Wednesday, September 12, 2007

This made my morning. I'm no Aussie hater and I have a lot of respect for them. But every pre-match sign they gave out spoke of a lack of interest and maybe a sniff of over-confidence. This should get them to "start respecting the game ". They might have been rusty and over-confident but I wonder if they were smart enough.
I grew up in a sizable colony with a lot of kids my age which meant every evening saw an army of us playing cricket. Every now and then we would be chased off the streets by somebody who had enough of us breaking windows or trampling their garden, snooping around the crotons, searching for tennis balls. And we would shift to a new street with a totally new set of dynamics. If the earlier "pitch" was long and narrow, the new one would be short and wide. More often than not, one had to develop new strokes to utilize the spaces in the new "ground" and also shed old ones which no longer fetched optimal returns. The bowlers had to rethink their areas and the lengths they would bowl. More importantly, in the first few matches, the captains never knew where exactly the balls would go to place their fielders and what scores to set if they batted first.
Those first few matches were when you needed to be tactically capable and adapt quickly. It no longer made sense to have a good long-term strategy in place. Rather, a clutch of tactics became strategies for the time-being. It made you streetsmart, literally and metaphorically.
Point is, the T20 promises to be entertaining. Although the format appears to be more swashbuckling than scholarly, what will be interesting is the kind of tactics the teams use when they know that they have a whole new set of simultaneous equations to solve. This is as short-term as short-term can get. Australia have always been strategically strong -- have the best bowlers, fielders and batsmen and play the game hard. But the T20 is like hit-and-run guerilla warfare (although that might be stretching the metaphor too much). Strategic strength might not be as vital as it is in the other forms of the game. Each side has more resources than it can spend. It looks like an interesting couple of weeks.
Sun Tzu would have had a field day, I imagine. As would have Garry Kasparov.

7 comments:

The Man Who Wasnt There said...

Yipee!!Australia lost!!
I admit I was grinning rather unabashedly as I was following the match in cricinfo....Much as I admire their Juggernaut nothing pleases me more than to see them eat humble pie...

And it is only with Australia. I would like to blame it conveniently on the media but I am not really convinced why this is so...

This twenty 20 seems quite interesting..I like the slam,bang,thank-you-mam aspect here...The betting industry will have a field day with this!!

unpredictable said...

heya .. im a non fan of cricket so didnt read a word of the post, but want to say a BIG THANKS for ur draft tip :)

musafir said...

TMWWT

"slam,bang,thank-you-mam" - :)) ... not the one for subtlety, are you?

I like Australia losing for other reasons. Now they'll raise their game and we'll all be better off with these Ubermensch.

unpredictable

You're welcome :)

The Man Who Wasnt There said...

Oh yes that they will..I wont be surprised if they pummel England ( All the more better..;) they were made to look much better than they are by the Indians )

ah atleast I was "polite"..yes yes ever the Gentleman...

Anyway am I not known for my subtlety? Why there was once the classic case of a thing being so subtle that it didnt realize it's own subtlety...

Ubermensch? It's more like Schadenfreude :D:D

And Oh Apparently Dravid resigns as Captain...

Yipee again! But who will take over now? Dhoni has a lot to prove in that arena yet...I wouldnt trust him yet with Captaincy..Twenty20 doesnt count much as far as "strategy" is concerned. Interesting times ahead eh?

Karthik said...

Actually sometimes u don't need much strategy and if it's your day, u can actually nick it !! Proof - Bangaldesh, zimbabwe etc .. And what do u think about the bowl out to resolve India - Pakistan tie ?? It was the biggest farce i have ever seen !!

~SuCh~ said...

India Won the World cup !

I am born-again ! :)

~SuCh~ said...

But the news channels linking the Chak De stuph, is total B.. psyched me out... (Dont ask me what happened to my lang.. its all to do with languishin in an uninhbitated isle in Hyd..)