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Match facts

Sunday, May 11, 2008
Start time 20.00 (local), 14.30 (GMT)

The Big Picture

As the Indian Premier League enters its second half, the matches hold more importance for the teams in the bottom half of the points table. The Rajasthan Royals are at the top of the league, and know that another couple of wins will virtually cement a semi-final berth. Delhi, on the other hand, are fourth and a defeat in Jaipur will give Kolkata and Mumbai a chance to draw level with them.Shane Warne’s men haven’t lost a game at the Sawai Man Singh Stadium, winning all four of their matches there. They seem to have developed successful formula: win the toss and field, restrict the opposition with their versatile bowling attack, and chase down targets at a comfortable pace. Rajasthan won all three games in which Warne put the opposition in and also won the two matches in which they were asked to chase. Their only two defeats came when they batted first.These teams played each other in their first match of the tournament and Delhi won that game by a massive nine-wicket margin. Delhi also prefer chasing, and have successfully gunned down three out of four targets. Their strength lies in their opening combinations: Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir with the bat, and Glenn McGrath and Mohammad Asif with the new ball. Sehwag and Gambhir are among the top three run-scorers in the tournament and Shikhar Dhawan, the No. 3 batsman, complements them well with an average of 51. The weakness lies in their middle order, where their international stars, Shoaib Malik and AB de Villiers, are yet to make a significant contribution. Dismiss the openers cheaply and negotiate McGrath with the new ball and half the battle is won against Delhi.

Tournament position

Rajasthan Royals P8, W6, L2, NRR +0.605
Delhi Daredevils P7, W4, L3, NRR +0.654

IPL form (last five matches)

Rajasthan Royals: WLWWW
Delhi Daredevils: LLWWL

Watch out for …

Having starred at the Wanderers with match figures of 8 for 99, Sreesanthknew that an encore wouldn’t be easy. On a Kingsmead pitch that wascertainly more batsman-friendly, he finished the first innings withfigures of 4 for 109, including the eye-catching dismissal of Mark Boucher- stumps splayed all over the place.The man with a penchant for the eccentric was his colourful self at thepress conference on Wednesday evening, offering up candid answers on hisdevelopment as a cricketer and the state of the match. “It was hard workthere,” he said with a grin when asked if there was any disappointment atmissing out on a five-for. “You cannot expect five every game or everyinnings. I’m happy to keep working on the basics and not worry too muchabout wickets.”His assessment of the pitch would have encouraged India’s batsmen, thoughhe shied away from saying whether he intended another six-hittingcelebration when his turn came to bat. “It’s on the slower side and thebounce was a bit less than Jo’burg,” he said. “It will get better andfaster. It was a bit more skiddy this morning. But if the batsmen ‘get in’on this wicket, they can go on to get a big score. It’s hard work for thebowlers.”He admitted that the Johannesburg display had increased the pressure ofexpectation, but said that he was prepared to deal with it. “I was verylucky to be performing with people like Anil and Sachin ,” hesaid referring to India’s most experienced duo. “I also spoke to AllanDonald and Wasim Akram; the more you talk, the more you get to learn. Theyall asked me not to try too hard.”That said, he still resembles a coiled spring at times out in the middle,only ever a good ball away from a riotous celebration or a plaintiveappeal. “The pressure is good at the start of the match because it bringsthe best out of you,” he said, while adding that he had been working onreining things in a little. His reaction after dismissing Hashim Amla atthe Wanderers attracted a fine from the match referee, and Sreesanth said:”It all happens when I’m in that frame of mind, but I don’t want to miss agame.”Most of the experts here, right from the batsmen like Barry Richards tobowlers like Donald, have been raving about the seam position when theball leaves his hand, and Sreesanth spoke about how it was a legacy of thetime spent at the MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai. “I worked with DennisLillee and TA Sekar, on swing and seam position. The basic thing[stressed] was not pace, but to get the seam position and how you releasethe ball.”His own transformation from wannabe leggie to pace spearhead is aremarkable one, and Sreesanth attributed his swing-and-seam strengths tothe often-heartbreaking experience of bowling on pancake-flat pitches backhome. “Initially, I wanted to hit the batsman,” he said with a smile. “Butit’s not easy to hit the helmet on Indian pitches. I used to watch guyslike [Glenn] McGrath and [Shaun] Pollock on TV, and learnt a lot. I learntthat there are many other ways of getting a batsman out.”Playing his seventh Test, Sreesanth is too consumed with the present toworry too much about what lies in wait. He certainly won’t be losing sleepworrying about burnout and injuries. “I love playing cricket,” he said,having joked about how the Durban weather reminded him of being back homein Kochi. “When I’m home, I play four or five games of tennis-ball cricketmost days. I just keep playing, and I’m not worried about injuries. Ifsomething happens, it happens.”And whatever happens, he’ll always have the Wanderers, and a performancethat few Indian quick bowlers will ever match.

A 16-member Zimbabwe squad left for South Africa today to prepare for the upcoming five-match series against Bangladesh that gets underway next Saturday.The side is captained by offspinner Prosper Utseya and contains four players who are yet to represent the country on the international scene – left-hand batsman Friday Kasteni, opening bat Tinotenda Mawoyo, wicketkeeper Tafadzwa Mufambisi and pace bowler Admire Manyumwa.Zimbabwe will play against the South African Academy and Highveld Lions with all the matches set for the High Performance Centre in Pretoria.The team returns home next Thursday, just two days before the start of series against the Bangladeshi Tigers. All those matches will be held at the Harare Sports Club.Zimbabwe squad Prosper Utseya (capt), Chamu Chibhabha, Elton Chigumbura, Trevor Garwe, Ryan Higgins, Friday Kasteni, Blessing Mahwire, Admire Manyumwa, Hamilton Masakadza, Stuart Matsikenyeri, Tino Mawoyo, Tafadzwa Mufambisi, Tawanda Mupariwa, Piet Rinke, Vusi Sibanda, Brendan Taylor.

After almost two days of travel Australia have landed in St Vincent to begin their final preparations for the World Cup defence. The squad, which is missing Adam Gilchrist, left Sydney on Wednesday and stopped off in Los Angeles, Miami and Barbados before reaching its destination.Australia, who will have their first practice on Saturday, will play a warm-up match against Zimbabwe on Tuesday and a friendly against England next Friday before heading to Jamaica for the opening ceremony on March 11. Scotland will be Australia’s first opponent in St Kitts on March 14 before matches against The Netherlands and South Africa complete the group stage.Michael Clarke, who missed the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy last month with a hip injury, said he was desperate for some game time. “I’m looking forward to getting there, getting into some training,” Clarke told at Barbados. “I feel like I’ve done nothing for six months after having missed New Zealand, so I’m looking forward to getting back into it.”Gilchrist is expected to arrive in St Vincent early next week after staying in Perth following the birth of his third child. Andrew Symonds is also due to test out his injured arm for the first time while batting over the weekend.

Dav Whatmore knows a thing or two about coaching struggling sides, and coaxing success out of whatever resources are at hand. He masterminded Sri Lanka’s World Cup win in 1996, and sparked a change in Bangladesh’s trajectory when he took over the coaching role there in 2003.He moved into his current position with Zimbabwe less than six weeks before the World Cup earlier this year, and was able to bring enjoyment and cohesion back into the team environment in remarkably quick time. Yet positive results haven’t been forthcoming, and on Tuesday Zimbabwe slipped to a 3-0 series defeat to India despite putting themselves into positions of dominance in all three matches.”That was a hugely disappointing effort in that first game. We honestly thought we should have won that. When you get so close, and you don’t, I think psychologically it becomes a little bit greater when you play the next one. We’ve got the potential, as you can see, we just need to transform our ability into performance, and that comes from here,” Whatmore said, pointing at his head.Though Whatmore prompted “a total 180 in the players’ mindsets” very quickly, according to former captain Brendan Taylor, he insists there is no quick fix for Zimbabwe’s issues.”It doesn’t happen like that,” Whatmore says, clicking his fingers to emphasise the point. “It never does. It takes a bit of time. If you look at the history of Zimbabwe cricket over the last four years, if you’ve done your research you’ll know that we’ve only played a handful of games. And to improve you need to go through certain situations more often. So hopefully boys will learn as quickly as possible, because we are now playing competition which we haven’t had in the past.”It’s okay to say ‘be patient with us’, it’s a cliche but I’m very pleased to have played these three games and we look forward very much to the future matches coming in this calendar year. And we look to improve. So please bear with us, we are trying really hard to get it right and we will need a bit more time. As other sides do.”Zimbabwe have been slightly surprised by the way these pitches have played, as ordinarily Harare Sports Club tracks ease out during the course of the day, particularly in winter. In this series, there has always been something on offer for the bowlers. They “briefly” considered batting first after Elton Chigumbura won his third toss in a row, Whatmore explained, “but this wicket generally gets a lot better than this. It’s sort of misbehaving a little more than what most of us thought. Generally speaking this wicket flattens out a little bit more, but it’s had some life in it right throughout.”India haven’t had it all their way in this series, slipping to 87 for 5 in the first match, losing 6 for 77 in the last 10 overs on Sunday, and wobbling at 82 for 4 today, but Zimbabwe were never able to land the killer blow and, as Whatmore admitted, “we’ve let them off the hook a couple of times”.The problem, for Chigumbura, is a lack of ruthlessness.”It’s just about being ruthless,” he said. “You tend to relax when you are on top, or sometimes some guys realise we’re on top. And also because of not playing many games regularly. I think the more we play the more we could quickly learn from these mistakes.”We need to dig deep when we get into these situations. I think that’s where we’re lacking. We always get into a good position, in almost every series that we play we’ll get one or two chances that we can take with both hands and win the game, but we don’t.”Zimbabwe have a quick turnaround in which to try to set things right before the Twenty20 series starts on Friday, but they can also look forward to an unusually full schedule in the months to come. With a little luck and a lot of hard work, particularly on the psychological aspect of their game, Zimbabwe could yet be another of Whatmore’s success stories.

Ricky Ponting, the Australian captain, has praised Michael Clarke for the restraint he showed throughout the incident with Chris Gayle during Wednesday’s match between Australia and West Indies in Mumbai. Gayle was later fined 30% of his match fee for a code one breach for failing to “conduct play within the spirit of the game”, a decision which Ponting welcomed.”I think it was handled in the right way,” Ponting was quoted as saying by . “If you look at the incidents, Pup [Clarke] nearly needs to be congratulated on the way he handled the whole thing. There’s no doubt he had a few words to say but Gayle was the one who was in his personal space and dragging the whole thing out the way he did. Pup handled it brilliantly, and I think it was a pretty fair result to come out of it.”The incident happened during Australia’s run-chase when Clarke and Adam Gilchrist were involved in a significant partnership. Gayle continually made comments directed at Clarke, and at one stage even conceded four overthrows off his own bowling when a throw at the batsman’s end went over the wicketkeeper’s head. It was later suggested that Clarke had sparked off the incident when he called Gayle a “second-class citizen”, a claim which Clarke denied. “If anyone is second-class it’s me, I’m from Liverpool,” Clarke, who grew up in the working-class Sydney suburb, said. “I didn’t say that – I wouldn’t say that – and neither did any of my team-mates.” While Gayle was fined, Clarke was found not guilty of any code violation.The ICC clarified that the decision to report the incident had only been made the morning after the game, and not immediately after the match finished. The delay led to speculation that Malcolm Speed, the ICC chief executive, may have intervened to order charges be laid, but an ICC spokesman said in this case the three umpires had “slept on it” before deciding to charge both players with contravening the spirit of cricket.

The second ODI between Hong Kong and Scotland at Mission Road was abandoned without a ball bowled due to persistent rain across the city. The match had been pushed into a reserve day but that mattered little as wet weather continued from Thursday into Friday and with no chance of the field drying out, play was called off before the scheduled start time on Friday’s reserve day.The result meant each team got a point from the abandonment, which pushed Hong Kong above Netherlands into first place, though Netherlands has a chance to leapfrog Hong Kong when they play UAE on Friday in Abu Dhabi. Scotland is now in third place with seven points, one ahead of Kenya on the table.This was the third time in six scheduled WCL Championship matches during the current competition that Scotland has had to split points due to poor weather following a no result and a total abandonment in the Netherlands last September. Scotland also came close to missing out on maximum points in their opening two encounters at home in July against Nepal but managed to come away with two wins despite wet weather in Ayr.

Tim Nielsen has ruled out tinkering with Shaun Tait’s action despite the bowler being forced to have surgery on his right elbow on Tuesday. However, Nielsen conceded his biggest challenge in taking over as Australia’s coach would be to keep his players healthy during an action-packed 18 months.Speaking at his first official engagement since replacing John Buchanan, the straight-talking Nielsen offered no Buchanan-esque cryptic responses and summarised his vision for a fit, determined squad with strong leadership from the senior players. He was brief and to the point, which seemed entirely appropriate for a man guiding his side through more than 20 Tests in 2008.”Without a doubt in professional sport that is the biggest challenge – to play at the highest level all the time, at great intensity,” Nielsen said. “Technically what [Tait] does so well is bowl fast. We don’t want to change that – we’ve just got to try and work with him to make sure he does minimise his injury risk.”Tait’s latest setback has given him a 50-50 chance of playing in the Twenty20 World Championship in September. He has already had shoulder surgery that kept him out of the Super Series in 2005, a back injury last April that stopped him touring Bangladesh, and a hamstring complaint in December, which delayed his ODI debut.Nielsen said reworking Tait’s delivery style would be unlikely to help the bowler or the team. “It’s just the volume of work that these young blokes need to adjust to,” he said. Nielsen’s “young blokes” will play a significant role in Australia’s attack in 2007-08. Tait, Ben Hilfenhaus, Mitchell Johnson, Cullen Bailey and Dan Cullen are all contracted by Cricket Australia but none has had an extended run in the team.For some, that could change as of the Twenty20 World Championship in South Africa, although Nielsen expects few deviations from the group that won the World Cup. “There’s young guys like Tait and Johnson who haven’t played a lot of one-day cricket,” Nielsen said. “And even Michael Clarke got opportunities batting at No. 4, which means that although he’s been around for a while he’s now got a new role. So it’s a bit of a new-look side anyway – I don’t think they’ll need to make drastic changes.”There are guaranteed to be at least three positions on offer when the Test season starts in November, after Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Justin Langer retired together. Fresh faces are lining up for the opening and fast-bowling vacancies but Nielsen wants the spin responsibilities in more experienced hands.”[Bailey and Cullen] probably need a bit more time to develop and that’s where we hope [Stuart] MacGill can play a massive role for us,” Nielsen said. “He can play for however long he wants and fill those shoes until the young fellows develop enough.”Nielsen was speaking at the Melbourne launch of Cricket Australia’s ticketing program for 2007-08, which will again feature a priority buying period for Australian Cricket Family (ACF) members. James Sutherland, CA’s chief executive, said he was not expecting similar problems to last year, when the demand for Ashes seats was so intense that many ACF members missed out.”Being part of the Australian Cricket Family is no absolute guarantee of getting tickets but what it does is it puts you in that priority window when tickets first go on sale to get first crack at it,” he said. Sutherland believes that with a record 50 days of international cricket in 2007-08, most fans are unlikely to be disappointed.Sri Lanka and India will tour Australia for Test and ODI series next season, while New Zealand will also make a brief visit for a limited-overs contest. Fans have until June 24 to register as an ACF member on the CA website and they can buy tickets from July 2. Remaining seats will then go on sale to the general public from August 1.

Sourav Ganguly’s association with one of the new IPL franchise owners has been questioned as a possible case of conflict of interest. Ganguly is a member of the IPL governing council and is also a co-owner of the football franchise Atletico de Kolkata; a fellow co-owner is Sanjiv Goenka, who heads the New Rising consortium that today won the Pune IPL franchise.The matter was raised at the press conference that followed the auction procedure and BCCI officials present denied it was a case of conflict but said it would be for the newly appointed ombudsman to decide. Ganguly, when contacted by ESPNcricinfo, laughed off the suggestion of conflict, saying football and cricket are two different sports.

The Kumble Question

The recent resignation of Anil Kumble, another former India captain, from the Mumbai Indians support staff had raised similar doubts over conflict of interest. Manohar was asked on Tuesday whether he thought Kumble’s case was similar to Ganguly’s, as he was not directly related to the Mumbai Indians franchise, and he replied: “No, he was on the technical committee, and the technical committee makes all rules and regulations with regards to playing of the game.”

Shashank Manohar, BCCI president and a lawyer himself, offered a more nuanced defence. “According to me there is not [a conflict of interest] because this is a transparent bidding concept,” Manohar said. “Basically I get questions everyday [about conflict of interest]. People have not understood the meaning of the word conflict. Conflict means where there could be an obvious bias with regards to the decision-making process. When a person can influence the decision-making, then only there is conflict. You can’t extend it to absurdity levels. I am a lawyer, if there is a client of mine, unless it can be shown I have influence, there is no conflict if he bids for a team.”Manohar, though, said his assessment of the Ganguly situation was his own personal view. “Everybody has a right to disagree with me. I am not going to be the judge. The board has appointed an independent agency.”Manohar’s point was that nobody knew the bid amounts while walking into the meeting. They didn’t even know who all were going to bid. The bidders made walk-in offers, which ruled out any knowledge to anyone as to who was going to bid how much. “It was a closed bid submitted at the bidding time,” Manohar said. “Sourav Ganguly has nothing to do with that. Even if somebody has an objection now, we have appointed an ombudsman to look into these cases.”New Rising made two bids in this reverse-bidding process, both in minus. Both were lower than any other bid, but they could get only one franchise according to IPL rules. Every other bidder made at least one positive bid.Manohar did not, however, address the issue of a situation that could arise going forward, where the IPL’s governing council – of which Ganguly is a member as a “cricketer” – might have to decide on matters directly related to the Pune franchise. Though his role is seen as largely ceremonial, it could be argued that he would have influence over decisions taken.It could also be argued that Ganguly is partner with Goenka in a separate entity, and might not have anything to gain financially from New Rising as a co-owner of Atletico. Such a defence has not been put forward by any of the parties involved, although Ganguly’s cryptic reply to ESPNcricinfo might have hinted at that.

Lynsey Askew and Charlie Russell have become the latest women to be invited onto the MCC Young Cricketers scheme.They join Jenny Halstead, Stephanie Davies and Hannah Burr, all of whom are in their second or third and final year of the scheme. Caroline Atkins and Nicola Shaw have finished their three-year stints with the MCC.Askew, the Kent allrounder, and Russell are both England internationals, with the offspinner Russell making her England debut earlier this year.England’s captain Charlotte Edwards was understandably pleased at the continued recognition of the talent in the women’s game. She said: “The MCC Young Cricketers programme has long been noted as a fantastic development model for some of the most talented players around.”I’m delighted that these five girls will be given the opportunity to concentrate on their game in the best cricket environment in the world.”