Saturday, March 6, 2010

Why the ICC world cup 2011 shouldn't be held in India

Indian pitches can all (except two or three ) be rendered unfit for hosting an ODI. BCCI is selling cricket... its playing a monopoly, unquestionably, monopoly. when I told this to my economics teacher, he laughed at me. he asked me, what does it sell? I told him - it sells (in more than one ways :-P )cricket, it doesn't allow competitors to enter the market (banned ICL), doesn't allow free flow of information (random selection, droppings, pitch selection, never-looks at some genuine talent... and gives no reason to most of them), and ofcourse, only motive is to make profit... Somehow, the faculty wasn't impressed, probably he was an IPL fan... hmmm... Nevertheless, coming back to the issue, I feel the pitch curators are brain dead. Forgot how to make pitches. I don't know how to make pitches, but they should know to make good ones. the test series against Sri Lanka had reports of average, below average and poor. Now, a 'poor' was a disgrace to the board, or so it should have been.

I'm tired of watching ODI games with 400+ scores and teams nearly chasing them down. Where is the fun i it. OK. If one team scores 400 and wraps up the other in 200, that displays some good team strength. But, that wasn't the case here. When was the last time I saw a 250 score being posted and defended? It just doesn't seem to be happening anymore.

When a curator says '260 will be a competetive total' and the team batting first scores 380 and the chasing team scores at more than run a ball to almost 280, I think the curator has to be fired. The Kotla pitch at Delhi which was under scrutiny after the Campions League match last October showed no improvement and was an absolute horror during the match against Sri Lanka, which I chose to watch because I saw grass on the pitch and some dampness in the air, likely to assist bowlers. Guess the grass was something i should've noticed, not just 'seen'. Present in scattered patches on a underprepared pitch, the balls shot off it once i a while injuring the Lankan batsmen more than 'once in a while'. Umpires called it a day. The curator got docked. Pitch got banned for an year. I don't know why the ICC trusts the BCCI of DDCA to prepare a sane pitch for the World Cup.

Country like India where 'peer pressure' is what brings out the worst in the people, the T20 seems to have become the household name for cricket. Bowlers have long been forgotten. Playing in the 'V' rarely appreciated, lemon slice gets a standing ovation (c'mon people, grow up! even the batsman doesn't know where the ball went) and there are lots and lots of flat piches with loads and loads of runs. If cricket is Ice Cream, T20 is diabetes. People in India largely have fallen prey to the monster called T20 which has completely gone off the hook. T20's creator, recently stated that today's T20 is not what he was thinking about a few years ago when the E(&W)CB introduced it in its domestic calendar.

Anyway, the Twenty20 Cup was more sane than the IPL. It had and has better pitches, controlled money flow, better trained players and a knowledgeable crowd who turn up for Friends Provident and County Championships too. Whereas, the BCCI, read as Lalit Modi, loves to pour money into IPL to reap more and more and more and more money, at the cost of cricket. With the advent of IPL, more and more people have started quitting Tests. Gayle wants to be a pro-T20 (ha  ah ha ha ha a haaaaa ) player, Freddie became a free lancer. An endless list of players injured themselves during the course of the IPL and missed off on more important series later on. One very hard to digest news was Dhoni playing IPL and opting our of a test series in Sri Lanka which proved quite costly. Where was the commitment to the nation, folks?

Now that a man has scored a double century in ODI, the home folks want more of it coming. the BCCI don't want their 'TRP's to drop, so, I expect they'll continue making pathetic pitches and feed the open mouthed spectators with more and more boundaries.

If BCCI had so much interest in dethroning Pakistan from hosting world cup matches, then I say India is no secure a place to host any match either. India has seen more and worse since and before the Lahore blast. (the Bombay blast a winter ago was where the English team was heading to, so, plus or minus a couple of days, the English team would've been in grave danger!). 

Money, and hence, power, has put BCCI in a comfortable positio. I don't know what the ICC and MCC are there for, BCCI is the one making the rules out there. Pretty bad ones.

My advice to any team who is coming to the world cup, if at all it happens - don't bring your bowlers. Let them take rest, some time off to spend quality time with their families.

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