and superfluous.