18 January 2006

Pawsted by Mosilager

Life's a pitch


Life's a pitch! Here's Siddhartha Vaidyanathan talking about how the pitch always gets blamed for drawn matches or one team performing badly. Those grounds staff can never win. I think Dravid's been pretty good at not criticising the pitch so much, he usually talks about the players not adapting to conditions. Anyway, with 1089 runs at a rate of 4.93, I think we can be justified in thinking that even we would have been able to score against the Rawalpindi express and co.

Translation of the above for non-cricket fans:
In a game where the ball bounces on the surface before being hit, the surface is very important. In the last India-Pakistan 5 day match at Lahore, the surface only favoured the batsmen (or the hitters/batters), so much so that they made more than a 1000 points very quickly. In fact it was the fastest ever. So I think that was a bad surface, and I was speculating that my friends and I over here could have faced off against the world's best bowlers (pitchers) on that track. Life's a pitch talks about how the surface always gets blamed for any strange result, and I made the point that the Indian captain never complains about the pitch, only the players :)

My previous cricket posts
Learning while webtrawling

4 comments:

Sunil Deepak said...

Thanks for coming to look at my Hindi blog. Take a look at Hindi Chitha Vishwa for meeting other Hindi bloggers:
http://myjavaserver.com/~hindi/

Pratik Pandey said...

हाँलाकि बल्‍लेबाज़ों के बढिया प्रदर्शन को कम नहीं आंका जा सकता, फिर भी कहना पड़ेगा कि गेन्‍दबाज़ों के लिये लाहौर की पिच बिल्‍कुल बेजान थी।

Anonymous said...

Thanks for translating for us non-crickateers! 1000 points is a lot.
And what criteria makes a surface good for the game??

Mosilager said...

hey mansoora,
for the pitch to be good, there should be something in it for the bowlers as well. In a 5 day match, the only way to get a result (win/lose) is for the bowlers to get the opposing team all out. Fast bowlers do it by speed, which didn't work on this pitch because after the bounce the ball slowed from 90mph to 70mph. Medium fast bowlers do it by moving the ball in the air (called swing) which also didn't work here. Slow bowlers turn the ball after the bounce in unpredictable directions (for the batsman anyway:)) and they couldn't do it on this pitch. And we had some of the best bowlers of each type playing in this match so if anyone could do it, they could. Hope that explains it.