Sports Betting Articles
Cricket Extremes - Australia vs India
By Chinmay Chakravarty
Positive cricket should always be the norm. While negative cricket should always be avoided. But extremes in both these forms of cricket bring disrepute to this great game of cricket.
Australia has been playing positive cricket over the decades. They have the competitive and fighting spirit, aggression, tough physical and mental frame and the right attitude of playing for win. They possess the 'killer instinct' to enforce win from any position of a particular match. And they have harvested the results. They have been the invincible team for at least a decade. They have recorded consecutive sixteen test wins two times. They have won the World Cup thrice in succession in 2007 in the one day format. Well, so far so good.
In the name of positive cricket Australia has also been indulging in mouthing abuses at the slightest opportunity, mindless sledging and pressurizing the umpires with both justified and unjustified wild pretended appeals. Their killer instinct has become a Frankenstein threatening to 'kill' the game itself. If one makes a study one is most likely to find that the most grievous umpiring mistakes have been committed in Australia with Australia playing against any team. They have mastered the winning habit alright, but they should not try to win by hook or by crook. They managed to win the home test series against India in 2007-2008 thanks to the foul cricket played in the Sydney test. They have taken positive cricket to extremes which are both shocking and shameful.
Indian cricket has been afflicted with negative attributes all the time. Their game is always overshadowed by defensive tactics. They prepare dry grass less pitches so that the Indian batsmen counter hostile pacers better and score tons of runs. Prior to a match if any trace of grass is detected it is shaved off immediately. Once in a particular match the detected trace of grass could not be shaved off and this made the then Indian captain so irritated that he sat out of the match. Experts pointed out that later that the captain sat out because he had a known weakness for speedy outside the off stump stuff. Such negative attitudes lead to natural over dependence on spinners and unless they do some magic matches are mostly drawn. A result everyone is happy with. Before a match India is less bothered by the quality cricket they are supposed to play than some external factors like the pitch report, the weather report and crowd behavior.
The Indian cricketing mindset thus overloaded with negative attributes just cannot have a killer instinct and they have righteously earned the titles of 'generous hosts' or 'a team capable of losing from any position'. Their failure to win against England and Pakistan in 2007 more emphatically or their failure to at least draw the controversial Sydney test in 2008 is a reflection of this negative mindset. Under pressure or to avert a defeat some negative tactics like bowling away from the stumps, delaying the overrate and mid field time pass consultations are more or less practiced by all the teams sometime or the other. But India has taken negative cricket to the extremes which are both shocking and shameful.
The most significant fact is that these two extremely positive and extremely negative teams had occupied the first two positions in the ICC cricket ranking just after the India-Australia Test Series of 2007-2008. This means both teams are immensely capable of playing good quality cricket and cricket is still the winner.
And, it is good positive quality cricket that the earnest cricket fans expect of any team.
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