April 13, 2004
 

Cricket

Triple centuries suddenly seem dime-a-dozen nowadays. 8 out of the 19 triple centuries scored in tests have been made post 1990, 4 of those 8 were made post 2000. Is it an indication about the lack of quality bowling nowadays that everyone and his dog manages to make a triple ton? Consider this. Of the current players, Lara and Tendulkar are in a race to get to 10000 runs, with Lara well in front now on the back of his amazing quadruple ton, the first ever in test cricket. In fact Lara is now exactly 400 runs ahead of Tendulkar. Amazingly enough, both of Lara's triple centuries came at St. John's, Antigua, just as both of Bradman's triple centuries came at Leeds. England's Thorpe is the only English player who was chasing leather on both occasions, including when Lara broke Sir Garfield Sobers' mark of 365 nearly a decade ago. In fact Lara himself is the other player who played in both the tests with Shivnarine Chanderpaul missing out narrowly after he was dropped for this game. Spookily enough, umpire Darrell Hair has been an umpire in both these tests! Anyway, back to the topic: when you leave those two aside, there're no batsmen who've made more than 7000 runs. There're very few current batsmen who've made even 6000 runs. The only ones who have are Inzamam (6890), Dravid (6595) [both as of end of the first day at Rawalpindi] & Ponting (6019). Kallis and Thorpe are just short of 6000 runs.

The quality of bowling, especially in the last half a dozen years or so with the retirements/waning of Ambrose, Walsh, Donald, Wasim, Waqar, Warne, Kumble etc. has been at an all-time low. Yet how do you explain the fact that there're hardly any batsmen who've made more than 6000 runs. All of these batsmen made their debuts sometime in the last decade (Inzamam in 1992 is the earliest of the lot while Kallis & Ponting would be the latest debutants).

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Politics

The now declassified full text of the intelligence briefing of 6 August 2001, prepared for US President George Bush, concerning al-Qaeda threat to the United States.

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Technology

Forbes Magazine profiles Google's GMail

Labels: al-qaeda

Rambled @ 6:26 PM

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