Jhakas | Sanjay Jha
In every social conversation these days, the one constant question we are asked is ---- Who will win the Champions Trophy?
Since we are not in the business of forecasting models, and neither do we believe that we should be indulging in wild guesstimating, we essentially state with a poker face , the standard cliché----“ The team that acclimatizes to the conditions well, bowls, bats and fields with superlative efficiency, wins the toss, does not drop silly catches, shows that insatiable, macabre hunger to win, runs like a being-chased hare between the wickets , sure enough, they will certainly win the match. Continue reading below
Obviously, if they get lucky as well by getting dubious decisions in their favour, that will not hurt the cause”.
The truth is that after the Australian applecart was defiantly upturned by a resurgent West Indies on Wednesday evening, nobody knows.
The tournament favorites were ignominiously bundled out by a determined , dogged and fighting bunch of players who were not so long ago christened as perpetual losers.
Suddenly, everyone believes they can win, starting with the normally reticent Stephen Fleming.
The topsy-turvy and curvy nature of the Brabourne Stadium has not helped matters at all; in fact, it has confounded one and all as much as an Agatha Christie mystery book.
With the much -- awaited finals being played out in the unusually hot and intensely humid Bombay on November 5, it can be safely mentioned that the dreaded toss could very well decide who the winners of the abridged World Cup could be, which is in a sense terribly ridiculous.
If you call tails , but it fails to wag, your head could well be on the chopping block, skipper.
At the time of writing, a foreign curator has been hurriedly rolled into service, so we will have to wait in animated suspension for his magical tricks to bear fruit.
Whatever the eventual outcome, it is absolutely great to have official games back at Cricket Club of India, evidently the quaint classical home of Bombay cricket.
Comparisons they say are odious, but now I now why. Wankhede Stadium, which usurped the game from CCI a few decades ago, is a virtual black-hole; a crumbling stadium, a death -- trap where once you enter it’s dicey precincts, you exit alive only if you have heavenly benedictions.
The aromatic emissions from the liquid lounge (lavatory, if you please) can by itself cause mass deaths worse than chemical warfare on Kurdish rebels by Saddam Hussein.
Getting to munch a sandwich is akin to being a cucumber piece between thick sliced breads, enveloped as one is on both sides in a bone-crushing enclosure.. And the seat allocations are a total joke, not well-designed for the average Indian posterior.
In fact, at Wankhede if you actually try and occupy your designated seat number, you are assumed to have gone bananas. Besides you need an X-Ray vision to see the game , obstructed visually as one is by pillars, people and policemen.
May be the finals on November 5 2006 will be reduced to a 20: 20 over match since the foreign curator is not really the son of the soil. But for those who have been experiencing the excruciating joys of watching cricket from the Wankhede, they will not mind their brief sojourn at CCI.
Care for a sandwich?
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