January 9, 2019 issue
Cricket
in Australia
Virat Kohli's dominant India reinforced their status as the world's number one team by winning a historic first-ever series in Australia on Monday in an achievement the skipper called the biggest of his storied career.
Australia were still 316 in arrears in Sydney when the fourth and final Test was called off due to rain on day five, leaving India with a 2-1 triumph after wins in Adelaide and Melbourne. Australia won in Perth.
“I want to say I've never been more proud of being part of a team, than this one right here,” said an overjoyed Kohli, widely considered perhaps the greatest player of his generation.
Their 2-1 triumph achieved what no other Indian side has managed since they started touring to Australia in 1947-48, with the foundations for success laid not in the first Test at Adelaide, but on their tour of South Africa last year.
It was there, and the subsequent tour of England, that he and coach Ravi Shastri identified the attacking brand of cricket that they wanted to play, all in preparation for Australia.
“We wanted to experiment with combinations and find out what suits the team best and take it forward from there,” said Ravi Shastri.
“So we learned a heck of a lot in South Africa, we learned a lot in England. We made mistakes, which we didn't make in this series. We learned from those mistakes."
India lost 2-1 in Tests to South Africa in January last year, and were then outplayed in England 4-1.
“So the most satisfying part of it [winning in Australia] was it was a team working towards this goal over the last 12 months,” said Shastri.
That journey has led to India boasting one of the most fearsome bowling attacks in the world, with the breakthroughs of speedster Jasprit Bumrah and spinner Kuldeep Yadav.
While India's batting in Australia was a class above, anchored by Kohli and Cheteshwar Pujara, it was the consistency of the bowling that made the difference, with no Australian batsmen scoring a century.
“The way the bowlers have dictated and dominated, not here but also in England and South Africa, it's something I haven't seen before,” said Kohli.
“Hats off to them, the way they've prepared, their fitness levels, and their mindset.”
So important was the win that Kohli, the best batsman in the world in all three formats, placed it above being part of the Indian team that won the 2011 World Cup.
“It's obviously a very proud moment. More so because for the last 12 months we understand what we have gone through as a team, we understand the kind of cricket we have been able to play,” he said.
“The fact that the reward has come in the most historic series for Indian cricket is the cherry on top of the cake.”
And while accolades will inevitably fall on Kohli, he has consistently stressed through the series that it can never be about one person. “It was a team effort through and through and that's what we strive for. We strive to play well as a team,” he said.
“Single innings and single spells don't win games of Test cricket. We play to make the team win.” India was already the number one team in the world before the series began, with the win only shoring up their formidable reputation.
Kohli is passionate about Test cricket and said he wanted youngsters to look at what the team had achieved, and the way they have done it, for inspiration to keep the red ball game in focus as limited-overs formats gain ever more traction.
“I see this series as a stepping stone for this team to inspire the next lot of Test cricketers. To be passionate for Test cricket firstly,” he said.
“When Indian cricket respects Test cricket we know the fans are going to come in and watch Test cricket."
"We definitely want to build on this and always promote the message of Test cricket being the most important and the most valued format of the game which it rightfully is."
Singing, dancing and waving massive flags, India's cricket fans were in party mode as their team achieved a milestone — their first-ever Test series win in Australia.
The two nations are fierce cricketing rivals and India, the number one Test side, came to Australia looking to create history after seven decades of trying.
The self-described 12th man of the team, the vocal Indian fans were a constant presence at the four Tests, eager to witness what seemed like an impossible task in the past become a reality.
“I am very happy now that the time has come that after 71 years 'Team India' is going to win this Test trophy,” renowned India fan Sudhir Chaudhary told AFP in Hindi via a translator outside the Sydney Cricket Ground.
Chaudhary – whose upper body and face is painted with the Indian tricolours of saffron, white and green and the name of his patron and favourite player, cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar – embodies the passion of the supporters.
Cricket is hugely popular in India and getting on top of Australia on home soil has been a key goal after 11 previous attempts.
Chaudhary, 37, has followed the Indian cricket team for almost two decades, and made sure he was a visible presence at the SCG as he waved a national flag and blew a conch.
Other faithful fans also travelled from far and wide to Australia to cheer on their star cricketers. Long periods of rain at the Tests in Sydney and Melbourne did not deter them, with their singing and drumming bringing energy to the dismal sessions.
“It's a bit of an emotional rollercoaster,” British-based Rakesh Patel, the founder of the supporters group Bharat Army, told AFP.
“After two very tough series (against South Africa and England), we're finally going to win a series away from home."
“Some of these guys here have travelled from all over the world to be here, to see India beat Australia for the first time,” he added.
With India sewing up the series 2-1 after drawing the rain-sodden final Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground and securing victories in Adelaide and Melbourne, the fans were planning a big bash.
“Our plan is to celebrate with the team. We are the 12th man of 'Team India', so we'll be celebrating with them, and then the party will go on,” Rajul Sharma, who heads up the Australian branch of Bharat Army, told AFP.
“It's hard to say when it's going to stop... So yeah Sydney, watch out for Indian fans!”
Dean Elgar hit 24 as South Africa took 9.5 overs to pass the target of 41 for the loss of one wicket and take a winning 2-0 lead in the three-match series.
However, it wasn't as simple as South Africa was hoping, with the Proteas losing stand-in opener Theunis de Bruyn for 4 and seeing Hashim Amla retire hurt on 2 before they reached the simple target.
De Bruyn was opening in place of Aiden Markram, who was injured fielding on the third day.
South Africa's fast bowlers took their team to the brink of another series win at home as Pakistan was bowled out for 294 right at the end of day three of the second test on Saturday, leaving the Proteas needing just 41 runs for victory.
Asad Shafiq (88) and Shan Masood (61) had begun to fight back for Pakistan earlier on Saturl.day with a partnership of 132 as the tourists faced a deficit of 254 when they started their second innings.
Babar Azam added 72 and the Pakistan tailenders clung on to the very end, eventually passing South Africa's first-innings total to avoid an innings defeat in a small measure of pride for them.
Pakistan lost the first test inside three days and failed to get to 200 in any of its three innings in this series before Saturday.
Kagiso Rabada took 4-61 to lead South Africa's four-man pace attack and Dale Steyn had 4-85, but Steyn encapsulated South Africa's frustration at not getting the job done at the end and missing out on a five-wicket haul by throwing his arms up in the air angrily on numerous occasions as Pakistan's tailenders kept narrowly surviving.
Steyn removed Imam-ul-Haq at the start of the Pakistan innings, broke the Masood-Shafiq partnership, and also collected the wickets of tailenders Mohammad Amir and Yasir Shah to take his match haul to seven wickets.
Rabada, the top-ranked test bowler in the world, knocked the stuffing out of the Pakistan middle order and finally ended the innings when last man Shaheen Afridi skied a catch to Vernon Philander at midwicket.
South Africa's strong recent test record at home has been built on tough, fast-bowler friendly pitches that suit the South African attack and aggressive style of cricket but Pakistan coach Mickey Arthur complained the surfaces for the first two tests were “sub-standard” for batting and not good enough for test cricket.
The criticism has been rejected by the South African team.
Pakistan is not the first to struggle against South Africa's pace-laden attack, with India and Australia both subdued by it last year.
South Africa's tactics were clear for what will almost certainly be the series clincher at Newlands when the home team packed its lineup with four fast bowlers two of them ranked in the top four in test cricket and dropped spinner Keshav Maharaj.
The final test in Johannesburg starts Friday.
By Romeo Kaseram
(Part 1)
Andrew Gordon Ganteaume was born on January 22, 1921 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, near the Queen’s Park Savannah. It seems a fitting, ideal location for the birth of this cricketer: “The Savannah” is suffused with a rich history of the game, and houses The Oval, Trinidad and Tobago’s main international cricketing venue.
However, Ganteaume’s story as a first class cricketer does not have a happy ending, as do the Empire’s narratives that were taught then to the colonised. Instead, there remains a troubling contribution by this player to the history of the game, a record which today still maintains its perch at the top as cricket’s highest batting average – achieved, remarkably, by an unprivileged West Indian Test player during the colonial era.
The young Ganteaume was brought up in the most part by his grandparents, Joshua and Clara Daniel. An athletic young man, no doubt aided by accessibility to the nearby Savannah, he thrived in the proximity to talents using the sporting fields, growing up to become a career sportsman and an all-rounder.
Such were his abilities that it took him to the top as far as he could rise in what was then a restrictive, colonised Trinidad and Tobago: first, in first class cricket as a batsman and wicketkeeper. Then, when the dry, dusty days of playing cricket on the yellow clay pitch and browned grass of the Oval’s pitch were over, in the time of rain, with its convectional sleets driving down from the mountains of the Northern Range, it was here on the lush, renewed grass of the Savannah where Ganteaume pursued a second love, this time in soccer. A capable and competent player, he was talented enough to make it into the national team representing Trinidad and Tobago.
However, while being a capable cricketer and an athletic soccer player, it is neither for his cricketing prowess, nor his ability chasing a soccer ball, that Ganteaume is remembered today. There is no crowning moment of glory. Instead, what remains is a somewhat tenuous and nebulous honour, a dubiety that lingers as a grey cloud over a troubling cricketing statistic derived from an alpha and an omega moment – Ganteaume’s first and last cricket Test match played against England on his home pitch in Port-of-Spain during the 1947-48 tour. It was his knock as an opening batsman, scoring a stalwart 112 runs (striking 13 fours), which cricketing history now records to be his highest score of 112, and which makes for an outstanding, and so far internationally unbeatable, average of 112.
It is outstanding as an achievement because Ganteaume’s Test average of 112 runs is yet to be undercut by a more competent blade, a boundary yet to be crossed by a modern-day cricketer. It is such a remarkable statistic that it is three fours (or two sixes in heftier currency) and .06 runs ahead of Donald Bradman, whose 80 innings converts into a perpetually trailing Test average of 99.94. That this record of 112 runs still holds the centre today is because Ganteaume was allowed to play in just one Test, and following this 1948 debut, was never again given an opportunity to step inside the hallowed, privileged crease on an international stage.
The Guardian out of London, England, is unequivocal in its driving analysis of why Ganteaume maintains his unassailable perch at the top of the world’s Test averages: “A victim of the obtuse racial politics that prevailed in postwar colonial British West Indies, his 112 against England in 1948 was deemed insufficient by the white selectors to win him a recall for the next Test – or any other during the rest of his career. That bizarre circumstance allowed him to finish with a better Test batting average than the great Sir Donald Bradman – and to achieve a far greater degree of fame as a one-hit wonder than he would likely have attained had he played more games at the highest level.”
It turns out Ganteaume did not really get a fair pick for his alpha and omega debut into Test cricket. It did not come following sober, judicial assessment of his prolific scoring and batsmanship in two home matches against the MCC. While his positive performances and burgeoning run count had led to an underswell of public clamour that he be selected to the Test team, as The Guardian points out, Ganteaume’s ancestry was a mixed one, with his origins coming from African and Indian genetic roots. With such a mixed lineage limiting his prospects as a Test player in the then restrictive, colonial space, in The Guardian’s words, it was a “misfortune to be living in an era when the team was still picked and captained by members of the white establishment”. It meant despite being a first class player, performance with the bat was inadequate merit to overcome the limitations of a second class citizenship imposed by an Empire’s preferentiality for a hierarchal establishment functioning inside a racist ideology.
However, Ganteaume made the team after all – albeit in a placement that was cynically weighted as it was a pragmatic, transactional afterthought. As Tony Cozier writes in ESPN cricinfo, in 1948 Ganteaume “was in the form of his life leading into the second Test, in Port-of-Spain, in a series marking the resumption of Test cricket in the Caribbean after World War II”. He adds: “In the 1946 season, [Ganteaume] compiled the first two of his eventual five first-class hundreds, 112 against Barbados and 159 against Jamaica. In Trinidad's two matches against the English tourists, his scores were 101, 47 not out, 5 and 90.” Yet despite such prolific performances, the promising cricketer was not included in the original Test team; at least not until one of its more privileged players was injured.
It appears decision to call up Ganteaume was a difficult one, with The Guardian noting, he “was chosen to play only through the gritted teeth of the selectors and because of an injury to Jeff Stollmeyer, a white Trinidadian batsman”. In such an arbitrary and unjust colonial world catering to the continuous upliftment of the privileged, this was a major break for the young, underprivileged Ganteaume. As Cozier notes, it was his “eighth season of first-class cricket; he was determined not to let the chance pass him by”.
(In Part II in the next edition: A “slow” century, an ultra-careful batsman, and the pointed irony of a world record average.)
seal 3-0 sweep
The third ODI betweeen New Zealand and Sri Lanka was just like the two that had gone before, only more so.
Sri Lanka won the toss and had made three changes to their side, but despite their best efforts, a familiar sequence of events unfolded in Nelson. New Zealand lost early wickets but recovered emphatically, Ross Taylor and Henry Nicholls hitting fine hundreds, while Kane Williamson made an effortless half-century. Sri Lanka failed to take wickets through the middle overs again, which allowed New Zealand to float into the final 10 overs with 234 for 3 on the board, before plundering 130 further runs to finish at 364 for 4.
The visitors' reply then began gallantly, the openers hurtling to a half-century stand, and the 100 coming off just 86 balls, before a clutch of wickets fell, and the innings flatlined as the middle overs began. Niroshan Dickwella had produced the rocket-powered start, and Thisara Perera was on hand to tonk a valiant 80 off 63, but for the majority of their innings, Sri Lanka did not have the measure of the mammoth target. They fell 115 runs short, leaving 8.2 overs unused.
New Zealand swept the series 3-0, perhaps saving their best batting effort for last. Sri Lanka, whose attack continues to ail, no matter which bowlers are playing or how many, are yet to win a match on tour.
Taylor, for who had come into this match with five consecutive fifty-plus scores behind him, cracked 137 off 131 to raise New Zealand from 31 for 2, to a position of outright command in the match. He was involved in two century stands that formed the body of this New Zealand innings. With Williamson, he put on 116 off 130 balls, before Nicholls joined him for a partnership worth 154 off 120.
He had begun with a little fortune, almost run out within minutes of arriving at the crease (he would have been on his way had Thisara hit the stumps), before nearly chopping the ball back onto his stumps in the next over. He was strong square of the wicket as usual, while Williamson prospered down the ground. Taylor's first few boundaries came on the legside, as Sri Lanka continued to bowl into his pads, but he would later unfurl that punishing cut shot as well. He got to his 20th hundred off the 112th ball he faced, by which time the slog overs had arrived, and Taylor found himself in a position to surge. He took an especial liking to the bowling of Lasith Malinga, hoisting him for four sixes in the arc between long on and midwicket between the 41st and 45th overs. He was eventually out trying to hit Malinga for a fifth six, ending up only pulling him into the hands of deep square leg.
Nicholls, meanwhile, had arrived in the 27th over and had the opportunity to get his bearings and build an innings, Taylor doing a lot of the legwork at the time. Once he was set, though, he became almost as comfortable as the senior partner. Like Taylor, he found plenty of boundaries on the legside, and took an especial liking to Nuwan Pradeep, hitting him for 41 runs off 16 balls. He reached his half century in the 41st over, and was unstoppable after Taylor's dismissal, looting 47 off the 18 balls he faced in the last five overs. He thumped Malinga over deep square leg for six to bring up his hundred, and finished on an outstanding 124 not out off 80 balls – his maiden trip to triple figures in ODIs.
Sri Lanka had hoped Dushmantha Chameera would help take wickets through the middle overs, but unable to find much movement from the pitch, he proved to be ineffective, with Lakshan Sandakan also proving largely modest through that period. The bowling effort was not helped though, by the fact that the two most experienced bowlers often missed their lengths at the death. Between them, Malinga and Pradeep gave away 170 runs off 114 balls.
They did, however, produce another bright start with the bat - Dhananjaya de Silva opening alongside Dickwella, after regular opener Danushka Gunathilaka went off the field with a stiff back halfway through New Zealand's innings. They raced to 66 at the end of the first eight overs before de Silva was trapped lbw by Tim Southee. It was at Dickwella's demise for 46, however, that the innings hit a wall. Kusal Mendis was run out without facing a ball (not without mild controversy - the replays did not seem to definitively show that his bat had not crossed the crease), Dasun Shanaka was lbw to Ish Sodhi after missing a sweep, and Kusal Perera was caught behind - which meant that Sri Lanka slipped from 107 for 1 to 143 for 5.
Thisara then played himself gradually into the game in the company of Gunathilaka, who came out at No. 7 visibly hampered by his injury, but despite another fine display of hitting - Thisara crashing three sixes and seven fours - the requirement always seemed beyond him. He had been dropped twice, by Tim Seifert on 62 and Ross Taylor on 74, but was out to perhaps the catch of the series. Top edging a cut off Lockie Ferguson, Thisara probably would have cleared backward point had any other fielder been stationed there but Martin Guptill. Back-pedalling quickly from his position, Guptill leapt backwards like a high jumper and with one hand reeled in the ball that was dropping quickly behind him.
With that wicket went Sri Lanka's last glimmer of hope. Within four overs, the remaining four wickets had been taken - Ferguson taking two of those to finish with an analysis of 4 for 40, while Ish Sodhi took the other two and ended with 3 for 40.
The former Pakistan and Bangladesh coach takes over from Nic Pothas, who had held the same role since Stuart Law left his job as head coach in November.
English-born Pybus, 54, returned to West Indies as high-performance director in February, having been director of cricket from 2013 to 2016.
England face West Indies in three Tests starting on 23 January in Barbados with five ODIs and three T20 internationals to follow.
Pybus will then lead the Windies in an ODI triangular tournament against hosts Ireland and Bangladesh in May, followed by the World Cup in England and Wales and India's tour of the Caribbean in July and August.
The West Indies Cricket Board said it will appoint a long-term head coach from September to replace Law, who left to coach Middlesex.
Pybus coached Pakistan's national team twice, in 1999 and 2003, and was appointed Middlesex coach in February 2007 only for the club to announce his departure with immediate effect in July that year "for personal reasons".
He said he was "really looking forward" to working with West Indies Test and ODI captain Jason Holder and T20 counterpart Carlos Brathwaite.
"We've got a great home series against England coming up," he added. "England are a high-quality side who will be an excellent test of the team in our home conditions."
Pybus' appointment on Friday was criticised by former West Indies captain Darren Sammy, who led the side when Pybus was director of cricket. "Please tell me that's fake news, somebody please," Sammy posted on Twitter.
"After the mess in 2014 he can't be back, I refuse to believe that's true."