Sri Lanka 215 for 5 (Sangakkara 78*, Kapugedera 47) beat India 186 for 9 (Gambhir 55) by 29
Kumar Sangakkara equalled the record for the fastest fifty by a Sri Lankan





Kumar Sangakkara starred with his highest Twenty20 score, a serenely-destructive 37-ball 78, as Sri Lanka thumped India by 29 runs in Nagpur. Chamara Kapugedera pitched in with a cameo to charge Sri Lanka to 215, a total that proved too much for India, who fell away after a promising start provided by Gautam Gambhir.
Gambhir tried valiantly with a counter-attacking fifty but it was Sangakkara who stole the show. He played only one dot ball till reached his fifty - from 21 deliveries, the quickest for Sri Lanka - but it wasn't a conventional Twenty20 knock in which the batsman goes hell for leather. There weren't many ugly swipes or heaves and anything unconventional was designed with the field in mind.
Sangakkara's innings sparked off in the ninth over against Pragyan Ojha's left-arm spin.




He chipped the first delivery he faced from Ojha over mid-on, swept the next to the boundary and lifted the third for a six over long-on. There were more classy strikes, the highlight being a chipped shot over mid-on to a length delivery from the debutant Ashok Dinda. Sangakkara's predetermined shots also came off perfectly: when he shuffled to the off side, the ball was invariably so full that it was easily lapped around the corner; when he moved outside leg, he flat-batted short-of-length deliveries over mid-on or mid-off.
It wasn't a solo show from him, though. Sangakkara found support from his partners at various points in the innings - Tillakaratne Dilshan at the start, unfurling a couple of on-the-up hits, Chamara Kapugedera in the middle and Angelo Mathews at the very end. Kapugedera was fluent against everyone but he reserved his best for Ashish Nehra, looting 18 runs from the 19th over with four boundaries to all parts of the ground - a punch over cover, a pull, a slice and a cut over point - which reflected the bowler's poor lines.
The run-glut came after India started with four tight overs, only for their bowling and fielding to disintegrate under pressure. Nehra and Ishant Sharma got the ball to skid from short of a length and cramped the openers for room but the fielding gave way first after which the bowling buckled under the assault. Yuvraj Singh dropped a sitter at point off Jayasuriya when he was on 2.
After the let-off, Jayasuriya went berserk in the fifth over, bowled by Nehra, taking him for 22 runs with five boundaries, including two lap-shots past the short fine-leg fielder. Dilshan was dropped too, with Ishant missing a straightforward return chance, and he too took full toll. Though the openers didn't go on to make big scores, they had broken the shackles and set the platform for Sangakkara to play a gem.

Despite Virender Sehwag's fall in the third over, Gambhir helped India take 76 from the Powerplay but their hopes started to sink with his departure. Gambhir's was a cheeky yet intelligent innings and he peppered the off-side field with his well-timed drives - the highlight being a sequence of seven fours from nine deliveries spread over two overs from Lasith Malinga and Nuwan Kulasekara. Despite a crowded field - a short point, backward point, cover point and cover were in place - he stole five of those seven boundaries through the off side. However, he fell while trying to paddle sweep Angelo Mathews and India lost four more wickets, including those of MS Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh, in three overs as the chase derailed spectacularly. The bowling was disciplined, without ever being threatening, but India were done in by the pressure of the steep run-rate

It is a big surprise that the commentators kept referring to the Ahmedabad track as being a ‘good wicket’. To me, that is either a gross misrepresentation of facts or a polite manner of understating the obvious; it was a track that could very well have seen another five days of cricket on it and not had a result. And this, to me, is by no means the definition of a good cricket wicket.
Around 1600 runs were scored in the test match for the loss of 21 wickets, making it an average of 80 runs per wicket. Even by the standards of this day and age, where the art of run-scoring has ceased to be an art any more, but has been reduced to how a batsman avoids getting out to the boredom caused due to the lack of any challenge, it is big. And apart from the first one hour’s play, when India lost four wickets in a hurry, the remaining 29 hours saw only 17 wickets, making it a slow drab of near-about one wicket every session!
It cannot be a good wicket for anyone save the batsmen; neither for the bowlers or fielders, nor for the spectators in the stadium or on television, or the ICC or the sport at large. Why, even the good batsmen would prefer more of a challenge in the track than this one, and the fans would really be hoping for something better than this in the second game at Kanpur.
Unfortunately, the Green Park in Kanpur had come under a bit of a scanner for the issues with the pitch the last occasion a test was played here. The surface was a bit of a minefield, and the batsmen had found it difficult to adjust themselves to it. The ball had spun from very early in the game, and despite batting first and scoring 265, they had gone on to lose the game. And this could mean that the curator would be given stand-in instructions to prevent something of a repeat of that game, ensuring a chance of over-compensation. That, in turn, could lead us to a repeat of the Ahmedabad game.
India has a lot to learn from the first test match. Despite the pitch, the Sri Lankan quick bowlers bowled slightly better than their Indian counterparts. And when one considers that the pair of Dammika Prasad and Chanaka Welegedara had not even played five games between them, it begs the question what was wrong with the Indian attack. And lesser said the better about the Indian spinners, who got absolutely no purchase from the wicket and ended with combined figures of 3/495 in the game. The only solace for them would be the fact that Muthiah Muralitharan bowled almost 40 overs in the second innings but ended wicketless

There has been a constant worry, or at least a purported one at least, that the advent of T20 cricket could cause early deaths of the other two formats of the game. The recently concluded ODI series between India and Australia, however, is said to have got TRPs which trumped even the likes of Champions Trophy and Champions League, thus making those ODI obituary-writers eat the humble pie for now.
And looking at the manner in which the Champions Trophy had panned out, the support for the fifty overs format would have given the organisers s breather.
This beggars the other question now. What about the test matches? Is there a reasonable viability of this format in the future or will it slowly go through the various transformations planned for it – pink balls, day and night games and so on – and lose its charm to be a long lost version of the game? To my mind, the tinkering around in five day games could be justified, but the inherent issue that needs to be addressed has to be that of the nature of the pitches.
As far as memory serves me, it wasn’t too long ago when the WACA at Perth, the Kingsmead in Durban, the Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, Wellington in New Zealand and Leeds in Headingley had their own set of characteristics that assisted the bowlers a trifle more than they do currently. These are result-oriented pitches which assist different forms of bowling – spin, swing, pace and bouncy – thus making them stand out of the pack.
However, slowly, but steadily, there is a growing concern that most of these wickets may go down the way of the others, where run-scoring would become much easier scalping wickets. While batting could b afforded more advantage than bowling, it is the irrational differences which give rise to boring, high-scoring draws, that in turn, keep the crowds at home.
It must be added here that most of the results in test matches are obtained despite the nature of the pitches. The batsmen easily maul their bowling counterparts and in turn set up the game for their sides, making the role of the bowlers almost redundant or overly dependent on the scores set by the batsmen. It is time that the ICC realises this conundrum and allows the host countries to make pitches that suit their own bowlers and ensures that the twenty wickets are taken at a fair clip. As much as the spectators like to see the boundaries, an over-excess of the same will almost make boundary-hitting a monotonous exercise to view. The reason why the fans enjoyed the batting of the likes of a Tendulkar or a Lara or even Laxman at their peak was because they had to see through some really nasty periods of play against bowlers spitting venom on wickets that allowed them to. Not any more!

It is an oft-repeated phrase in the Indian cricketing parlance; so near, yet, so very far. Despite the South Africans having bagged the official rights to the appellation of chokers, the Indians have demonstrated in this series, that given the right opposition and conditions, they are not too far behind. They are down 2-3 in the seven-game series and in all the three games that they lost, a win was much more than just a remote possibility.
That Sachin Tendulkar played an innings of his life-time – and it has been an illustrious career at that – is an understatement. However, that he played a rather puzzling shot in a situation which demanded 17 singles and a couple to win the game is an equally foregone statement. While christening the shot he played in the 48th over of Clint McKay to having ‘done a Misbah’ would be cruel to the man who not only smashed a 175 in the game but also completed 17,000 runs, the fact of the matter is that it was clearly a shot that he could have avoided.
No, I do not say this because I am one of those few Tendulkar-bashers in the country. Nor do I say it because I am wiser in the hindsight. It is just that India needed 19 runs off the last 18 balls and had two set batsmen at the crease to deal with the business. With the batting Powerplay only three overs old, the boundary would have come sometime down the line and it needed a cool head to guide the home team through.
Instead, Tendulkar opted to go for the scoop-shot that he usually plays against the spinners much better than the quicker ones. Ironically, McKay bowled it much slower than his rest of the deliveries and all Tendulkar could do was to get it high on his bat, and scoop it up to offer a dolly that the Aussie fielder accepted.
The rest, as they say was history. It was very evident that Ravindra Jadeja does not possess the wherewithal to bat in a situation which was tailor-made for the gritty. In a very short career, this was the third occasion when he muffed up a golden opportunity to prove it to the selectors that he had the potential to be counted as one of the better finishers for his side batting down the order. In fact, Harbhajan Singh has proved to be a better finisher than him in this series.
Earlier, the Aussies had almost batted the Indians out of the game. The signs were there in the game at Mohali that the Australian side looked good to pile up a big one. It was only a chance collapse that saw them get restricted to 250, but they were clearly in no mood to repeat the mistakes of the previous game.
Unfortunately, Team India looks like they manage to learn nothing from their mistakes.

It has almost become monotonously repetitive with Virender Sehwag. He may have missed out on a record third triple century, but the manner in which he looks to be batting these days – or probably bats usually – it will only be a matter of time before he gets another opportunity to do so! Such was the daredevilry that the Nawab showed on the second day of the third test match, that for the 10k odd of those who had turned out, it proved to be a day of celebrations and fun and frolic and a whole lot of runs that flowed from his bat.
It is difficult to rate Sehwag’s innings. Because, not before long, there would be another one that would not be too dissimilar from the one played previously and that would put the experts in a quandary. Take the example of this 293. 284 off those runs came in one day’s – minus the 45 minutes at the start for Sri Lanka – play. Usually, 284 would be the number of runs one would associate with a team in a day’s play, and here was Sehwag treating every bowler as a battering ram and getting them off his own bat.
In the process he also got to the fastest ever 250 in the history of test match cricket – there have been 75 knocks of 250 or more in tests – and got the Indians into a position that one could have never imagined at the start of the day. In fact, with the Lankans having got to a near-400 total, most experts thought that it was a score to reckon on a track that had enough help on it for the bowlers. The quicker bowlers were getting the assistance in the form of swing, while the spinners had been afforded enough bounce to keep those short-leg and bat-pad fielders interested.
Sehwag dismissed all of them; bowlers, pundits, experts and created enough room for his side from where they can now dictate terms. Already at lunch, the Indians had been around 150 ahead, and another 150 runs of credit could almost end any hopes that Sri Lanka has of winning a test match in the country. At least for some time. What has obviously helped is the rate at which Sehwag has played, which will assist the Indians into achieving the lead of 300 runs with two days of cricket still remaining despite a first innings total of a near-400.
From the Sri Lankan perspective, the Sehwag blitzkrieg would have hit their morale hard. The dent would be evident and with a couple of T20Is and five ODIs still to follow, it remains to be seen how the Sri Lankans bounce back from this savage attack in not only this game, but the rest of the tour as well!

So India finally wins a tournament final in Sri Lanka. Difficult to call it a breaking of finals’ jinx, given that only in 2008 had India beaten Australia in their own den in what was the last tri-series finals, but yes, one does get the point – for years, the Indian side has continued to play well enough and end up vanquished in the finals. For a change, the side lost a game in the league stage to the same side which they managed to get better of, in the finals. The question that remains though is, did they play well enough to deserve that number one tag they had had conferred upon them for a period of less than 24 hours before being unceremoniously removed after the league game against Sri Lanka? To my mind, and despite the obvious rustiness that could be associated with the lack of cricket for a reasonable length of time, it was clearly not a display that befitted a number one side. For one, the fielding could be described appalling at best. At worst though, it was worst than what one would find at most clubs in the country. Sitters were dropped, balls were fumbled, and easy twos and threes were conceded when the batsmen should have been restricted to less. How much the side deserves a throne depends largely on the ease with which they can field, and it certainly did not seem like the Indians were enjoying it too much out there; a point that wouldn’t have gone unnoticed by Robin Singh. The other issue was with the loss in the second game of the tournament, en route winning it. Quite clearly, the Indians had been out-played in all the three departments. Now, my problem is not with losing games – every number one team loses and will go on to lose games. It is about the abject manner in which the Indians almost surrendered the match, first in the field – which includes the aforementioned aspect about fielding – and then with the bat. It was almost so reminiscent of those days in the past, when the Indian ODI side needed Sachin Tendulkar to perform at the top, and without him, it almost looked as lost as a pup in a pub! What worries me is that the likes of Yusuf Pathan and Suresh Raina may be big enough names, and even bigger hitters of the ball, but their performance has been anything but that. Probably it is still early in the season, but there is clear evidence that the players at the bottom of the rung need to take that step up – and score the runs even if they get to face the overs in the end. After all, a guy like Pathan is in the side to do a job, and that is to get maximum runs off minimum deliveries; probably even treat the remaining overs of the game as a T20 game! He almost looks lost for his role in his team, almost as if the captain and the coach haven’t defined it for him.Another word about how the tournament has been afforded a ‘meaningless’ status by the experts; something that cannot be fully justified. What was then expected out of India? To go into the Champions Trophy with no international games under their belt, no on-field strategy, and no nothing and win it? Strange are some so-called experts.