Micromax 2010 Asia Cup: Testing waters and making comebacks

This seems to be the theme for nearly every team participating in what is being billed as the battle for supremacy in Asian cricket. For starters, both India and Pakistan have come to this edition of the Asia Cup with players who are finding their feet in international cricket after a brief spell of being rested or dropped, for various reasons. While Pakistan aims to fight its most usual nemesis, i.e. the threat of mutiny in its ranks, India is trying to establish what could be their probable line-up for the forthcoming World Cup. Sri Lanka too are looking beyond the usual players like Jayasuriya who have delivered in the past and the onus could well be on the likes of Malinga, Herath and Angelo Mathews to stake claims not just as potential match-winners but the core of the team that is going to try and bring back the world cup to Sri Lanka. While the persistence with Muralitharan at this juncture seems a bits surprising, it is not secret that Lankans are trying to find a permanent solution to their number five, six and seven slots that seem to have been changed with unwanted regularity in the recent past.

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.