In the age of new media, we get to read many cricket articles, as These articles are a combination of match reports, commentaries and opinions.
The Crawler brings to you the top 5 cricket articles of the month, from around the world.
1) All hail the new, macho Fawad Alam
This piece by Ahemer Naqvi, on ESPNCRICINFO, is a must read for all of those who have followed Fawad Alam’s career closely. Ahmer Naqvi is one of the finest Pakistani cricket writers, and with this piece he will only earn more followers and admirers:
“An absolutely disastrous four years for Pakistani cricket after that incident saw the team’s batting regress. Eventually Fawad was called back and his return to the ODI side saw him play a leading part in two chases that went at over six runs an over (something the team hadn’t done in three years) and scoring a hundred in between in the Asia Cup final. Yet when an Osman Samiuddin article celebrating his exploits was published after the tournament, the majority of comments on it implied that everyone seemed to have known of Fawad’s potential all along.”
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2) From Cricket Widow to Cricket Wife
“I found myself at a small Irish pub one evening, flashing my newly minted driver’s license with pride. As with many life-changing events seen only in retrospect, it seemed like just a bar—the wooden tables soaked with old beer, the local band playing the same seven songs at every gig. In the movie of my life, though, this scene would play in slow motion. My outfit would be updated from the high-neck wool sweater I was actually wearing to something more fashionable, and the camera would pan out to show me sitting across from one Subash Jayaraman — known to his listeners as the Cricket Couch — the man who would become my husband.”
You will really enjoy reading this piece by Kathleen Galligan. In this, she has explained her journey from a cricket widow to cricket wife, on Wisden India
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3) Sachin Tendulkar’s retirement has exposed Board of Control for Cricket in India’s control-freakery
Tanya Aldred, of Telegraph argues that the BCCI has done nothing to endear India’s post-Tendulkar team to supporters, as proved by poor crowds at Test series against England:
“Three years ago, 20,000 people lined the gold-paved streets of St John’s Wood before the last day of the first Test between England and India. The first doughty souls were unpacking their blankets outside the Grace Gates at 2am which, even at high summer, is 3¼ hours before dawn. A large chunk of them were India supporters, desperate to be let in.
This year, interest in the same series was fading before it had begun. The first Test at Trent Bridge did not sell out and fewer than 5,000 people turned up for a sunny fourth day of the third Test at the Ageas Bowl. The Anglo-Asian crowds that many of the grounds had tried to woo failed to materialise in any great number. What went wrong?”
This piece exposes the lack of intent on BCCI’s part after Sachin’s retirement, to keep the madness alive.
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4) Dennis Interviews ICC President Srinivasan
You will really enjoying this hilarious interview, in which Dennis of www.dennisdoescricket.com is asking some specific questions to N Srinivasan. But, Srinivasan, as always, is talking sh*t. On Dennis Does Cricket
Dennis: *sigh*. Mr Srinivasan. May I start by asking what it feels like to be the ICC President?
Srinivasan: I’m up to level 58 of Candy Crush.
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5) Beyond the Boundary
In this, Rahul Bhatia gives a long report on “How N Srinivasan became cricket’s biggest hitter”
THE SRINIVASAN WHO WALKED into the meeting of the International Cricket Council at its headquarters in Dubai on 9 January this year looked like a different man. Time had left him sunken-eyed and serious. He was now the president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the most powerful cricket board in the world; but it had been a difficult year, and the annoyances were piling up. His presumptive leadership of global cricket was under threat. He even had a cataract to take care of.
For the two decades since the benefit match, Srinivasan worked to fuse himself with the sport in a way that no cricket administrator had in the past, and outplayed some of the most formidable men in the business. Jagmohan Dalmiya, a supremely wily strategist, had been Srinivasan’s boss at the BCCI once, but had been relegated to relative obscurity. The redoubtable Sharad Pawar, chief of the Nationalist Congress Party and one of India’s toughest politicians, had been the BCCI president, and then the ICC chief in 2010, but Srinivasan had outflanked him, too. And Lalit Modi, Srinivasan’s most vocal rival and the manic architect of the money-spinning, short-format Indian Premier League, was living in exile in London—a circumstance for which he blamed Srinivasan.
If you read one thing this week, make it this profile of Srinivasan. On The Caravan Magazine
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