Ignorance is blasted

A few days ago, I was talking to a friend who was adamant that Chris Gayle should make way for Darren Ganga as the captain of the West Indies squad. Calling him the "best captain West Indies never had", my friend convinced me that taking a Trinidad and Tobago team to the final of a T20 Champions League was just the proof of the pudding.

He then told me about Shane Warne and repeated the myth that the leg-spinner never captained Australia. I convinced him otherwise, pointing out that Warne did indeed captain Australia, contrary to popular belief. At this point, some doubts set in. I thought I remembered Darren Ganga captaining West Indies, too. Surely, I could not be wrong about that, could I?

Well, well, what do you know - Ganga played as many as 48 Tests for the Windies and even captained the Test team in two Test matches in England, both of which were lost by the visitors. The last Test Ganga captained was one in which Shivnaraine Chanderpaul was finally dismissed by England after occupying the crease for almost 18 hours spread over three Tests!

The man of a 1000 cuts

According to the ICC, the number 1 ranked Test batsman in the world is not named Ponting, Sangakkara, Tendulkar, Sehwag, Smith, or Pietersen. Not surprisingly, this anonymous soul is happy that the attention is elsewhere.

Shivnarine Chanderpaul is content to let preening alpha dogs like Kevin Pietersen hog the limelight while he toils away in a mediocre West Indian batting line-up. His road to the top has been a long and arduous one (as is almost everyone else's, true) but especially so since his shy nature and interesting batting style does not lend itself easily to reams of poetic prose, to coin a phrase.

Only 6 batsmen in the history of Tests have batted more than a thousand minutes between dismissals. Chanderpaul, the only man to do it more than once, has done it a mind-boggling 4 times! He is the only one to go more than 1500 minutes, and during that span he faced more than 1000 balls (the only one in the 1000 ball club, incidentally). In fact, that 1500 minute span came against the 2001-02 Australia team, no less!

And he is not just a blocker. One day, he scored the 4th fastest Test 100, off just 69 balls, that too in the first innings against Australia!

Talking to Anna Kessel of The Observer, Chanderpaul shows why he is more than content to let the others around him hog the limelight. Though, the mention of one person does raise his shackles and bring out the hidden fury in him.

There are few subjects that will shake Chanderpaul out of his private world, but Kevin Pietersen is one of them. The two batsmen are polar opposites – Pietersen loves the limelight, Chanderpaul detests "glamour"; Pietersen loves to take risks, Chanderpaul would rather stay at the crease. They meet again at Lord's on Wednesday as England take on West Indies. At the mention of KP, Chanderpaul's face grows very dark. On the recent West Indies tour Pietersen took a swipe at him, accusing him of "playing for himself". It was a comment that Chanderpaul did not take lightly.

"You can't assume or think someone's just playing for themselves. I don't know where he gets his stories from … I can't be playing for myself when I'm in Trinidad trying to save a match. Scoring 140 and I'm playing for myself?" Chanderpaul's expression is one of utter disgust.

Did Pietersen's comment make him angry? "What he said just motivated me more. It definitely made me better at what I was doing. If people come at me I just want to make sure that I can be out there even longer. You get angry and you just want to grind somebody out there longer, that's how I do my job." Chanderpaul folds his arms, his outburst a rare moment of expression.

By the way, I am waiting for a day when an article on Chanderpaul will be written without his crab-like batting stance being mentioned even once (oops, I just did it, too). The photo at the top of this post was taken from an article in The Age that discusses his stance.

Catching up

While I was away from the blogsphere these were some of the articles that caught my eye.

a) Who is (statistically) the greatest all-rounder in the history of Test cricket? The answer is someone who has very quietly put together a very formidable career. Get this: he is the only man to have scored over 9,000 runs, taken more than 200 wickets, and snagged at least 100 catches in BOTH Tests and ODI's.

b) Jamie Alter describes Virender Sehwag's approach to the Sri Lankan bowlers, especially Mendis, en route to a coruscating double century in the second Test against Sri Lanka. A must read.

c) Yuvraj Singh really has nice parents. After hearing from his mother, it is now the father's turn to talk about his son. Of particular interest is this snippet (I will let the comment speak for itself)...

Yograj doesn’t sound too happy with all the pampering that Yuvi has got from his mother Shabnam. He emphatically states, “A mother can give birth and maintain a house. But she can never show the right path to the child. It’s a man’s job. I have ruled my family with an iron hand.”

d) Two fellows - Graeme Hick and Mark Ramprakash - who made their debut in the same Test, underachieved at the highest level, and then forged a formidable career in the English County scene are linked forever as members of one of cricket's most exclusive clubs - the hundred 100's club. Simon Hattenstone pays glowing tribute to the ageless warriors.

e) In all the years of Test cricket, only 9 times has a batsman batted more than 1,000 minutes in Tests without being dismissed. Astonishingly, one man has done it on 4 different occasions, the latest being earlier this year. I will give you a dozen chances to guess who that might be, but I can bet that only a few of you will get it right. Not surprisingly, this dude also gives among the most boring interviews around, filled with banal observations and very little insight into the way he really thinks. Or maybe that's the secret of his success - he is really a very simple person!

f) Dileep Premachandran wrote about the declining fortunes of the Indian middle order after they failed miserably in the first innings of the Third Test match. After the series was done, he expanded on his thoughts and discussed the state of India's cricketing cupboard.

g) One of my favourite cricket-writers is Peter Roebuck. While it is probably too soon in his career for such fawning pieces to be written about him, it voices many of my sentiments.

h) And finally, Sambit Bal reviews the process of challenging an umpire's decision that was unveiled during the just-concluded Indo-Sri Lanka series. A tentative thumb's up is his final verdict, with the emphasis on the word tentative.

It was meant to get rid of obvious umpiring mistakes - the kind in the Sydney Test that threatened to derail India's tour of Australia - but it has ended up ruling on marginal calls.

Underappreciated and overburdened

In spite of all the problems that the West Indies are having of late, in the cricketing arena one player has emerged unscathed from the rubble and enhanced his reputation even further - Shivnarine Chanderpaul. For a long time he belong to the Fleming-Dravid school of batsmanship, scoring 50's, staying at the crease for long periods of time, but only occasionally crossing 100. Rahul Dravid has ventured out of this league, though in the past year he seems to be coming back to the fold. Similarly, Chanderpaul, in the final third of his career is proving to his detractors that style (ahem, Lara) is not everything. Peter Roebuck discusses this determined fighter who, more often than not, is left to plough a lone furrow for the Windies.

Altogether he has played eight Tests in the last 12 months, and has collected 1635 runs in the three formats at an average of 86.05. Along the way he has added six centuries to his tally. Nor has he punished mugs. Besides the Australians, these runs have been scored against England and South Africa in their own backyards. It is a mighty achievement.

Casting the first stone

Before the ongoing West Indies-New Zealand Test series, Brian Lara challenged Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the current WI captain, to score more runs as befits a senior player on a team that is struggling to be competitive, let alone win games.

Lara himself stood up to be counted, scoring 5 and 0, while lasting a total of 13 balls and falling victim to Shane Bond both times with a golden duck in the second innings when his team came up short by just 27 runs.

Methinks the title of this Saul Bellow book best describes Lara's verbal faux pas?