The Official Cricket Thread 2006/2007 (3 Viewers)

[Redwan]

meh i hope that ODI win was a fluke for england India is gunna come back XD

 

[fernando]

anyone going to the games in australia?

 

[el gwapo]

I'm getting a couple of my friends to go to a one-dayer. Some of them are Lankan so they'd wanna see the SL-Aus game in the SCG. Tickets would be rarer though, considering the construction works

 

[fernando]

yeah i wanna go to the lankan vs Aus too!!

 

[fernando]

kenya got PAWNED by lanka! YEAAAAAHHHH!!

 

[wuddie]

and australia won the world cup!!!

20/20 is a freaken joke in my opinion. they started with test cricket exclusively, and then they had one dayers, which would have been enough. but no, not in this commercial world we live in, the sponsors want some quick fix with 20/20 in pommieland, now they've making a world cup out of it, what a joke. it seriously should never be taken seriously. in fact, i think they are trying to make something so that someone else besides australia can win it for once.

its a good idea as a charity or entertainment event, but not as an official form of the game.

 

[fernando]

yeah i agree 20/20 is shiet.

 

[A High Way Man]

20 20 is awesome u guys all suck cause u lost so bad

 

[A High Way Man]

woooooooooooooo inDIA!!!!

 

[PrinceHarry]

20/20 is far more exciting , no wonders it is the most successful world cup ever for cricket. It will soon replace the original cricket because people do not want to sit all day for a single match which is as exciting as Knitting. Now Cricket can be enjoyed as a normal sport just like football, baseball, basketball etc.

 

[A High Way Man]

20/20 is far more exciting , no wonders it is the most successful world cup ever for cricket. It will soon replace the original cricket because people do not want to sit all day for a single match which is as exciting as Knitting. Now Cricket can be enjoyed as a normal sport just like football, baseball, basketball etc.

agreed , now they need to start breeding specialist 2020 players, and the 2020 game needs to supplant the 50 over game

Test cricket however should remain the ultimate form.

 

[jb_nc]

20/20 and one-day cricket should be destroyed

it's a joke for bowlers, i wonder why they don't have a machine which sends it straight down at 50km/h with a boundary rope 20 metres back. max score of 720 every match. they cultivate the wickets to be rock hard (i.e. no spin) and a pitch doesn't really crack after 10 let alone 200 overs, im suprised they don't play on concrete.

 

[A High Way Man]

20/20 and one-day cricket should be destroyed

it's a joke for bowlers, i wonder why they don't have a machine which sends it straight down at 50km/h with a boundary rope 20 metres back. max score of 720 every match. they cultivate the wickets to be rock hard (i.e. no spin) and a pitch doesn't really crack after 10 let alone 200 overs, im suprised they don't play on concrete.

bitter bowler alert


except in the last few games its been the bowlers successfully defending the totals to win the match

 

[jb_nc]

bitter bowler alert

I gave up cricket when I was 12. I do like cricket though, I like the match-up between batsman and bowler, it's lame when you just watch the batsman hit six sixes in a row (has been done in 20/20) with no footwork.

except in the last few games its been the bowlers successfully defending the totals to win the match

Good bowling doesn't exactly ooze out of 20/20 whether they defend their total or not. Then again, neither does "good" batting.

Cricket will rue dawn of Twenty20

Gideon Haigh | September 25, 2007

NOTHING succeeds like success, says the proverb. For confirmation, look no further than the cricket grounds of South Africa. Test matches there usually struggle to attract a quorum. For the past 10 days the grounds have brimmed with life and noise for a world championship of the game's newest variant, Twenty20: a heady mixture of thrills, spills and the epiphenomenon of mass marketing.

The conclusion, moreover, was close to ideal. Where the 50-over-a-side World Cup earlier this year was fatally undermined by the early exits of India and Pakistan, here those traditional antagonists reached the final, having earlier tied after 240 deliveries. The subcontinent is the hub of the game and cricket observes the golden rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules. India and Pakistan, and perforce the world, are about to go Twenty20 crazy.

In the excitement, Australians have been notable party poopers, and not merely because they went down to both finalists after being tripped up by Zimbabwe. Trying to sound enthused about the crowds in Johannesburg, Adam Gilchrist let his ambivalence hang out: "Er, yeah, yeah. It's um ... well. The more I play it, I am starting to, not so much like it as a player, but love watching it."

Andrew Symonds came straight out and called Twenty20 "a frustrating game because you can be beaten by the lesser sides", which "have to be good for a shorter period of time". In this they echo their captain, Ricky Ponting, who last year confessed: "I don't think I really like playing Twenty20 international cricket."

Nobody else shows quite the same candour, perhaps because Twenty20 is looming as a means by which the much-resented Australian grip on international cricket may be loosened, and perhaps also because of its looming booty.

A Champions Twenty20 League along the lines of rugby's Super 14s is promised a year hence: nine days, $US5 million ($5.7 million), involving teams from host India, Australia, England and South Africa, with corporates bidding for the right to field franchise teams selected from a pool of internationals.

For punters, Twenty20 has been a blast: a starburst of sixes, a welter of wickets and, not least, a farcical "bowl-out" during the finalists' first meeting where trembling players proved embarrassingly incapable of hitting a set of stumps.

Indeed, embarrassment is the essence of Twenty20. Players don't just fail, they are humiliated.

A promising young bowler, Stuart Broad, was smashed for six sixes in an over. A brilliant young batsman, Michael Clarke, faced only four balls during the entire tournament. Sri Lanka's able and stylish top order, which excelled in the World Cup and whose variety of strokeplayers is one of the pleasures of the modern game, committed batting harakiri in 10 overs. The fielding has been surprisingly ham-handed, with plenty of catches missed and only three taken in the slips in the 26 games preceding the final. Twenty20, then, turns a game of subtleties, intricacies and distant intimacies into a theatre of cruelty for television.

Cricket lovers underestimate this philosophical shift at their peril. Cricket has traditionally been a game for players, with everyone enjoying the scope and the time to show their own special skills. But this length, breadth and variety have made the game difficult to mass market.

When one-day cricket brought the spectators' understandable desire to see a result in a day into calculations, that balance was disturbed. "In cricket, the players are the boss," observed Peter Roebuck. "In one-day cricket, the game is the boss."

In Twenty20, that boss totes an MBA and a BlackBerry, and his concern is chiefly ratings rather than runs or wickets. Indeed, the format originated on the marketing whiteboards at the England and Wales Cricket Board four years ago as a means of attracting cricket "tolerators": sports watchers averse to the game who might consider going if it was shorter, sharper and noisier.

A novel idea, this: to redesign a game to the specifications of those who don't like it, rather like creating art for consumers who prefer pornography or composing music for listeners with a taste for cacophony.

But the practitioners' acquiescence is bought by an arrangement reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's principle for dealing with actors: "Pay them heaps and treat them like cattle."

So the administrators have a hit on their hands, a hit that will reverberate. We have already seen the best-case scenario: a successful tournament still tinged with novelty.

Through time, however, it is likely that the main beneficiaries will be commercial intermediaries.

Cricket will make a great deal of money in the short term, money it has no obvious need for and will mostly waste, and it will be left a coarser, crueller, crasser game as a result. Now that the Twenty20 world championship is over, another proverb comes to mind: be careful what you wish for.

Gideon Haigh is author of numerous books on cricket, including, most recently, All Out: The Ashes 2006-07 (Black Inc). His The Green & Golden Age: Writings on Australian Cricket Today is published on October 8.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22473696-7583,00.html

 

[wuddie]

i agree, 20/20 is undermining the difficulties of a tough game.

it is almost equivalent to any shorten version of any sport - 20min rugby, the first goal wins for soccer, first set wins for tennis. it is all very good once in a while, for a laugh and a giggle. but to take this seriously?

cricket was never about who can hit the most boundaries - if you like that sort of a game, baseball is the go - it's about discipline and teamwork, patience and finess. 20/20 has none of that, none.

if 20/20 was such as success, why don't they have 5/5, or better still, have the wickies bowling? cricket will lose a lot of followers if they continue to invest money in 20/20.

 

[PrinceHarry]

Because 20/20 is better than 50/50 or 5/5 and that why it is becoming the most popular form of cricket.

I am disgusted by the arrogance of pakis, one of their player thanked all muslims around the world for their support as if they represent muslims in cricket or as if it was a match between Muslim and Hindus. I am extremely pleased that they got their hairy arse kicked by Indians.

 

[HotShot]

there is no struggle in 20/20 - no one cares just go out and swing.

 

[wuddie]

aust vs india in ODI

2-0 in favour of aust at the moment, aussies look so at home and playing with so much ease. india on the other hand, seems to play with so much expectation of themselves and besides youraj singh, yet to free their arms and have a real go at it. is it because of the complacency from the 20/20 world cup? bare in mind, they are playing the world number one so no expectations there at all.

 

[Chelsea FC]

The behaviour from the fuking Curry Munching players and fans has been nothing but disgraceful lately.

The throw rocks at our team bus for losing and they go making monkey chants to one of our players.

I think this pathetic Indians have surpassed the English as the new Whingers in world cricket.

 

[speed2]

I think this pathetic Indians have surpassed the English as the new Whingers in world cricket.

Nah, they still trail the Aussies.