Second Match is at an Interesting Stage ...

The first match belonged to the English, to the rain gods and to Mahendra Singh Dhoni for India. England deserved the win. Yes, Sachin could have done better with his II-Innings knock but others have said plenty about that. It's just unfortunate that another all-time-great, Kapil Dev too has decided to muddy the waters by criticizing Sachin. This time, it's about his match-winning capabilities.

I enjoyed his II-match knock so far and Andrew Miller did it too, apparently. It's just the yet another instance of praise-or-wayward criticism game that is so commonplace in sport journalism these days. The other day, one Mr S Rajesh went on to collect statistics about who has played the best in the 4th Innings while chasing a victory or saving a match. Come on! Give me a break! This is like finding faults with people, and finding innovative ways to find a fault. If you are really interested in it, go get the statistics for the following for greatest batsmen in the World and compare them:

• Performance when the bowling side has more than two right-arm fast bowlers, two left-handed fast bowlers, one left-arm spinner and one genuine googly bowler. This might give insights to opponents about team composition if the given batsman is still playing.
  
• Performance when batting at bat number 1, 3, 4 and 5.
• Number of lives they got and (LBW) appeals they survived while scoring a century (will that data be available?)
• Probability that their side would have won a match if they had performed on all the occasions that they actually failed. A performance in this case is a half-century and a lack of performance is number of runs < 50.
  

Cricket is a team game.

Player of the Series (twice in a row) ...

Notwithstanding the so-called clouds of doubt, Sachin became the Player of the Series twice in a row after the early exit from the World Cup, once on sub-continental pitches and once on Irish pitches.

He shared the honors (rightfully) with Yuvraj Singh and India beat SA convincingly at Belfast. Yuvee was at his best too and saw India through.

This is a thumping blow to sport critics world-wide. They have to pray that he underperforms in England. And again, he's up for the law of averages. I don't have any expectations. I do feel that Karthik, Dhoni and others should now step up and shoulder more responsibilities ...

Let's see what happens in England, who are all over WI.

BTW, here is another unimpressive collection of Sachin's stats. I think if you have nothing to do, you can come up with several good-looking comparison charts that are good for nothing.