Friday, October 27, 2006

ICC Champions - not so bad after all

The event is proving many sceptics wrong, completely by accident. Bad surfaces usually create interesting matches. Throw in other factors like the dew, and you are bound to get a few upsets, strange matches and unpredictability. We now have a situation where there is every possibility that a major cricket tournament being held on the slow, low pitches of the Indian subcontinent may well have no semi-finalists from Asia. Who would have thought that was possible?

My money was on Sri Lanka going all the way, and there are out of the tournament already. Pakistan are being Pakistan - blowing hot and cold. India struggled to a loss against the Windies yesterday in a bizzare match yesterday, and now have the huge task of defeating Australia to go through.

On most of these pitches, a score of 250 seems to be a high score, and the dew is messing up the captains' minds more than anything else. No one really knows how this tournament will pan out in the end - which suits the ICC well. The pity, of course, is that this came about completely by accident - if the ICC could change anything, they would have asked for pitches where 300 was the minimum the team batting first had to get. So in a strange fashion that is unique to cricket, the tournament is better off because of the lack of quality in the pitches.

Last observation - Manjrekar got it right, cricket in India is no religion. It is Indian cricket that is the opium of the masses. Embarassingly empty stands greet every other match. Blame it on the ticket prices, blame it on saturation-level cricket on TV, blame it on big city distraction - it indeed looks ominous for cricket in general when ODIs in India are played to empty stands. I could actually see many empty seats yesterday when India played WI. Now that was unthinkable! Strongest statement yet by the fans that the administrators better get their house in order - i.e. quality over quantity, better pricing and value for money in the stadium, and most importantly - focus on the cricket, not merely on the finances.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

You Tube - an unbelievable story

Can you even begin to believe this? 2 young buggers like you and me go to a dinner party in SFO, shoot a video and want to share that with friends. They try sending email but it just keeps bouncing back. They try to upload it on the Net, but it is too much of a hassle. What would you and I do? Just say, fuck it, not worth the damn effort. What did these guys do? Go into their garage (probably the garage does the trick!!! - did too with HP, Google etc) - and came up with a simple technical/user-driven solution called You Tube. If you don't know what they heck You Tube is, you must be living under a rock or something. They built an easy-to-upload and use video sharing site, and brilliantly, developed the concept of community around it. People could share videos, comment on it, blog about it, swap it around etc. Suddenly, in America and rest of the broadband-driven world, people started watching and sharing TV soap clips, porn, sports clips, porn, funny home videos, porn at their convenience - not when the big networks wanted them to watch. How cool - but since all of this was for free, what next? Businessweek asked this question a few months back, and concluded the article, well, without a serious conclusion. How could they monetise this please?

Well, they did, and how! None other than big daddy Google paid a fuckintastic, unbelievable, crazy 1.6 billion $ (yes, with a b, not a m) for this! The damn founders are bloody 29 and 27 still! The rest of the world is shaking heads with disbelief. This cannot be true.

Take a look at these buggers - the founders who suddenly are richer by atleast 200 mill $ each! Appropriately, in a you Tube video. That could so easily be you, me, or the class back bencher from your school/college. No one can be so damn smart/lucky - whichever way you look at it!



So how will Google recover that money? It is a lot of money by even Google's standards. Obviously their strategy is to monetize the millions of visitors' eyeballs with the video version of Adwords. How it will pan out is a billion $ question. It is one thing to have unobtrusive text ads, quite another to put video ads on a home video of 3 chicks dancing the Ho Dance in Chelsea! And what about copyright problems? A huge % of videos are in clear copyright violation - but hey, that is the Net isin't it? Interesting, very interesting.

By the way, one of the founders (Steve Hurley) is a design guy - logos and stuff (did the design for Paypal), and the other dude (Chan) is a techie geek - comp. science etc. No MBA, no nothing. Just an idea, the guts to do it, and the vision to expand the horizons, the right environment (Silicon Valley, the VC network, the concepts etc) and sheer luck. Wonderful stuff!

Monday, October 16, 2006

England football = Indian cricket

I always drew the parallel between the passion England have for football (passion is too mild a word perhaps) and how Indians feel about cricket. That was a reasonable no-brainer to deduce. Dileep Premachandran here takes that further, and provides a wonderful point of view - the England football team is in fact very similar to the Indian cricket team. His arguments are persuasive - hanging of the hat on one or two matches (India V Aus 2001, Eng V Germany in Munich), 1 World Cup win last century each, focus on megastars (Tendulkar/Dravid, Gerrard/Rooney), Chappell/Eriksson, and more recently John Terry and Dravid.

Beautiful, isn't it? In fact the one major difference I see here is that atleast English fans have one of the world's best domestic leagues, where they get quality football every week, whereas us poor Indian fans just get to watch one team battle it out. A lesson there for all concerned?

Thursday, October 12, 2006

The ODI debate

Rohit Brijnath is one of the best sports writers around - based in Australia now, it is unfortunate that he does not write more regularly on Indian cricket/sport (he does have a weekly in the Hindu, and occasionally in BBC website, but little else). I remember his Sportstar writing vividly, and wasn't he a host of a TV sports program on DD many moons ago?

Please take the time off to read this wonderful piece on the glut that is one day cricket.

The entire conversation of cricket has altered. Debate on footwork or whether spinners should toss the ball up has vanished, an old appreciation slowly leaching out of the stadium. Instead, we are now a reactive audience.

The world's finest batsman once is now Tendulkar one day, Endulkar the next. Sehwag is God with every six and devil when caught on the boundary. Captains are hailed at 20 overs and heckled at 40.

There was a time when I remembered everything there was to remember about every cricket game played, especially if India was involved. I don't, anymore. When did Dravid score an ODI century last? When did Kumble last pick 4 wickets in an innings? Do you remember a recent McGrath ODI spell where he took out the top order cheaply? I don't. I know that generally India are losing more than they are winning - but I don't immediately recall what the scoreline was when Pakistan came to India in 2005! You know things are getting out of hand when you start forgetting India - Pakistan encounters.

Mercifully, my Test cricket knowledge has remained reasonably intact - obviously because India plays very little Test cricket nowadays, and personally for me Test Cricket is quite enjoyable.

Look, I am not being this snooty English-media fed bugger who claims Test cricket is the ultimate, and everything else is hogwash. I think one day cricket and Twenty20 cricket are very entertaining, and are responsible in more ways than one for reviving Test cricket worldwide. My grouse is with the quantity - which has a serious effect on quality. Cricket series must have a meaning, a set routine and must build on a sense of anticipation. There must be something more than just the day's match to play for. When India played the Test series in the Windies this summer, they were playing for a first series win outside the subcontinent for donkeys' years. Now that is memorable. Contrast that with when India played in KL later on in a tri-series. Contrast that now with the Ashes - with a 100 year plus history. The World Cup has huge merit - and so will the Champions Trophy - only if the ICC got its scheduling right. I am also looking forward to India touring South Africa this Nov - to see how Dhoni, Raina and the young uns cope on the first real test of pace and bounce. The ODIs and Tests there will be exciting to watch.

It does not take an advanced degree in space research or the intellect of Duckworth and Lewis to come up with a schedule that provides meaning and context to bilateral series for both Tests and ODIs. Then, and only then, will every ODI played have relevance and meaning tonight's TV analysis and tomorrows' screaming headlines. I shudder to think of what will happen if and when countries start scheduling stand-alone Twenty20 tri-series in Papua New Guinea just because they have the weekend off.

Less, sometimes, is really more.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Good old Pakistan cricket

"If God wants I will obviously lead the side one day."
Mohammad Yousuf bypasses Pakistan's national selectors
- Cricinfo

Pakistan cricket - What would we do without them?

3 captain changes in 2 days, the Chairman resigns 2 months before his term expired, the Manager sacked, the Assistant coach sacked for no apparent reason, some more office bearers resign/sacked, rumours about the suspended captain also being sacked, the first Test match forfeit ever, ball tampering/match fixing/ [replace with scandal of the season], fervent calls to God at the drop of a hat/player or grant of a Man of the Match Award, the President/Dictator for Life having a say on their arch-rivals' hairstyles, ex-greats sniping at each other, current prima donnas strutting around like Brit rock stars - it has them all!

I feel for the average Pakistani cricket fan - infuriating does not begin to describe what it must feel like to support this motley crew.

Monday, October 09, 2006

How sad was that engine blow out?

Did you watch the Suzuka F1 yesterday? Did your gut wrench? Ugh it was sad wasn't it? I am a big time Schumi fan - so I definitely felt bad that after leading so easily and taking a big step towards winning an unthinkable 8th World Championship, the damn Ferrari engine (which has been so unbelievably reliable) had to blow up at that bloody race!

Schumi, who has won pretty much everything there is to be won in F1 many times over must have felt immense disappointment - here was a championship that was gone for all money 8 races ago, and then to script an amazing turnaround on your last year on the circuit, and to see your prized asset - the Ferrari reliability - fail when comfortably in front of your closest rival - that feeling is something I wish I never have to experience.

What makes it worse is that the whole thing was being set up beautifully for a winner-take-all in Brazil. Now Alonso has to pretty much turn up and win the Championship.

It definitely ruined my day.