Cricket with CricChanakya

-Atul Agarwal It was a bright sunny afternoon in Johannesburg on the 23 rd day of March, 2003, and millions of Indians back home were glued to their television sets, hoping that the Men in Blue beat all odds stacked up against them. However, the Aussie skipper Ricky Ponting had different plans. His knock of 140 off 121 balls was enough to send us in deep sense of melancholy. The sound of the ball hitting the meat of the bat before flying over the stands still reverberates in our ears. It wasn’t that the Indian Cricket Team struggled this way throughout the tournament on their road to the finals. They were one of the most dominating sides in the competition. In their defence, they were up against the most dominating cricketing nation of the generation. They were the mighty Australians! Fast forward fifteen years, in the ongoing Test match against India in Adelaide, the Aussies seem to have lost all traces of the aggressive outlook, which made them the powerhouse of world