India Insight

We're into March, and the ICC Cricket World Cup is well under way. Just 32 more days to go (yes, thirty-two!) until the tournament comes to a close with a final showdown in Mumbai on April 2.

Reuters' lean mean team of photographers have fanned out across three countries in the subcontinent - India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka - as we get stuck into covering the first round of the tournament. Photographers Adnan Abidi, Andrew Biraj, Amit Dave, Andrew Caballero-Reynolds, Dinuka Liyanawatte, Rupak De Chowdhury, Danish Siddiqui and myself have started crisscrossing our territories. Philip Brown, who is on an "embed" with the English cricket team, has already covered two cities. Altaf Bhat in New Delhi is anchoring the operation as the main editor for the tournament with me lending a hand on days when I'm not on the move, shooting training or covering a match.

Covering cricket in the subcontinent is not as straightforward as one might think - for one thing, we're worried about tight travel schedules and the possibility of flight delays - which thankfully haven't happened yet.

A range of problems beset every one of us in this first week of matches.

At the opening ceremony in Dhaka, the stadium wireless went down, as did the phone network, leaving everyone stranded with no way to file anything, and it didn't recover until well into the ceremony. Andrew Biraj had pictures of a lavish ceremony featuring traditional hand-pulled rickshaws and performers playing a cricket suspended from wires, on a giant vertical backdrop.

Adnan turned up in Chennai and was told no one could move from their shooting position, which surprised every photographer who came to cover the match.

As the cricket World Cup draws closer, the pulse rate of the players and their fans from the 14 participating nations is surely rising.

The build up to the quadrennial event, the equivalent of the FIFA soccer world cup, has been nothing short of spectacular. Despite the game grappling with a spot-fixing saga and an under-prepared Eden Gardens stadium in Kolkata losing the hosts a marquee match against England, the enthusiasm of having a “good game” seems to have taken over. Like the previous editions, the 10th ICC world cup will also see some of the great cricketers saying “Goodbye” to the gentleman’s game and all of them would want to lay their hands on the coveted trophy.

Fans will be seeing Ricky Ponting, Muthaiah Muralitharan, Sachin Tendulkar and probably Jacques Kallis for the last time at a world cup but it will be Sachin, who will want to etch his name on the winners’ trophy more than anyone else. The master blaster has achieved almost everything that is there to achieve in the game of cricket but the world cup has remained elusive.

As the cricket World Cup gets under way, the jury is out on the relevance of such a tournament in a developing region, and for a sport played seriously in only a dozen countries.

The International Cricket Council (ICC) has worked hard to expand the game’s reach across the globe, but that attempt is yet to show substantial results. The popularity of the game is so limited globally that the word still means a bug to the non-cricketing world.

The primary argument is that cricket is mostly popular only in former British colonies and there is hardly any chance for the game to take the world stage, particularly when its classical format lasts for five days.

Reuters Photographer Parivartan Sharma takes us to the town of Meerut, north of Delhi, where cricket balls are still being made the old-fashioned way - by hand. India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh will co-host the 2011 Cricket World Cup starting on February 19.

The Making Of A Cricket Ball - Cricket World Cup Preview from Vivek Prakash on Vimeo.

India and South Africa lock horns in a five-match one-day cricket series which should help finalise their World Cup squads.

Captains Graeme Smith and Mahendra Singh Dhoni plan to use the series to assess the fringe players who may be needed during the tournament in Asia which starts next month.

Get the latest updates and photos from the ODI cricket series. Share your views.

I have always followed 'cricket' and 'news' but 'cricket news' has fascinated me like nothing else.

I was in school when news broke that a young boy was going to be part of the Indian cricket team to tour Pakistan under a new captain -- Krishnamachari Srikkant. No one in the world had any doubts about the talented young boy from Mumbai but to throw him in the deep end to face the pace battery of Pakistan, led by Wasim Akram and the spin wizardry of Abdul Qadir, who had earned himself a sobriquet of "Googly" for foxing the batsmen world over, had many questioning the wisdom of his selection.

But Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar -- who would prove to be the real baby-faced assassin of all bowling attacks and a nightmare for bowlers of legendary stature like Shane Warne -- had other ideas.

It’s intriguing arithmetic. After adding two new franchises to its stable, the Indian Premier League now runs the serious risk of going into its fourth edition with seven cricket teams, one less than the original eight.

In that March 21 news conference in Chennai, Lalit Modi, still one month away from a dramatic dumping, was doing what he does best — reeling off mindboggling numbers.

Modi welcomed Pune and Kochi on board and waxed eloquent on how recession-proof the cash-awash league was.

In getting out to debutant Peter George of Australia in the second cricket test at Bangalore, India's Sachin Tendulkar has established another test record.

Of the 251 times he has gotten out in a test match, the little master has been the debut wicket of at least ten bowlers - Hansie Cronje, Mark Ealham, Neil Johnson, Ruwan Kalpage, Jacob Oram, Monty Panesar, Ujesh Ranchod, Peter Siddle, Cameron White and Peter George.

While getting Tendulkar’s scalp might seem like a dream start to a young cricketer’s career, which of these players have gone on to become greats of the game?