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.

Stop whining about India’s batting versus Bangladesh, it makes the game interesting

A lot of people in India, particularly the over-critical media, has been voicing their disappointment about how the Indian batsmen faltered against a mediocre team like Bangladesh. However, I believe that things need to be looked at from a much larger perspective.
For starters, the Idea test series has very little to offer in terms of exciting encounters since the Bangladeshi cricket team hardly has any renowned players. With the Indian batsmen getting out to a score of less than 250 runs, the game has been set-up in a manner that at least makes it a bit engaging, at least in terms of TV viewership. And further, all these emotional outbursts about India faring so averagely after graduating to the number one test team spot is getting a bit too repetitive — India haven’t even spent two straight months at this ranking. It is just an occasional thing and one day of average batting performance is not going to sink the ship… seriously, some folks need to take things a bit less seriously!