An Indian cricket coach for team India?
The Indian cricket team has not had a full-time local coach in over a decade since John Wright took over possibly the second most challenging job in world cricket in 2000. Barring the Greg Chappell debacle, the two other foreign coaches the team has employed have delivered.
India made the finals of the 2003 World Cup under Wright, and Gary Kirsten signed off after the team were crowned world champions in 2011. Interestingly, both Kirsten and Wright had inherited a team full of superstars low on confidence.
Wright took over the reins in the aftermath of the match- fixing crisis of 1999, and Kirsten after the 2007 World Cup disaster (though a victory in the inaugural T20 World Cup under an interim coach, Indian Lalchand Rajput, somewhat satiated fans).
Chappell, though, had a team that could potentially be world beaters — eerily like the batch of 2011 — but his tenure was hardly the golden age of Indian cricket.
That’s why it’s important to not miss a step here. In the world of Indian cricket, dreams can easily turn into nightmares.
And now with the euphoria of the World Cup victory over, a country of a billion armchair critics awaits the next appointee. Chances are it might be another foreign assignee. But for a reasonably settled team, that needs tips to handle pressure more than batting advice, the question begs to be answered — why not an Indian coach?
Doesn’t anyone love the underdog anymore?
It is said that everyone loves the underdog. You can’t fault Ireland if they disagree.
Days after cricket’s showpiece event ended, the game’s governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC) announced its decision to trim the next two World Cups to just 10 teams and throw out the associate nations from the 2015 edition, featuring only its 10 full members. The 10 spots for the 2019 edition will be determined through qualification.
“This is not a World Cup, it’s a glorified Champions Trophy,” said Ireland’s captain William Porterfield, after the ICC’s decision to trim the 2015 World Cup that will see associate teams like Ireland and Netherlands miss out on the chance to rub shoulders with the best of the cricketing world.
Porterfield has a point there. Given that much of the excitement and drama of the initial group stage games of the recently concluded 2011 edition — hailed by some experts as “the best World Cup of all time” — was provided by his brilliantly spirited and gutsy team, it is difficult not to agree that Ireland may have been hard done by. Associate member nations will now have to wait until 2019 for a chance to compete again.
Without Ireland, the 2015 edition could play out rather flatly — and more worryingly — predictably. Without Ireland, we would not have witnessed one of the greatest one-day innings of all time in the form of Kevin O’Brien.
Without Ireland (and the other associate teams), the 2015 World Cup will be reduced to the status of a league of extraordinary cricketers battling it out for glory.
In 2007, we witnessed the dullest World Cup of all time. Australia came, saw and conquered. It was a foregone conclusion even before the tournament began. What made it even more unbearable was the fact that the teams had to play a second round of unending, insipid group stage games — the Super Eights, as it was called, which was anything but super — after the first round was done and dusted with and the tournament’s biggest draws, India and Pakistan, had been sent packing.
from Photographers Blog:
Editing thousands of cricket pictures a day
Sports and Action photography is all about timing. It’s about reacting. It’s about being in the right place at the right time and it’s about execution.
These are all qualities of the athlete and those of the photographer covering them as well. Each sport has predictable and unpredictable moments. For instance, in cricket, photographers will have opportunities to capture jump shots, players diving to make the crease, diving to take a catch, diving to field the ball, a bowler leaping in the air as he bowls, a batsman screaming in joy on reaching his century, etc. Understanding the timing of these predictable actions allows a photographer to capture the peak moment; when the action is most dramatic.
Before I start editing I always have a brief chat with the photographers about what could be the day’s great picture. The staff never fail to deliver and meet expectations. I briefed two photographers covering matches from the quarter-finals onwards not to forget to look for emotion in the players and the fans. A good number of the best shots come from the crowd. I received a bunch of nice pictures of the crowd from the final.
While editing pictures from the semi-final match between arch rivals India and Pakistan, I thought I should leave the confines of our New Delhi desk and photograph the match in Mohali. The Mohali semi-final match had a few news angles attached to it. Firstly, India and Pakistan were playing each other after a long time; secondly the Indian Prime Minister and his Pakistan counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani were watching the match in the stands after the latter accepted an invite from Manmohan Singh to watch the match. It was a historic moment where one could see the prime ministers of two nuclear-armed countries sitting side-by-side enjoying the game. But in the end, I am glad I edited their pictures.
Great images, pretty much my dream job – the photography rather than the editing 
Any pointers for my portfolio would be very welcome.
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
India-Pakistan – cricket, spooks and peace
"Cricket diplomacy" has always been one of the great staples of the relationship between India and Pakistan. The two countries have tried and failed before to use their shared enthusiasm for cricket to build bridges, right back to the days of Pakistan President Zia ul-Haq, if not earlier.
So when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced last week that he was inviting Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and President Asif Ali Zardari to watch the semi-finals of the Cricket World Cup in Mohali, India, the temptation was to dismiss it as an old idea.
Yes, it would be the first visit by a leader of either country to the other since the November 2008 attack on Mumbai. Yes, the invitation came at a time when relations between the two countries were already thawing. And yes, the Middle East is changing so fast that you would expect -- in the way that warring siblings do -- that India and Pakistan would bury their differences at a time when the outside world has become so unpredictable.
But the instinct for cynicism is unerring. India and Pakistan have tried and failed to make peace for so long that it is easy, lazily easy, to predict that this latest initiative will also come to nothing. Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, himself a participant in cricket diplomacy in 2005, wrote it off in 2000:
`"We have been trying all kinds of bus diplomacy and cricket diplomacy and everything. Why has all of it failed? It has failed because the core issue was not being addressed ... because there is only one dispute, the Kashmir dispute ... others are just aberrations, minor differences of opinion which can be resolved," he told The Hindu in an interview in 2000.
Yet even after Mumbai, even after years of fighting over Kashmir, even after all the failed diplomatic initiatives of the past, I still found myself regularly checking on Google and Twitter to see whether Pakistan had accepted the invitation to the cricket match. When Zardari's spokeswoman Farahnaz Ispahani announced on her Twitter feed that Gilani would be going to Mohali, the news was retweeted with the speed once reserved by traditional media for attendance at U.S.-Soviet summits.
Over the years, each time something like this has happened, enthusiasm about a breakthrough in India-Pakistan relations has been swiftly disabused.
Pashtoons are by and large hospitable, when compared with Indian folks. Afridis are Pashtoons. This does not, however, follow that Afridis are hospiable people as such.
Americans are the most hospitable and generous people in the world! This is continuously changing ofcourse, due to the mix in their population.
Rex Minor
from Photographers Blog:
Clash of two cricketing titans
The second quarter-final of the cricket world cup was a clash between two huge teams. India, the world's no. 1 team with its power batting lineup. Australia, three-time world champions who have reigned supreme over the game for 12 years. Whoever won, it would be a huge story. Whoever lost, it would be a huge story.
We headed to the stadium at around 10am, well before the 2.30pm start. Traffic was backed up a long way. There was only one road leading to it and we weren't sure if it was fans waving flags and blowing horns, buses and four wheel drives, scooters or the cops that were in charge. Fellow photographer Andrew Caballero-Reynolds got nervous because on his last 3 trips to stadiums, the vehicle he's been in has blown a tire. Lucky we made it in one piece. There were thousands of fans queuing in the searing heat to get into the ground, watched over by the usual stick-wielding police in khaki suits.
I installed a remote camera high on a TV tower above the stands, hooked up by usb cable to a laptop, both powered by a 25m extension cord we rented for 150 rupees (about 4 dollars) from a local shop that usually rents them out for weddings. The remote would capture the action from a different angle and would fire whenever I wanted it to from my field side position. I had the laptop running on a data card so the pictures would automatically be downloaded and transmitted to our editing system live, so that we didn't have to wait for the break inbetween innings to get the disk and edit pictures. It was going to provide some great pictures from the match.
As it got closer to the start of the match, fans packed the stadium and the familiar chants began - "Jeeta bhai jeetega!! Indiaaaaa jeetega!!!" (We'll win brother, we'll win, India will win!!!) I was torn, as someone who was born in India but has an Australian passport, I wasn't sure who to support. I decided to support New Zealand, my other nationality, to evade having to choose.
Australia had a fairly tame start to the match. Captain Ricky Ponting scored a century as Australia posted a total of 260. Amit Dave, Andrew and myself were burnt to a crisp in the unforgiving Gujarat heat as we covered the innings. At least I had water on my side; they forgot to bring any for the photographers at Andrew and Amit's positions.
from Photographers Blog:
Cricket snippets
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.
from Photographers Blog:
2011 Cricket World Cup: Let’s play
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.
There will surely be new heroes found for their respective nations and new stars will appear on the horizon. But there are already some who I will be keenly watching during the 45 day event. From India, the most exciting youngster to emerge since the master blaster has been Virat Kohli. In the limited opportunities he has got, Kohli has proved that he is the man for the future.
Colin Ingram from South Africa will be another young lad to watch alongside Ahmad Shehzad, Umar Akmal (from Pakistan), Darren Bravo from the West Indies and Angelo Mathews from Sri Lanka.
In the bowling department, spinners will hold the key on the slower and turning tracks of the subcontinent. It might not be the run feast that is anticipated on the pitches in this part of the world but batting should be easier if the batsmen are willing to grind.
Cricket going global? Think again
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.
A lot has been said about Afghanistan’s emergence as a cricketing power and how it signifies cricket’s glowing clout in the world arena. ICC chief Haroon Lorgat told Reuters recently that cricket leagues help in selling cricket to the world, citing the example of Afghanistan.
But with the emergence of 20-over cricket, a format that gets over in three hours, there is a big question mark over the future of the one-day game itself — the nine-hour format applied in the showpiece World Cup.
Even in India, where jokes abound about the country’s productivity going down during Team India’s matches, the buzz is missing this time. If India exits in the initial rounds, as they did in the 2007 edition, advertisers, sponsors and broadcasters are bound to face extensive losses.
It will be a herculean task for the ICC to take the game to a global audience, particularly when Twitter and Facebook are abuzz with Arsenal playing Barcelona, and not the biggest event in cricket.
from Photographers Blog:
Before a ball is bowled
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.
Parivartan, Vivek and Danish, thanks for the insight into this shiny, red and perfectly rounded world. Looking forward to the cricket world cup
Dears
Yes, Why not ? also, why only one ? we have great living legends – we can have 3 all-rounders yet each specialised in batting, bowling and fielding respectively – to pick a trio who can work well as a team, to give excellent morale booster to the currently excellent cricket team on the globe !