World Cup 2011: The IRISH are definitely impressive!

It started with the men in green defeating the English side and continued with the spirited Irish reply to the challenge put forth by the Indians but the fact remains that the Irish team has established itself as the real surprise package of the tournament. These are players who aren't fully profesional cricketers, many of them doing odd jobs for a few months in the year and a couple who play in the B-grade English leagues. However, most of them have presented themselves as rather worthy of playing on the big stage. If they could just defeat one more of the major teams, it would seriously enhance their
reputation of being the real dark horses of the World Cup, a title that was supposed to be that of Bangladesh who in fact, have played rather poorly. The islander cricketers had said a lot about the home pitches playing to their strengths but they seem to lack the stomach to put it past the the bigger sides. One factor that is missing sorely in the progress of Irish cricket is that they are not receiving invitations for cricket haves like India and Australia where such emerging teams should be invited to play in the state or league matches. This will give the Irish players to get accustomed to varying pitch conditions and get a more realistic idea about their shortcomings.

Afridi—no longer the Pakistani roaring tiger?

He has a tiger imprint on his bat and the bat reads “sher” too which essentially means a lion and that is the type of cricketer Shahid Afridi is believed to be—till the time he started complaining about the unfair treatment against him and his teammates in being ridiculed against in the IPL auctions. It was almost unbelievable to hear the usually ferocious ‘pathan’ complaining like a meek cat on an Indian FM channel. He even had the nerves to say that he believes his team has more fans in India than in Pakistan and thus, their participation in the IPL is vital!! I always counted Afridi along the likes of Saeed Anwar and Wasim Akram—players whose performance and on-field antics reached a new height every time they played against India. I always believed that Afridi must be on the Indian team’s most vicious, almost hated opponent, considering the amount of verbal abuse he displays against the Indians. It now seems that the lure of easy IPL cash has mellowed down the Pathani tiger—they do say money can make you do strange things, don’t they?