Blog Posts by Venkat Ananth

Seven years ago almost to the day, a teenaged seam bowler grabbed headlines in the New Year's Test against Australia at the SCG with an eye-poppingly hostile spell of bowling, with that yorker to Adam Gilchrist as the exclamation mark – the perfect start to what promised to be an illustrious career.

That was then. Today, a mature Irfan Pathan is on the last stretch of a long, tortuous road to redemption, and hoping to resucitate a career suspended thanks to recurring injuries and a general lack of direction.

I spoke to Irfan on New Year's day – for the rest of us, a day to rest and relax and recover from the revelries of the previous night; for Pathan, a chance to catch his breath after a strict training schedule at the National Cricket Academy, Bangalore.

His last appearance in Indian colors was as part of the disastrous World T20 2009 campaign in England, where the team exited in the second round. On that campaign, the inswinger into the right hander was conspicuous by its

In the wake of the Centurion Test, India's captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni came down unusually hard on his bowlers.

 
His post-match comments were an exercise in stating the blindingly obvious -- and stating them with unusual vigor. You need to take 20 wickets to win a Test, Dhoni pointed out -- and the bowling lineup showed no sign of being able to accomplish that task. Worse -- again, as Dhoni pointed out -- the morning session of day 3, in course of which India gave away 225 runs, made defeat inevitable by allowing South Africa to declare and bury India not merely under a mountain of runs, but also time.

 
The points Dhoni made were well taken, but they were also characterized by a glaring anomaly. When going into specifics, this is what the skipper said:

 
Our bowlers are not express quick. They don't generally bowl over 140-plus. They have to be very precise with their line and length. We tried different fields. We tried to work around their bowling aspects, which, more often than

The tendency among the lazier sports writers is to create simplistic narratives — and in recent times nothing is more simplistic than this: India has achieved the statistical distinction of topping the rankings on the ICC Test table, hence India is the best Test side in the world.

While admitting to the obvious — that India has attained the statistical milestone and, to its credit, held on to it for the better part of the year in defiance of the attempts of the dethroned Aussies to snatch it back — I would argue that India is still a long way away from being a champion side.

That goal is a journey, a process — not something that is attained through a calculator. And that process is long; it is accomplished one incremental step at a time; it is a function of identifying the bedrock basics of the sport and becoming extraordinarily good at every aspect of it.

Somewhere along this journey, there will be moments where opponents outweigh you through sheer brilliance; there will also be

It's not often that you find an Englishman of all people, a spinner no less, find himself in an unchartered perch of being the finest exponent of his art, amongst his peers. Quite obviously, times have changed, and Graeme Swann's emergence demonstrates that very fact.

Every single time, Andrew Strauss and England are going through a dry patch, an eventless session where the on-crease batsmen seem to have their way, comfortably perched, settled and making their bucks, the captain throws the ball to his trump card, and almost unfailingly, Swann strikes. And this story of arguably the world's best spinner going around today, a story, which is quite a healthy departure from a Victorian fable that has come to define English sport over the years, but a story which cricket, in times of growing professionalism deserves to be told - the just triumph of a character with colossal self-belief, sturdily backed only by a refreshing smack of self-assuredness in one's own ability and talent.

To

It is almost with a sigh of relief, and I speak for the majority here, that I note that the Test-leg of the home series against New Zealand has come to a relatively successful end, with a deserved 1-0 win to the hosts. Though the series did have its moments, it was - to put it bluntly - overall an excruciating watch for a Test cricket connoisseur, with India doing just enough to clinch the outcome.

In three weeks, the focus shifts to  South Africa, where the cricket is  as much a test of technique buttressed by a measure of belief, of sheer mental fortitude and an intense examination of approach. In other words, it is going to be the polar opposite of the just concluded Tests against New Zealand, and how India performs against the Proteas will go  a long way in dispelling doubters, me included, about whether the team really deserves its recently acquired number one tag.

In a sense, this tour of South Africa comes at the right time for the Indian Test team: a historic series win

In exactly a week's time, the first ball might be sent down in one of the most anticipated Test series of the year -- The Ashes. And given the manner in which the subcontinent is quite shamelessly offering a dull view of Test cricket in recent times with flat wickets by the matches, The Ashes could well, I hope, dish out what it has always been about -- Test cricket at a level typified by its rich intensity, unrivaled passion and unmatched dynamism. The Ashes of 2010 comes at a time when cricket is in dire need of a folklore to talk about, a cricketer whose achievements could capture a nation's imagination, with cricket being his tool of expression -- someone not quite dissimilar to the Freddie "Jesus" Flintoff of Lord's fame. And that's where I believe the Ashes is an important cricketing series.

Add history, and it gives the contest a sense of context, a past that went on to define the game through its complex yet contrasting narratives. The dominant theme of this year's Ashes

Over the years, and more especially over the past decade or so, cricket has systematically attempted to transform itself into a sport that combines fast-paced on-field action with a frenetic off-field entertainment component. The spectator is truly king, and administrators have become focused on accommodating the needs of the audience into the larger dynamics of running the sport. Somewhere along the way, cricket has learnt to seamlessly integrate its historic traditions with a more modern, marketing oriented narrative that not so long ago was anathema.

One upshot of this development is that change now follows a far more rapid cycle. Over a century went by before one day cricket came along to challenge the monopoly of Test cricket; however, it did not take half as long for T20 to emerge as an alternative. The upshot has been that 50-over cricket is now under threat from the T20 format; it is widely argued that the lack of action in the middle overs, when both sides are in

Indian cricket is, like it or not, on the brink of transition. On its way out is an era remembered for some of the best exponents of the different moods of batsmanship - the classic, the belligerent, the artistic, the stoic. The national selectors are increasingly reconciled to the fact that the Tendulkars, Dravids and Laxmans will not play forever, and have begun looking at the Pujaras, the Kohlis and the Rainas as the faces of India's future.

A name that deserves discussion in this context is that of Ajinkya Rahane, the 22-year old Mumbai batsman.

Rahane's story is in a sense that of Mumbai cricket itself - a story where cricket is often one strand in a narrative that spans the virtues of grit and determination, an infinite capacity for hard work, a seminal struggle that begins with the fight to board a second class compartment, kit bag in tow, during rush hour and just gets tougher from there. Those who know Mumbai cricket well will tell you that it is a crucible like no other;