How NOT to handle defeat

1) Tear up the wicket keeper's house - According to this article, a mob in India attacked the under-construction home of wicket keeper Mahendra Dhoni. It's crazy how they literally build up and tear down their stars. In a country with a billion people, it's understandable that there will be a few people who go to extremes, but again, this group took it way too personally.

There's an informative related post on Cricket 24x7.

I should add that this sort of issue is not a uniquely South-Asian problem. Even in ultra-polite Canada there have been riots after hockey teams lost. In my native U.S. there are sometimes riots when a team wins a championship. In the most extreme case, a soccer match in El Salvador resulted in a war!

2) Lead a drinking expedition the night before the next match, followed by a pedal-boat excursion - Of course this is the odd news about England star Andrew Flintoff, which cost him the vice-captaincy. This may also be a case of taking things too personally. One would expect Flintoff to have the occasional drinking binge, but not the night before a match. I'm sure that disappointment about losing to New Zealand must have clouded his judgment a bit.

3) Murder the coach - This is really the extreme logical extension of taking wins and losses too personally. Valuing victory in a sports event above human life is quite simply insane and evil, but it's not that far beyond valuing victory over sportsmanship or common courtesy.

This shocking revelation also presents another problem for Pakistan cricket. How does one recruit a new cricket coach when the last one was murdered for performance reasons? Who would want to take that job?

There's a certain irony to this awful tragedy. In recent years there have been security concerns surrounding teams touring Pakistan (New Zealand cut short a tour after a bomb blast, and other teams have had concerns as well), and in 2003 there were security concerns in Africa. None of that crossed anyone's mind with the Caribbean, where the main concern was whether the venues would be built on time. This is the biggest security incident in the history of international cricket, and it's not linked to terrorism or political instability.

A St. Patrick's Day Miracle

Congratulations to the Irish, still the only team in the history of the World Cup who have never lost a match.

Pundits said the pitches in the Caribbean would favor South Asian teams. Some picked Pakistan and India as the most likely teams to pry the cup away from the Australians. But now, stunningly, Pakistan is the first team eliminated from contention (before Bermuda, even!), and India is in danger of following suit.

If Ireland's winning ways continue, it will be interesting to see whether Ed Joyce begins to regret his choice of country. An England-Ireland match-up in the super-8's could be interesting, but England has to beat Kenya to make that happen. After a day where the minnows won 2-0 I'm not going to count on that happening. It's also possible that Ireland could fail to advance if Zimbabwe also beats Pakistan.

A year ago the idea of Pakistan leaving the World Cup without a win was unthinkable, but at this point it can't be ruled out as a possibility. Despite the brilliance of certain batsmen, it's been a tough year for Pakistan's cricket program.

A Perfect 36

Here's the BBC article about what Herschelle Gibbs accomplished in one over against Holland yesterday. It's very impressive, hitting all 6 balls for six. It's actually easier for me, given my level of talent, to identify with the bowler, Daan van Bunge. To his credit, he did not bowl any extras in the over. Given the hammering he was taking it would have been understandable for him to get rattled or try something beyond his abilities.

I once heard an interview with an English club cricketer who hit 7 sixes in an over, thanks to a no-ball. So that's a 43-run over for some unfortunate club bowler.

What caught my attention in the article was that the Dutch captain did not know where to place his fielders. Suppose you're the captain, and your opponents need 6 off the last ball to win. And let's say the on-strike batsman is Gibbs and the bowler is van Bunge (sounds a lot better than "the bowler's Holding; the batsman's Willey"). Where do you place your fielders?

I don't know whether it's in the spirit of the game (there's a bit of Jardine in me, I guess), but I would put fielders OUTSIDE the boundary. If I understand law 32 correctly (if you're an accredited umpire and disagree, please leave an explanatory comment), a fielder can prevent a six by catching the ball in the air, even well outside the rope, and throwing the ball back in play (as long as the ball is released before his feet touch the ground).

From that point on, it probably makes more sense for the fielder to pick up the ball and throw it back to the bowler or keeper in a hurry. If the batsmen have not scored a run by the time the ball is reached I believe the fielder could throw the ball over the rope to end the match with a 1-run win, but law 19 makes this scenario very risky. If the fielder throws the ball over the rope, the batting side gets the 4 runs plus whatever runs the batsmen have taken before the throw went over the rope. By the time the ball goes to the extra-deep fielder and back in play, and the fielder gets in to pick it up, the batsmen will likely have scored a run, and the fieldsman will not have had the opportunity to check whether or not they have (or, even worse, he might not notice a no-ball signal from the umpire). So the best bet is to get the ball in before they can run 5 for a tie or 6 for the win.

Another radical fielding idea more appropriate for the actual scenario of Gibbs' heroics (i.e. not chasing, and there's one ball in the over after he's scored 30 off the first 5 balls) would be to put fielders at the boundary in pairs - one inside and one outside. So the one outside could try to take the ball with feet off the ground and lob the ball in for the other fielder to take the catch. Don't leave anyone but the bowler and the keeper more than 5 yards inside the boundary. In that scenario, Gibbs might think twice about trying to hit the big one.

March Madness

If you don't know what the NCAA basketball tournament is like - and if you're not American, that's quite understandable - you have the opportunity to find out this week on internet radio. If, on the other hand, you don't know anything about the cricket World Cup and would like to find out, well, if you're not in one of the participating countries you're out of luck.

Today it was the luck of the Irish which escaped me, as cricket minnows Ireland pulled off a near-miraculous tie against degraded former cricket power Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe seemed to have it easily in hand, but the Irish took a flurry of late wickets, including, apparently, a runout of the last man on the final ball of the 50th over. This luck escaped me because no one has bought the rights for even internet radio broadcasts of the World Cup here in France, so I only know about the match from reading about it.

The ICC is a monopoly which tries to maximize its short-term interests to the detriment of the sport. It's a disgrace to the sport of cricket that this supposedly world-wide event is blacked out even from radio and internet radio coverage in much of the world, which is not the case for a university league event in the U.S.