Game 3 Review

Sorry folks - in giving a sound thrashing to Team India (alias Team BCCI alias Team Ganguly - take your pick), I forgot to go over the actual details of the match. Now parts of this post may be sarcastic and some may not. It will always be clear from the context.

To start off, we had lost the match with the toss itself. However, the seamers had given us a fair start with Nehra nailing Afridi courtesy a wonderful catch by Dravid and the run-rate kept in check by the 15-over mark. Very predictably, Ganguly opted to put his grey matter in the dressing room again - he assumed that since India had managed to restrict Pakistan to 5 an over off the first 15 overs, they would not be able to score quicker than that in the rest of the innings. Accordingly, he set an ultra-defensive field giving the batsmen cheap ones and twos and threes (oh Yes - with Nehra and Zaheer patrolling the boundaries, could you expect anything else ??), he made a steed like Harbhajan perform the mule's work.

Salman Butt, the talented opener that he is, relished this opportunity of course - and Shoaib Malik almost threatened to single-handedly destroy us (take your minds back to Sri Lanka in July 2004) but luckily was caught in the deep when just about to break lose. Well as it turns out - didn't make any difference. Pathan bowled an abominable 2-ball spell in which he gave away 14 runs and was thankfully kicked off the field in what turned out to be a blessing that could not even maintain its disguise. Turns out, even that would not make a difference in the end, we could not have chased 250 on that wicket yesterday.

Full credit to Rana Naved - I hope a certain vain individual procrastinating in Rawalpindi will take note of the whole-hearted performances of this extremely honest and hard-working cricketer and a super-spell by Sami - taking the "important" wicket of Tendulkar and the "lesser important" one of Dravid.

Again, I think both Tendulkar and Ganguly can hardly be blamed. Both played quite magnificent innigs - in 1 innings Tendulkar not only doubled his run-tally for the series, he also doubled his tally of boundaries - a fabulous achievement by a true legend of the game. Same goes for the skipper who after a superb show of captaincy in which he restricted Pakistan to 319 on a pitch that cried out for 500, followed it up by a crushing boundary through the covers and actually achived the distinction "of not being clean-bowled three times in a row". Unfortunately, the middle order just did not have the firepower to capitalist on this great start provided by the 2 greats of modern Indian batting.