Viru

[Bumper]

That match was played on the flattest pitch imaginable. You can't approach every chase like that. Besides, history tells us that one chase is an exception to the rule. Regarding this bullsh[t about "attitude" - even India attacked at Karachi back in 2006, scoring at nearly 5 an over in the 4th innings. What difference did that make, they still lost by 300+ runs. Attacking in the 4th innings is the last resort when teams have nothing to lose. It may look good to the millions of armchair experts but the result is what people remember.

Attacked back in Karachi ? There is a huge difference between chasing 600 & chasing 256. One is impossible & the other attainable if we bat well. Just batting positively, scoring at 3.5 an over can get us there. This is not a mine field by any means. If you are set, you can score runs. But so often, we are a victim of our own mental frailties. For every score card you can come up with for a draw, its possible to come up with twice as many that we've lost.

You are conveniently ignoring his rather average 2nd innings record too. He played a great knock, but these innings of his are too much of a rarity.

That makes my point. Had Veeru gone by his history, he should have batted 'carefully' trying to hang in there, so he could better his second innings average. But thats not what he did. He went out there believing that he could win the game. Only because he thought so, we are in a position where a victory looks possible. Had a diff opener opened with Gambhir we'd have been reduced to 65/3, facing a sure defeat. We cant keep looking back at history, because our history is so poor as a cricketing nation. Its time for our great players to do something out of the ordinary that they can look back at and cherish when they hang up their boots.

[Bumper]

3rd innings...flat pitch....this Madras wicket is a turner where a mediocre spinner like Swann is making the ball talk' date=' not to mention the reverse swing which England will get first thing tomorrow morning.[/quote'] How about this Shwetabh ? At Murali's den. http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/statsguru/engine/match/238216.html

[Dhondy]

Hmmm....so the fact that class act Collingwood managed to score a century has got nothing to do with our poor bowling? If it weren't for Ishant and Zaheer we would have been royally screwed in this test match.

Why are you deprecating Collingwood? He averages in the mid-40s and has put in several stellar innings for England from difficult situations. Gritty as sand... want a list? Secondly, I believe that had England not been nearly dismissed, they would have batted on, probably for another hour. That would have diminished India's chances of winning it, but vastly helped our chances of pulling off a draw. If India lose tomorrow, with an hour to stumps, as I think they will, we'll revisit this. Those wickets by Zaheer & Ishant may have just sealed our fate.

[The Outsider]

How about this Shwetabh ? At Murali's den. http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/statsguru/engine/match/238216.html

Firstly the wicket was as flat as they come after the 3rd day and secondly it was a draw....I am not betting against a draw...I think we can still draw the match, but winning it will require something special and with two passengers in the line up I don't think we are capable of it.

[The Outsider]

If India lose tomorrow, with an hour to stumps, as I think they will, we'll revisit this. Those wickets by Zaheer & Ishant may have just sealed our fate.

We would probably be chasing 500 in 5 sessions instead of 400 in 4 if it Zaheer and Ishant had not bowled so accurately, economically, and dangerously.

[Bumper]

Firstly the wicket was as flat as they come after the 3rd day and secondly it was a draw....I am not betting against a draw...I think we can still draw the match' date=' but winning it will require something special and with two passengers in the line up I don't think we are capable of it.[/quote'] Consider the odds please. You would not have given a chance for most batting lineups against Murali on D5 in Lanka , definitely not to a Pak batting line up with no MoYo and Malik & Farhat as openers Infact i would argue that the odds of Pak saving that one was far worse, as they were facing an impossible task (of chasing 458) against Murali and given the weight of runs Lankans had the luxury of attacking thru out, something England cannot do, if they lose the first session tomorrow.

[Kumar]

a great and fantastic player allover, though hate the sign of the english on bbc forum that they are dissing his from in 2006 and calling him incosistent and saying gayle is a better destructive player.:finger:

[Dirty_South]

Well said Ticz

[fineleg]

Cricketics, take it from me dude. I've been watching cricket for a lot longer than you, and India just don't do these kind of chases. There are people out there scarred from myriad past failures- the ghosts of Bombay, Durban, Bangalore. It doesn't matter that they are capable of doing it...they simply don't think they can do it. This will be a humiliating defeat for sure; who can take being beaten by an English side at home after whipping Australia 2-0? But unless rain intervenes, that's exactly what's going to happen. The English press will (rightly) hail it as the greatest feat since Ashes, and you, my dear friend will almost inevitably suffer a very cold turkey, the way you are going.

You are absolutely right doc - Viru is different, now is different. Now its a typical Day-5 match with Maharathis (except for GG who will now be influenced by Maharathis on day-5). They think differently from Sehwag, are sure to go into a shell, and we know what will happen. Even if they dont go into a shell, it will be a bit artificial the way they play. You'll know it when you see it on day-5. The artificial is what will get folkz like Swanz, Montyz and Flintoff thinking the wicket is any next ball.

[The Outsider]

Consider the odds please. You would not have given a chance for most batting lineups against Murali on D5 in Lanka , definitely not to a Pak batting line up with no MoYo and Malik & Farhat as openers Infact i would argue that the odds of Pak saving that one was far worse, as they were facing an impossible task (of chasing 458) against Murali and given the weight of runs Lankans had the luxury of attacking thru out, something England cannot do, if they lose the first session tomorrow.

Yaar, I don't think you watched that match or it's highlights. The pitch was a patta and even Murali was not getting any turn on it.

[Fontaine]

then tell me how swann was turning it miles and bouncing too' date='while bhajji didnt look threatening a all.bhajji is supposed to be better than krejza n swann but has been outbowled by them in two consecutive matches[/quote'] good observation. Swann's natural angle was bouncing the ball to the right handers on a bit of rough patch on the pitch and he was repeatedly targetting that area and one such delivery threw up a bit of dust and kept low which got Viru out. By no means am I saying that our spinners deserve no blame.

[Captain of Bhangra]

Hats off to Sehwag. Regardless of the result tommorrow, we started the 5th day with a chance of victory we should never have had. He is a phenomenon...

[Fontaine]

I'm not counting out anything as long as Tendulkar still has to go. If there's one player that can carry on after Sehwag it's SRT.

[Dhondy]

Hats off to Sehwag. Regardless of the result tommorrow' date=' we started the 5th day with a chance of victory we should never have had. He is a phenomenon...[/quote'] This is all your fault, Daljit Singh. If only you hadn't bragged that the Ashes would be a contest between two sides beaten by India..:angry_smile:

[Predator_05]

Attacked back in Karachi ? There is a huge difference between chasing 600 & chasing 256. One is impossible & the other attainable if we bat well. Just batting positively, scoring at 3.5 an over can get us there. This is not a mine field by any means. If you are set, you can score runs. But so often, we are a victim of our own mental frailties. For every score card you can come up with for a draw, its possible to come up with twice as many that we've lost.

No difference between chasing 600 and 400, which is what Australia needed at Nagpur. Historically, both are impossible anyway. Yet you seem to be so enthralled by how Australia got beaten by 172 runs simply because they showed some fake aggression.

That makes my point. Had Veeru gone by his history' date=' he should have batted 'carefully' trying to hang in there, so he could better his second innings average. But thats not what he did. He went out there believing that he could win the game. .[/quote'] ?? What a bizarre comment. Veeru doesn't have a clue what his own averages are - he batted exactly the same way he did in any of those tests he played in before. He even said as much in the press conference at the end of the day. He didnt change anything, didn't do anything differently. That's what his batting is like in the 2nd innings - most of the time he will get out for a low score, but occasionally he will make a score. The fact that he averages 30 in the 2nd innings proves that his approach isn't the right one. One or two innings notwithstanding

[goose]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/cricket/article5340667.ece Virender Sehwag is the most exciting batsman on the planet, says Simon Wilde Simon Wilde in Chennai OPENING the batting in all forms of the international game has to be one of the toughest jobs around. It must take a tremendous mental toll tailoring your game to the many situations these different formats throw up and the recent emotional problems of Herschelle Gibbs and Marcus Trescothick bear testimony to this. Unsurprising, then, that there is something slightly unhinged about the way Virender Sehwag, India's 24/7 opener, goes about his business. He certainly plunged England into shock as he tore into their bowling. England had spent the day *****-footing around for more than two sessions edging their lead up by another 139 and must have imagined that India might bat in similar vein. But that's the great thing about the truly great players. They don't do what everyone else does. Sehwag has not so much pushed the envelope containing the rules on how to open the batting as punch it to shreds. His great gift is synthesis of approach. One minute he is batting as you would expect someone to bat in a Test match, the next he has flicked a switch and has gone into one-day mode, or rather one-day mood, and every ball looks set to end up in the stands. Sehwag obviously reckoned India's best chance in the face of a daunting run-chase was to hit the England bowlers hard and see how they responded. It was hard to argue with the thinking, especially given the scars he had inflicted on them in the one-day series. Steve Harmison, James Anderson and Panesar are all mentally frail at times and Graeme Swann is playing his first Test. Thank goodness, then, for Andrew Flintoff, who at one point seemed to be shoring things up at both ends. Humiliatingly, Panesar ended up bowling from over the wicket in an effort to staunch the flow of runs. Earlier this year, on this very ground, Sehwag spent most of the first day of a Test against South Africa batting as though he were in the first powerplay of a one-day game, and raced to the fastest triple- century in Test history. He beat the previous record by a cool 84 balls, so it was something of a Bob Beamon moment. He is also the owner of three of the seven fastest double-centuries in Tests. When, in the tenth over of the innings, he pushed a single into the on side - just to show he could - it brought up his half-century from 32 balls. There are 11 instances of faster fifties in Tests but none by an opener. Things have certainly moved on a bit since Geoff Boycott's day. Boycott's idea of chasing 387 in the fourth innings would have been to bat three sessions and then see how things lay. Like Trescothick and Gibbs, Sehwag has had his ups and downs. He went through a bad trot in one-dayers in 2004 and spent most of last year unwanted in Tests. You could pick a pretty good World XI from people who were not playing Test cricket this time last year, given that Andrew Strauss (this game's twin centurion) was left at home while England were touring Sri Lanka, and Andrew Flintoff was still in the rehab room. Now, the idea of leaving out Sehwag seems like an act of lunacy. Apart from his huge effort against South Africa, he also made important runs in the series against Australia, but unarguably his finest innings of the year was a double-century in Galle when the rest of the Indian batsmen could make neither head nor tail of Ayantha Mendis. Sehwag's risk-taking approach seems contrary to his modest background. Raised in Nafargarh, a satellite town of Delhi, as the son of a storekeeper, he might be forgiven for adopting a thriftier approach to his day job. Yet it is actually the likes of Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, middle-class children both, who calculate every risk three times over before taking it. Sehwag's first coach was so frustrated by his carefree ways that he resorted to tying his feet to the back of the net to stop him charging the bowling. Clearly, it did not work. Sehwag was often compared to Tendulkar in his early days. Tendulkar was the player he had modelled himself on and physically resembled. Yet Sehwag plays like a Tendulkar liberated of the enormous pressure of being India's greatest sporting icon. But Sehwag now deserves to be properly recognised for what he is: since the retirement of Adam Gilchrist, the most exciting batsman on the planet.

[Captain of Bhangra]

This is all your fault' date=' Daljit Singh. If only you hadn't bragged that the Ashes would be a contest between two sides beaten by India..:angry_smile:[/quote'] Believe me, a lost/drawn series for India here will result in a lot of payback for me, so feel safe in the knowledge I will be punished!...

[Dhondy]

Goosey, try saying that to the dickheads who compare him with Shahid Afridi or Chris Gayle. Even the comparisons with Trescothick and Gibbs are completely misplaced. Either they average 10 runs less then him , or score at 60% his rate. Averaging 52 @78/100 balls is unheard of in the whole ****ing history of Test cricket, opener or not. Only the comparison with Glichrist was appropriate.

[goose]

i agree. the above article shows the rest of the world is now learning what we've known for a while. despite the plaudits the writer still falls short of capturing his true greatness.

[fineleg]

Believe me' date=' a lost/drawn series for India here will result in a lot of payback for me, so feel safe in the knowledge I will be punished!...[/quote'] CoB - welcome back! How is anjali?