March 24, 2003
 

Politics

The US is taking exception to the telecast of interviews with alleged US Prisoners of War on the Al-Jazeera TV channel and is asking for them to be treated according to the Geneva convention. This, when there's so much loss of civilian lives & property as well as injuries to civilians in Iraq. I wonder if the US has forgotten that there're rules of combat too, unless of course this is part of the collateral damage. As usual, one rule for them, one rule for us.

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Cricket

Oh well, a 44 (I hope my counting is right) day farce came to an end. While the ICC may be declaring this to be the best World Cup ever, the quality of cricket really did suck. Add in the boycotts by England and New Zealand, botched up number counting by South Africa and some ridiculous rules on reserve days for rain etc. Forget the problems at the league stage, if the final and all reserve days were washed out due to rain, the trophy would be shared. Imagine a World Championship being shared across two teams because of rain.


The Australians played magnificiently throughout, only the third team to go through a World Cup undefeated (West Indies in 1975 & 1979 and Sri Lanka in 1996, albeit helped by Australia and West Indies conceding their games in Colombo were the others), the second team to retain the title (WI in 1975 & 79) and the first to win three titles. That is some legacy now for future teams (Australian, and otherwise) to achieve. As for India, we were really outplayed in the final. There could have been a better fight, but chasing 360 was never really on. The fact that India ended up at around 6 runs/over after 39 overs means that the pitch was still great for batting. If the target were around 280-300 it'd have been a very interesting game indeed. However the new ball attack, which has come in for rave reviews throughout the tournament, failed when it counted. So did Tendulkar. He was the Man of the Tournament, but I'm sure he will gladly trade that award for the cup that matters. I think Ganguly got it right when he sent Australia in. The conditions were good for bowling, even though the overcast conditions disappeared in much the same way as the sun re-appeared from nowhere thanks to Krishna when Arjuna, after apparently failing in his bid to kill Jayadratha by dusk, was preparing for self-immolation. Surely the VHP-RSS-BJP types would not have failed to notice this occurence and tied it into the fact that neither Zaheer Khan nor Mohammad Kaif did anything of note yesterday.

Labels: 2003 world cup

Rambled @ 6:56 PM

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