The last time Tendulkar played Australia in a big series, was in the CB Series, Australia 2008, where India won 2-0 in the finals. Tendulkar scored a hundred and a ninety in both the games.
Today, after Australia posted 292, they knew that a run-a-ball effort, which Tendulkar is perhaps the only player in world cricket to achieve without risk taking would dent their chances.
Australia vs India 1-0,
1st ODI 2009 (7 match series)
Australia managed to put up a very strong 292 after batting first in Vadodara on a slowish surface. India dropped chances from Ponting and then Hussey made the most of their second batting powerplay towards the end of the innings.
Chasing about 300 runs in an ODI has never been easy. The bowling side knows that they have margins favoring them, and can implement plans accordingly.
Posted in context of a Wall Street Journal Article suggesting removal of Women's Titles in Chess and reigning World Women's Champion Alexandra Kosteniuk's strong response against it.
Here is an excerpt of my Preface from Dot Chess-The Cricket in Between (2007)- where this topic is touched upon.
5 points that ebook gadgets will need to address to be viable alternatives to print.
A blog debate at nytimes about whether our brains like ebooks, has some excellent views across the history of reading, and if humans were meant to read at all.
For instance, Plato disliked reading because it was apparently a 'new' distractive medium. Incidentally, I just bought an audiobook of Plato's Republic (itunes for $1.99). This is great, as the masterpiece is anyway in a dialogue form.
So the buzz is that Android sales (OS for handhelds, from Google) may tip the iPhone by 2012? Sounds like a Mac vs PC debate. Well sort of, but the Mac debuted in 1984, when PCs had already been pushed by IBM with DOS. However, Apple was in the Personal Computing business earlier than the PCs and was already the pioneer to beat. So there is some similarity here, but this time
We can have tablets from 5x7 inches (personal) to 2 feet (tables at work/library/copy center) if required. Scalable iTablets! They only have logic for touch and display and if feasible networking.
In 1999 my iMac was 233Mhz, had 128Mb RAM and 12Gb space.I also had a Powerbook Duo laptop in the early '90s, with a dock (monitor, keyboard, mouse no CPU). The laptop was grayscale, but when docked, it became a desktop Mac with thousands of colors.. when done, eject laptop like a floppy... and go.
2009: iTablet or iMac or whatever, can perhaps be sold in different form factors, at low cost- just as screen with a docking slot... hmm...iPodTouch is already 64Gb, 500Mhz+... please!!!
@saumilzx
Mumbai, India
8 Oct 2009
ICC Champions Trophy 2009 Finals
New Zealand won the toss and batted first. Australians who have a great reputation of exploiting the dot-ball dilemma of the first innings (when a team bats first, they do not know the target- so the price a batting team pays for dot balls is not known- yet some strike rate is needed being an ODI and wickets are key since some decent total is also needed). So some mix of caution and scoring is needed). How much? That is a dilemma.
Ricky Ponting, is known for his reflexes and flamboyant style of smacking short as well as fuller balls off the front foot. However, in the last few years bowlers have also developed weird type of dot-ball plans ranging from bowling with a scrambled seam, slower cutters and wobbly short balls. This art of mixing things up with seemingly innocuous balls has been further promoted by the rise of T20 Cricket where dot balls are like gold.
Most top batsmen in a team such Tendulkar, Kevin Petersien and Ponting will be the first targets of any new ploy or trick bowlers have up their sleeve. Nothing new, but in the past decade, when a bowler targets a batsman it would usually mean having some special or compelling ball which pokes at a weakness or exploits the conditions. Today, the conditions are usually more batting friendly, so bowlers' hidden plans involve some wobbly or unorthodox type of balls.
For instance, the recent successes of Ajantha Mendis and also Praveen Kumar in Australia 07-08 (ODIs) have a lot to do about a ball which just looks easy but is just a bit different. Praveen Kumar got the better of the Australian top order in the finals in Australia by just rolling his fingers in a way that the bounce was just not as expected. He got Ponting trying to pull and also others, but not with a ball which could be tough to defend. However, it must be said that Ishant Sharma's battle with Ponting in the Tests has been classical - testing the Australian on the front foot on off stump....
When Ponting came to India in 2008, he eventually scored his first century in India- in Bangalore. When Ian Chappell was asked by a TV viewer why Ponting could do it this time, he simply answered that what he did right was 'he did not get out'. However, why he did not get out was that he curbed his natural game of smacking slightly short balls off the front foot. Ponting has now altered his game to blend caution and aggression- and is back into the thick of scoring runs. A shift which Sachin Tendulkar has made, and has been successful (but somehow gets criticized).
This Champions trophy 2009, is a good indicator of Ponting's shifting gears. In South Africa, where conditions are more like home for Ponting, he started off well against West Indies' B Team. Against India he struggled- could have been caught behind off a pull, had a few mistimed drives... but he hung in to make 65 off 88 balls, well below the strike rates on that pitch. Against Pakistan, chasing 206, he eased in with a useful 34 of 68 balls- well below the asking rate and eventually the tail bailed them from the mess. But again, these are signs of blending caution in the right amount, when it is not necessary to 'just go out and play your shots'.
Yesterday, in the semi finals he showed his brilliance (sure the English team was weakened without Stuart Broad and Flintoff), but chasing 250 in a semis is never a given. He made sure he put momentum to get the score to about 80/1 and then he let Watson take risks and push the game beyond England's reach.
Ponting finally went past his poor record in tournament semi-finals (He aggregated only 151 runs in 7 innings till now).
Of course, knock-outs are not the only matches which matter... there are league phases where games are near must-win to qualify, and this fact gets extended when your team is not invincible as it used to be. (Australia were let down by batters against Pakistan, in their must win league game). Someday the media will get it right, that all games, except dead rubbers matter.
Saumil
Mumbai, India
3 Oct 2009
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