Malinga, bound to be T20 World Cup’s best bowler?

This might seem a bit premature to most cricket fans but considering the performance of Lasith Malinga over the past two years in T20 matches, it is almost sure that if the Sri Lankan team is able to enter the final four of the World Cup 2010, the slinger from the Emerald Island is bound to become the best bowler on show. The reasons aren’t difficult to understand considering how regularly he bowls yorkers with such amazing accuracy. Further, he has the ability to bowl about 20, block-hole deliveries
in his given quota of 24 deliveries and he has been doing so very impressively. There is nearly no other bowler who can claim to bowl the full-length ball with so much ease. Even Steyn from SA, despite having lots of pace, does struggle to keep-up six balls on the go, around the middle stump, fullish length like Malinga. Since T20 is all about containing the batsmen rather than dismissing them and if this parameter is taken into account, Malinga perhaps has no other competition. The only other bowler who comes close to Malinga in terms of hitting the yorkish length is the wild-card entry from Pakistan, Mohammad Sami but then again you can never say much about a Pakistani player considering their tendency to self-destruct.

IPL3: Timing gone horribly wrong??

Some folks might not be asking this question but I am surely not one of those guys. I honestly feel that the present scheduling of IPL3 is highly questionable considering that the T20 World Cup 2010 in Caribbean is so near. This will lead to another T20 glut that is not going to do any favors to the viewership for the club games. Let us get thing very clear, and that is in the cricket perspective: we are not in the mold of the English Premier League wherein the same bunch of guys can form great, talked-about friendships during their club stints and still go totally ‘Mexican’ when it comes to the competitions wherein national teams participate. This is still a more conservative form of a not-so-global sport and we want to see some real bad blood, I am trying to say ‘extreme competitiveness’ here, between the players and the presence of IPL3 so close to the World Cup is bound to hamper this. Further, after seeing IPL matches round the clock, doesn’t the very status of a World Cup get slightly eradicated, particularly considering that T20 matches are still assuming the serious proportions that they have promised.