This was meant to be a year-long blog and it's a couple of months over that limit now. Blogging about cricket without any right to has been entertaining. I wasn't edited, which was strange but nice, and readers wrote in, which was gratifying. The last year has been good to people like me who track the Indian team to wallow in Test match success. There was success to wallow in, for instance (not always the case in the forty-something years of my fan-dom); even the rubber we lost in Australia was so stirring it felt like we had won. It was such a good year that the limited overs game was nearly memorable: the Twenty20 triumph in South Africa was a landmark; so was the CB Series win.

I can't see that there's going to be a tour to top the one in Australia any time soon, so this looks like a good place to stop. If, like an Australian, I was used to winning, I might see the past year as the start of a hot new streak, but I'm not. I'm a desi fan who has learnt over time to keep his fingers crossed, not to push his luck and to quit when he's ahead. If a brave new world of cricket beckons, with new forms of the game, new leagues and young players, it ought to be more robustly blogged.

Bye.

	© Getty Images

Listening to Tendulkar declare that the CB series win counted as the greatest moment of his cricketing career, I felt dismayed, then scornful, and then just old.

The dismay was defensible: here was the best Test batsman India had ever produced, back to sublime Test form (he had just struck two centuries and a fifty in the four Test series against Australia), the spearhead of the Indian charge to a gloriously implausible victory in the third Test in Perth, telling the world that India's triumph in a trivial three-nation tournament in its last season (the tri-series tv ratings are so poor that it's being put to sleep) ranked higher than any Test match triumph of which he had been a part.

So, I thought, building up a rhetorical head of steam, this was bigger than the 2001 Test in Kolkata where Laxman's double and Dravid's century and, yes, Tendulkar's three wickets, helped us clinch our greatest Test victory ever? Bigger than the win at Chennai in the final Test of that series, where Tendulkar's hundred won us a series victory against Waugh's Invincibles at full strength?

Bigger than the last Test series in Australia when we got the better of a 1-1 draw. Bigger than winning our first Test rubber in England in twenty years last summer? Edging a struggling Sri Lanka in the league stage and blanking an ageing Australian side in the finals of a small limited overs tournament was a bigger deal than all of the above?

Continue reading "The Beginning of the End"

	Kerry Packer didn't ask the world's cricket boards if he could subsidise them for the trouble they had taken to raise the players he was buying for his pirate league © The Cricketer International

I've no idea whether the IPL will work in the long term or not and I'm as surprised as anyone at the money that's been bid for the players. But it seems like an interesting experiment that might create a following for the game at a sub-national level. I'd like Twenty20 cricket to mutate into a four-innings format, like Test cricket in miniature. It's an idea that Chris Cairns once mentioned in a discussion in a television studio. It's a feasible format because even with each side batting twice, the 80 overs would take less time to bowl than the 100 overs of one-day cricket. The sports channels would love it (more time to flash commercials in) and the limited-overs game would be invested with some of the magic of Test cricket: the thrill of another chance, the prospect of the stirring fight back, the shot at a second-innings redemption.

Continue reading "Why should the IPL be globally managed?"