Australian Cricket

I’ve been a true patriot each time the Indian Cricket Team has taken field and in the worst of the match status, I have backed them. I have also never been able to praise another team for playing well but have never missed a chance to criticize the bad performance of our Indian Cricket team. Well there is only one reason why I am confessing all of this and that is to pay tribute to the world class Australian Cricket Team.

In the summer of 2003-2004 in Adelaide (Australia), the Indian team came out victorious of the test match played against the home side. The IND-AUS test series 2003-2004 ended in a draw, each side winning one test a piece and the last test was drawn. India previously had defeated Australia at home in the Test match series. The critics who wrote off Indian team’s winning odds every time they toured outside the country, were beginning to find good things to write about the team. Many thought across the world that this is the beginning of the sporting rivalry which will make people forget the Indo-Pak or the Ashes encounters. For a moment even I thought that the Indian team is actually comparable to the Aussies.

Australian team all of a sudden was looking a bit fragile. Steve Waugh’s retirement was seen as an end of a golden era for them. In came Ricky Ponting to take charge of the test team. The purist believe that Test cricket is the ultimate test of a cricketer and one needs to prove his mettle in those 5 days to come into reckoning, and I fully subscribe to the thought. Australia toured India soon after and won the test series against the home side. The final frontier, India, (as remarked by Steve Waugh) was crossed.

Some teams have managed to fair well against the Aussies in the recent past and when arch rival England won Ashes 2004, doubts were again in the air of the Aussie team’s deteriorating performance. Well, the English played out of their best abilities but a comparison with the Aussies is just not possible. Pull out the records and see how many tests England has lost against the Aussies and by how much margins.

“Consistency” is what the Australian Cricket team is all about. There are world class performers in every International team be it the Tendulkars and the Dravids in India, Smiths and the Kallis in South Africa or Inzamams and the Akhtars in Pakistan. But the delicate balance of fusing individual brilliance in a team environment is best achieved by Australia.

The cricket governing system in Australia deserves a lot of credit for maintaining professionalism in the game from the very club level. A lot of exposure is given to young kids and no wonder the bench strength in Australian Cricket can easily field a separate International team in world cricket.

A lot of credit also needs to be given to the coaches at state level and to the selectors for bringing forward talents like the Chappels, Borders, Healys, Warnes, Pontings, Gilchrist and the list goes on.

A killer attitude and a desire to win every time they play make the Australian team and is a joy to watch them play for any cricket lover. Australian Cricket has raised the bar really high and I just hope some International team is able to get close.  

Indian Sport…… Northbound

Indian sport is at an all time high. Be it the splendid performance of athletes at the recently concluded Melbourne Commonwealth Games or the Indian Cricket team’s series win over arch rivals Pakistan. A country where Cricket is by far the most popular sport and cricketers treated as gods, sports like Formula1, Tennis, Chess etc have off-late shared the limelight.

Cricket has long been accused of a sport that gains maximum media attention also resulting in huge corporate sponsorships not just for the game but also for the players. The point to be noted here is that it makes business sense for the media and corporates to back a sport in which our countrymen are doing well. You can’t expect to win a big sponsorship deal for an Indian hockey team for which you got to jog your memory to recall the last win or for our football team which never qualified through the regional league also.

Sania Mirza, Vishwanathan Anand, Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupati, Narain Karthikeyan are some of the names which are doing the rounds selling you a PC, colas, car etc. This clears one point which is that if you are good enough to perform at the world stage there are people to back you up.

Though there is another point to note which is that even being a country of a billion people, we struggle each time to win a single gold in Olympics. There is a huge need to promote sport in our educational institutions and within corporate organizations. There is a lot of stress upon students to do well in academics and sport always take the back seat. Sports are looked down upon by parents and majority wants their kids to grow up and take up a regular office job. The attitude needs to be changed; parents should realize that sports are not just a good career but also a source for developing the overall personality of the kid.

All the athletes who have done our country proud deserve a pat on the back and we should all promote our sportsmen, So the next time you are sitting with an American friend never forget to mention a Arjun Atwal or a Mahesh Bhupati to an Englishman or a Narain Karthikeyan to a European.