• Dial ‘M’ for Match-Fixing

    By Yahoo! Cricket | Cricket Editorial Blogs – Fri 6 May, 2011 6:55 PM IST

    Innocence, like virginity, can be lost only once.

    Cricket – the players, the administration, the fans, the game itself – lost its innocence on April 7, 2000, when New Delhi police officials accused then South African captain Hansie Cronje of colluding with bookmaker Sanjay Chawla to fix the one day games with India played in March of that year.

    Any hymenal vestiges were swept aside in the months that followed, thanks to the revelations from a Central Bureau of Investigation probe in India; the report of the Justice Qayyum commission in Pakistan; the serial naming of players from around the world and their almost ritual ‘clearing’ by the respective boards, and finally by the spot-fixing expose of last year that resulted in bans of varying durations imposed on three Pakistani players.

    All of which is why the latest media story on match-fixing – Dirt in Cricket, a Heena Zuni Pandit-authored cover story for the latest issue of Sports Illustrated India – comes without the sort of shock

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  • After Thursday’s loss to the Deccan Chargers, their second in a row, Royal Challengers Bangalore management is facing the ire of the fans.

    Not many were happy when RCB chose to retain only Virat Kohli from amongst their old squad of the past three seasons. Some even speculated that Anil Kumble’s decision to pull out of the IPL auction in January was due to intimation from RCB that they would not retain him. They claimed he didn’t want to face the embarrassment of going up for auction and having to play for another team whilst being the incumbent President of the Karnataka State Cricket Association.

    Over the past three years RCB had built its fan base around homegrown Indian legends like Kumble and Rahul Dravid, other Karnataka stars like Robin Uthappa, Manish Pandey, Vinay Kumar and foreign players like Jacques Kallis, Ross Taylor and Dale Steyn. But the only player RCB purchased during the auction from their old squad was Abhimanyu Mithun.

    Now with the Challengers having won only one

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  • The Fall & Rise of Paul Valthaty

    By Yahoo! Cricket | Cricket Editorial Blogs – Wed 13 Apr, 2011 10:45 PM IST
    Paul ValthatyPaul Valthaty

    Kings XI Punjab's Paul Valthaty celebrates his hundred against Chennai Super Kings on Wednesday.

    If you could find a football equivalent for his story, Paul Valthaty would be a striker struggling to find his feet in the big league, having done it all in lower leagues, and then suddenly one fine day scoring a hat-trick for a Premier League side against one of the top guns.

    Valthaty’s hundred against Chennai Super Kings would be somewhat of a fairytale, considering his only worthwhile performance in top-level cricket was a streaky 44 in a warm-up one-day game for a Mumbai Cricket Association XI (made up of reserves) against the touring England team at the Brabourne Stadium. Today was the stage he had waited for, having failed to break into Mumbai’s Ranji Trophy team and having played a solitary one-dayer for them in February 2006.

    In Mumbai circles, Valthaty is a T20 legend, known from his early days for his ability to thump the ball as hard as anyone else, so much so that he’s made the

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