Crucket

A limp effort in Saturday’s game against India led to us being eliminated from the travesty of a tournament that was the Compaq Cup. And that is all anyone would want to know really. Goodbye Compaq Cup, goodbye Sri Lanka.

But of course, there had to be a follow up newspaper story after the press conference. So we get to read Daniel Vettori’s comments. Whoopee.

It’s the same old stuff. Didn’t get enough runs. *shrug* Didn’t put enough pressure on the opposition. No attempt to find explanations for the poor performance. No attempt to find excuses. Just an acknowledgement that he’s said the same thing before. But I’m sure he’s said that he’s said the same thing before. “I know I sound like a broken record but…” You don’t know just how right you are

Wouldn’t it be great to see something different at a press conference when there is nothing to say about the cricket? Some karaoke or stand-up would be a good laugh, but could Vettori or Moles carry that off? Maybe a chapter from whatever Dan has on his bedside table. Or maybe a little travelogue.

What we really want to see though are some excuses or explanations. Why? What happened? What went wrong? Who’s to blame?

Now you are selector, who are you looking at dropping? Who’s not pulling their weight?

Or was the opposition at fault? A couple of digs at the sportsmanship of the other guys would make things interesting.

Just something to help us understand, or think we’re understanding.

There’s still about a day before the next game in Sri Lanka, the match-up with a bullish India, maybe just enough time for me to quickly recount my experiences of the previous tour to Sri Lanka in 2003.

Test in Kandy

Being in Sri Lanka for the tour was entirely coincidental. I had been travelling around India looking at temples, a journey that was to stretch from the Himalayas to the southern tip of the peninsula, from the west coast to the east.  (I’d love to write about it one day, but who has the time.) As you can imagine, such a pilgrimage takes quite a long while, and your basic 6-month tourist visa wasn’t going to cut it, so we popped over to Sri Lanka to renew our visas.

Sri Lanka however is a lovely place, so even though the visit was ostensibly a diversion, we had a great time drinking tea, relaxing and enjoying not being in India for a couple of weeks. And by chance we arrived just after the first test (missing Fleming’s 274, which I understand wasn’t broadcast at all in New Zealand, so we all missed it).

Colombo was a bit urgh though. We stayed at the YMCA (coz we’re such budget travellers), where the staff were drunk, I had to sleep on a filthy mattress and the fan blew the light fitting into the wall constantly. So we got out of there as fast as we could and headed to Kandy in the hills. Where, by chance, the second test was in progress. Once we were settled in, we managed to get to the stadium to see the last couple of days (pretty rubbish really, though we did see Vettori get wiped out in a collision with Atapattu).

Kandy is a beautiful venue, surrounded by hills with a rickety old stand from which flocks swallows fly throughout the day. I don’t know why more cricket isn’t played there. I think the game was even stopped for a while for a dog on the field.

The game staggered to a draw, but Fleming was entitled to a post-match shot suggesting Tillakaratne wasn’t trying hard enough.

ODI series

Next up was the tri-series with Pakistan, entirely held in Dambulla. We attended the first two New Zealand games of the series.

Dambulla is a smart enough venue, but has none of the character of Kandy. The town is a dustbowl and the ground has nothing to recommend it. Still, the main stand allows a good view of the action, and that’s what matters.

We arrived for the first of our games a few overs in, where we were greeted by a peculiar scorecard showing the first 5 Pakistan batsmen having 0 – Hafeez, Iqbal and Youhanna out without scoring, with neither Umar or Khan having opened their accounts (the 5 runs at that stage were all extras). Shane Bond ended with 2/7, but buggered his back.

Our closest encounter with the team came after that match as we waited for a bus to take us back to Kandy. While we stood on the dusty street we saw this tall guy with black shorts wandering about looking lost. While we were muttering “who is that?” to each other, he was collected by an official. I’d been away from home for several years and was barely familiar with the team, so it wasn’t until much later that I worked out it was Kyle Mills.

Transport in Sri Lanka is completely shite by the way. I still don’t quite know how we managed to get to and from Dambulla twice. There are hardly any buses and they don’t seem to have regular stopping points. They are always packed to the ceiling and have tiny seats installed. One of our buses broke down in the middle of nowhere, leaving us to hitch a ride on the next overloaded rattletrap we could catch.

The trains aren’t any better. After the next match we moved from Kandy to Haputale up in the mountains. Standing room only on the train. Fun for a while but agony by the end of the journey.

We followed the rest of the round robin games in Haputale on TV along with the staff, a bunch of young guys and an older Muslim man. The young guys were well into the cricket and confident that Sri Lanka were going to win. The second to last qualifying match was Sri Lanka versus New Zealand and so confident were they that Sri Lanka would carry it, they laid a bet with us with a bottle of ginger ale as the stakes. The game was close run, with 10 runs needed by Sri Lanka off the last two overs, but when Styris took the last wicket we heard a pop and fizz from the other room as the guys popped open our prize ginger ale before bringing it in for us. We then all went outside and played ‘one-hand, one-bounce’ with a piece of wood and a ball made up of rolled up tape.

The last game was between Pakistan and New Zealand. NZ had already done enough to qualify for the final, but the outcome of this match would determine whether Pakistan or Sri Lanka would go through. Sensibly, any Sri Lankan would be rooting for New Zealand in this game. However, the Muslim Sri Lankan staff member was quite chuffed when Pakistan won. This is an attitude I’d come across before in South Asia amongst certain Muslims, who will support Pakistan over their home country. Very strange.

Final

So New Zealand had made the final. We had our new visas so we were heading back to Colombo for our flight back to India.

The final was held on the day before we left. Unfortunately our budget here didn’t extend to a hotel with a TV we could watch. Our solution to this problem was to watch the game at Colombo’s Cricket Club Cafe. Now, since our budget didn’t extend to TV access, it could hardly cover a full day’s drinks at an up-market cafe. So in a fairly shameful exercise in thrift, we nursed one glass of beer each for the whole day.

It was all worth it in the end as New Zealand won the series, making it a successful tour of Sri Lanka. Much as our holiday was.

A 97-run defeat is pretty damn disappointing (though not as devastating as Jamie Alter wants to make out: “any self-belief that lingered after the Tests [has] now vanished“). Remarkably however, this has been the best result for a team batting second at the R. Premadasa Stadium for the 2009 season. In two attempts in August, Sri Lanka was not able to get within 130 runs of Pakistan’s totals.

I was disappointed when the tour schedule was changed from 5 ODIs against Sri Lanka to a miniature tri-series with India, but considering how one-sided games in Colombo have been, cutting the number of ODIs featuring NZ from 5 to a likely 2 seems a blessing.

If you are hoping for a tight result in tonight’s ODI between NZ and Sri Lanka in Colombo, history suggests you will be disappointed. This is a list of the margins for the past 10 completed matches in R. Premadasa Stadium:

107 runs
33 runs
46 runs
112 runs
15 runs
147 runs
67 runs
68 runs
146 runs
132 runs

It is barely worth stating that winning the toss is essential.

New Zealand backed up their good win in the 1st 20-20 with a commanding win last night. 22 runs in the end – that’s about 3 overs worth. Great performances all round really, but particularly Ryder’s 52 off 37 and Bond’s 3-18.

A clean sweep against the ICC World 20-20 runners up in their own backyard, especially after being dicked in the tests, is best celebrated in song.

The Breeders:

A very nice win by New Zealand. Defending 142 was quite an achievement and it took Vettori’s 2 for 11, Bond’s 4 runs in the 19th over and Oram’s hat-trick as well as the other contributions. It was a team effort really.

141 should not have been enough to win. Which raises the question, what is a winning score in a 20-20?

141 is the lowest score that New Zealand has ever defended and 142 is the lowest target Sri Lanka have ever failed to chase down. In fact, it is a bit of an outlier in the spectrum of results for both teams. If we discard last night’s game, then a figure of about 165 emerges as a boundary between winning and losing totals. Sri Lanka has never chased down a target greater than 165 and New Zealand has never defended a total less than 164 (barring last night’s game), having once failed and once succeeded to defend 164.

Edit: To make the point clearer, apart from last night’s game, Sri Lanka have chased down every total of 165 or less they have faced and failed to chase down every score higher than that, while NZ have successfully defended every total below 164 and failed to defend every total greater (and once failed and once succeeded to defend 164). There definitely seems to be some threshold of winnability in the 160s.

Pixies (playing in NZ in March, but Auckland is just so far away):

Welcome back Shane Bond. Now, no pressure, but please save New Zealand cricket.

“Another day of dominance for SL” read the headline on the Cricinfo Daily e-mail newsletter yesterday. The headline barely expresses the situation; there have been 8 completed days in this test series and each of them have belonged to Sri Lanka, as has the first half of the 9th day. We are now also into the 8th innings of the series. Of the completed 7 innings, the best 4 were the Sri Lankan innings and the worst 3 have been those of New Zealand.

I suppose it is possible for the difference in the teams’ results to be greater in magnitude (NZ have scored over 200 in each of their completed innings after all), but not in consistency.

It might not look like things have changed since the first test, but behind the scenes Sri Lanka has risen to no. 2 in the ICC test rankings. This was due to Australia falling to an embarrassing 4th, rather than Sri Lanka doing anything to push themselves up. But even so, for the no. 7  team, taking on the no. 2 team seems so much more daunting than taking on the no. 3 team.

You wouldn’t quite expect the no. 2 to beat no. 7 in every 2 out of 2 tests. It’s probably more like 1.75 out of every 2 tests. If Sri Lanka win today’s test, they will slightly entrench their no. 2 ranking. Currently both Sri Lanka and India are on 119 points, with Sri Lanka being fractionally higher. A 2-0 series result will bump them to 120 points, pushing them just clear of India.

But if they don’t win, then it is interesting. A draw in this test will actually see Sri Lanka lose points, even though they would have won the series. They will fall to 118 points, into 3rd place. Now, if New Zealand were to win and the series shared, Sri Lanka would fall to 115 points, below Australia, while New Zealand would rise to 86 points (whoa!), actually putting them in 6th place, above Pakistan.

Did Mark Richardson really have so little to talk about after the test that he had to rehash the Murali chucking whine? Or was he just courting some controversy?

We’ve all watched Murali, looking for some elbow bending. And of course, all I can see is bending. And a lot of flipping and a lot of rotating. A lot of rotating. Like 180 degrees. Which is the whole point of Murali’s action. The bend and the rotating gives him a big arc which added to his wrist flipping gives him torque on the ball. That bend is crucial. So why would he straighten?