Deep Adhya, PhD

The birthplace of Aryabhatta to Ramanujan, India has shown that it is crazy about numbers. And, for a country crazy about numbers, cricket has been the best sporting phenomenon to have hit its shores. Not only are Indians crazy about stats, they become berserk when the stats are all in their favour, and that is where Sachin Tendulkar quietly made an entrance. I have no recollection of watching Gavaskar play, though I was born two year before he hung his boots. My baptism therefore, and subsequent induction into cricket started by watching Sachin on the telly. There have been so many tournaments that Sachin has played in, that I have lost count of how many I have watched, and played shadow cricket in the living room during it. I clearly remember Hero Cup though, watching on those flickering cathode ray tube TVs of yonder years. I remember the tension of watching that tournament with my family, hoping with clenched fists that India will win, and that if nobody can, Sa...

How often has cricket been predictable? How often have big teams dominated and minnows just faded away? The cricket world cup always turns up a few surprises, but it is surprising to see that the surprises have gone far ahead this time around and has set the groundwork for a very interesting round two when the teams of the two groups A and B meet head to head. The group A matches consisting of Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and Pakistan have been predictable so far except for the Pakistan versus Sri Lanka match, where Pakistan, the battered team was definitely expected to lose to the powerful and well-trained Sri Lankan team. Group B on the other hand has held up a few surprises and they are pretty handsome and worth writing home about. The most amazing surprise is probably the insurgence of the Irish team with their win over neighbors England. They have also pushed India to some sweat in their match yesterday. The second surprise was the high voltage encounter between Eng...