Cricket with CricChanakya

- Atul Agarwal With four months remaining for the World Cup 2019, each of the ten cricket boards is busy trying to figure out the perfect combination of fifteen odd men who’d be flying to England for the grandest tournament of the cricketing arena. While each team has some people who’ve almost booked a slot, there are others who’ve been facing the axes muscly swung by their national selectors ahead of their respective bilateral ODI series.   Selection of a team has never been more difficult before, with the onset of far too many players emerging from the domestic T20 and One Day leagues. While there are ten teams contending for the coveted glory, cricket aficionados have already declared their verdict that the two teams that should make it to the finals are England and India. However, reality, like always, is far from the truth. Despite being the co-favourites, the Indian selection board and the team management have been having the toughest of times in picking their...

-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...