Chelsea and Yash Raj films enter into a partnership. Maverick has more on it. Why go into such a partnership? Abhishek Bachchan, the hero of the film, tells us via this statement:

The character I play in the film is of a very loyal Chelsea fan. I have now had the chance to see Chelsea live after following them over the last few years and the club have given me a jersey with my character’s name Ricky on it, so that was fun.

The premiership is becoming big in India but it is still not being able to sell the jerseys of star players. India has missed the bus on this craze so far. Firstly, BCCI didn’t market selling shirts as well (we still don’t have BCCI official cricket shops like we have NBA stores). However, Pepsi increased it’s product sales by offering team jerseys coinciding with the 1999 world cup and then the BCCI encashed a fair bit before and during the 2003 world cup.

The big problem with jersey sales in India is the price sensitive nature of the consumer. People would rather have an unofficial t-shirt than the official costlier one. Who is to say Chelsea is looking just at jersey sales? They want to sell every thing possible to the fans and via the help of bollywood, possibly attract newer fans as well. Yash Raj films get to promote their film and it is a win-win situation for both.

The consumer sports luxury good market in India is still largely untapped and Chelsea is hoping to capture some of that market share. I won’t buy Chelsea jerseys though as we all know that Barcelona>>>>>>>>>>>>Chelsea! ;)

The lights in Netaji Indoor Stadium still shine. The stadium was renovated last year.

The tournament saw a lot of seeds upset early but ended with Martina Hingis winning the singles quite comfortably. She wasn’t stretched at any point in the tournament and was typical Hingis - winning using timing and placement rather than power.

The semi-final versus Mirza was the big attraction from the local point of view. However, the match disappointed at large. Mirza started off with a bit of promise considering her first serves were going in more often than not. However, the aspect where she missed out was going for the placement game versus Martina Hingis. 99 times out of 100, if you try to beat Hingis at her strength, you will end up second best.

Mirza played the waiting game instead of going for her shots - her main strength. When she did go the power route for a couple of games in the second set, she looked far more effective and looked like troubling Hingis, even if it was for a few points. The problem with the service showed up after a few games in the first set itself though and though there has been a marked improvement in Mirza’s service, more power and accuracy is still needed. Mirza did win the doubles as a consolation prize but as Hingis said, the promise is there for the future.

Over all, the tournament was dampening because many of the top seeds went out early. The novelty factor present in the inaugral Sunfeast Open wasn’t there as well. The tournament is still in it’s infancy and bringing Hingis to play in only the second year of the event is a huge achievement in itself.

The following are a few more pictures my friends and I took. Hope you like them:

The chair umpire checks that the measurements of the net, sidelines are perfect before the match starts.

(more…)

I have very good memories of the inaugral Sunfeast Open held in Calcutta last year. I visited most days and loved the international standard atmosphere Netaji Indoor Stadium provided. This year, I haven’t been able to go even once but the Sania Mirza versus Martina Hingis semi is not one to be missed and needless to say, I will be there and am looking forward to it.

Looking at their head to head, the only time they faced each other in Dubai earlier this year ended up in a close enouncter with Hingis prevailing 6-3 7-5. Since then, Hingis has had more exposure and she is deep into her come back now. The big wins haven’t come yet for Hingis and she is unlikely to be fazed by a loud Calcutta crowd. Mirza will have to go for the win rather than expect Hingis to hand the match to her via unforced errors.

Mirza has also left the ankle injury in the past. The injury had meant that she has had an ordinary year but things started looking up around the US Open. A few weeks ago, Mirza tried to reduce the hype around her and the negative attention the media was giving over her not improving in rankings saying that winning a grandslam wasn’t one of her primary goals. It is an intellegent strategy as expectations reduce to some degree and Mirza can focus on her game much more.

We do not know if Mirza is back to 100% fitness. However, she seems much improved of late. A WTA title to end the year will be just perfect to end what seems a disappointing year. However, people should not make too much out of 2006 for Mirza because of the injuries she had. She has made tremendous progress over all in her career if we look at the time period and the ranking she has achieved in the given period. 2007 should be a much better year where we will should see another marked improvement.

For now, I will just enjoy the tennis and hopefully witness a Mirza double win - in singles and doubles.

[CNN report]

Munaf Patel is tall but not very tall. However the high arm action means that he extracts awkward bounce off a length just short of good length. As a result, he is very difficult to play and not just get away for runs. Comparisons to McGrath have been made and they are not completely unjustified. However, it will be unust to Patel to put such huge expectations on him.

One aspect which he has lacked so far in his career has been the accuracy. How difficult it is to attain accuracy has often been under played. Patel has gone down the path of becoming more accurate at the cost of losing pace. Now pace is a weapon which not many have and so I am always against a bowler who can bowl fast to sacrifice his natural edge. One school of thought is that as bowlers have little room for error in a ground like Kinrara (small stadium), Patel is going for honing his accuracy. I have no qualms with this approach if it is only a short term measure.

When Patel can get the batsmen in uncomortable positions on a Kinrara pitch because of the bounce from the just short of good length, the potential on a more bouncier pitch like say pitches in South Africa is immense. Get back to the normal 90 miles Patel bowls at and keep the accuracy close to what he is getting in Malaysia and you have a dangerous bowler.

What is missing in the Patel armoury? Variation. You need to swing the ball both ways and even reverse it if you can and keep the batsmen guessing. A hindrance for Patel which has been stated often is his high arm action as opposed to the round arm action of say Ajit Agarkar (who has every delivery in his kitty). I don’t see why Patel cannot develop variations in his bowling. Patel has already shown that he is a keen student of the game and in due course, he is bound to get more weapons.

South Africans are among the best players of pace bowling in the world. You need more than just pace and accuracy to get the best of them. You need to pitch the ball at the right spot and outfox the batsman as well with variation. I hope he doesn’t change the length drastically there because a common mistake bowlers have made when they get more bouncier pitches is start bowling shorter. The hook and pull not being a problem for the batsmen, that means easy runs. It is a mistake Srinath often made.

I am looking forward to how Patel bowls in South Africa and regardless of how he fares, it will show us how far he has developed and give us a glimpse at what more Patel needs to do to improve further.

In Visitors, I invite one person each month to share perspectives on a sport, a sporting event, sporting aspects or any thing in between. This month, Haakon Moerk from Norway joins us to give insights into Norway’s winter sports culture and history. Part one can be read here. The following is the concluding part. If you would like to contribute for a future edition of Visitors, do not hesitate to e-mail me.

Another sport on the scene was biathlon. A sport molded on cross-country skiing at first, it was difficult to comprehend for viewers, as the biathletes shot on balloons to avoid penalty minutes and the aggregate result wasn’t really known until well after the event. Though Norwegians have a penchant for sports with complicated rules for time calculation, this was taking it too far. Magnar Solberg, a policeman by trade and a true amateur, won Olympic gold both in Grenoble ‘68 and Sapporo ‘72, but never earned anything from it.

Cross-country skiing began to see a small revival, however. It had by now reached the television screens - where viewers were often offered a view of the snow and the forest as the cameras waited for each skier to appear - butafter Gjermund Eggen’s 50 km victory at the home World Championships in 1966, Norwegian skiers failed to back that up with consistent performances. Norway won three of the 20 available men’s gold medals in Olympic and World skiing in the 1970s; the women zero of 16. Norwegians were seen as too backward, too stuck in the old times with meal breaks and gentlemen in jumpers and knickerbockers out in the forest - while the Soviets and East Germans swept the 1974 World Championship with their skis made of glass fibre. Norwegians still fondly remember Magne Myrmo - the last world champion on wooden skis.

Indeed, the resistance to change has been a particular part of Norwegian winter sports culture. Norwegians claim “this is what has made the sport so popular, don’t remove it!” In the 1980s, the American Bill Koch began to experiment with one ski out of the prepared tracks, as he thought it helped him push backwards on the ground (to gain more forward momentum). It worked: Koch won the silver medal on the 30 km in Oslo 1982, behind Lars Erik Eriksen, as Norwegian skiers once again got some good performances at home. Koch also totalled the most points during the World Cup in 1981/82, and remains the only non-European to win the World Cup.

Without mastery of the new technique - known as “skating” since the leg movement of pushing backwards on the snow was similar to what skaters did on the ice - Norwegians were left totally behind on the men’s side. The Swede Gunde Svan dominated the decade, winning seven World Championship titles, four Olympic titles, and five World Cup titles, and the only thing that kept Norwegians interested were the times - and the successes of the women, who proved they could ski too, only 20 years after they had been cautiously introduced into the World Championship with a 5km event in 1962.

(more…)

Update: Visa problems at the last minute means I can’t leave Calcutta. The plan has been cancelled. Maybe some other place for some other sporting event some other time. Sigh.

Just as Sachin hit his 100, I got the idea to go to Kuala Lumpur to watch the matches. After all, it just about three hours journey from Calcutta. So, I will reach Calcutta tomorrow, be in Kuala Lumpur tomorrow evening and in the stadium the day after that to see Sachin bat and India take on Australia.

How long I will be there isn’t decided yet but it should be a lot of fun! Do let me know if you are there in Kuala Lumpur for the matches as well.

So, see you there!

Kiran More has come out against the voting system which is a part of the selection process to choose the Indian cricket team. The zonal system is often criticised and an overhaul has been long overdue. For, how can the selectors act with conviction if they are bonded by pressures from their respective zones? The selection committee should be an independant body for a period of three to four years. The selectors should have had some experience in picking sides at some level to some degree. Also, they should have a reputation and not be some one whose motives can be easily questioned when taking tough decisions.

In addition to More’s remarks, VB Chandrasekhar, the South Zone selector, said this:

The chairman should be a strong person who sets the vision for the committee. Interaction with the captain and coach is important. Then there is no question of voting.

I don’t see why voting should not be there. Without voting rights, a person has little power and his word doesn’t really matter. A system of a chairman and two other selectors plus a vote for the captain and coach would mean four votes in total. So, a 2-2 tie would mean the final word would go to the chairman. That way, the chairman has the final say on close calls but over all, decisions are taken with general consensus.

Two of the three selectors More mentioned have retorted as expected. What is important to note is this - More finishes his tenure in three weeks. So why make the comments now and not earlier when he was not happy with the way things were going? What is More looking at in the near future once this tenure is over?

The Indian selection committee will be changed in the near future. It is likely that the current system will finally see an end. That is essentially a good thing. That the new process which will be put in place is a huge improvement is equally important.

Update: More has apparently done a U-turn now. Heh.

Update 2: My more detailed take on the Indian selection process and the way ahead can be read in Haftamag here.

In Visitors, I invite one person each month to share perspectives on a sport, a sporting event, sporting aspects or any thing in between. This month, Haakon Moerk from Norway joins us to give insights into Norway’s winter sports culture and history. If you would like to contribute for a future edition of Visitors, do not hesitate to e-mail me.

Like in many other countries, sports have a long history in Norway. Even in Snorre’s sagas about the medieval kings there are tales about young noblemen competing against each other, and taunting each other about their respective abilities. However, there exists little recorded history of organised ball games such as in England, Italy and the old Aztec empire, possibly due to the low population density and the long winters that prevented running freely. Instead, Norwegian sports legends concentrate on skiing and skating, and those two sports have retained a high position on the Norwegian ladder until this day.

The Norwegians claim that “the cradle of skiing” lies in Morgedal, Telemark, a small village with approximately 300 citizens. The skiing brothers Hemmestveit, along with ski inventor Sondre Norheim, all came from this snowy village, and dominated the Norwegian skiing scene for much of the 19th century. However, although skiing events, particularly ski jumping, had been hosted in the cities since the mid-1850s, the main cross-country skiers still came from rural settlements, where there was ample opportunity to practise - prepared skiing tracks in the forests around the cities were not yet used by most city dwellers.

While rural dwellers skied between places and developed cross-country and telemark skiing, and also the word “slalom”, speed skating developed as the city sport, as a kind of wintertime relative to track running. The first recorded speed skating race in Norway dates back to 1863, on the sea outside Oslo. Due to the ease of making a speed skating track in the city - often just a case of watering over an athletics track - people flocked to the stadias to watch their heroes, with the 1884 skating race involving the Norwegian skating pioneer Axel Paulsen and a Dutch champion, Renke van Der Zee, drew almost 30,000 spectators. By now, the skating administrators had determined the format that has been common in long track all through its remaining history: the skaters going in pairs against each other, with two marked lanes (the inner and outer) with the skaters changing after every lane, so that no skater could interfere with the other. In the end, the skater with the lowest time won, regardless of what pair he skated in. However, quadathlon (allround) tournaments were quickly introduced, so that the competition would not be immediately over after one race. In the beginning, the winner had to take three of the four races, but as distance specialisation became common and it became almost impossible to win three races, the “time points” (or converting the 5000- and 1500-metre times into how long it would take to skate a 500-metre with the same pace) were introduced.

Speed skating became a city sport because of viewer accessibility. Unlike all other winter sports bar ski jumping, all the action took place in front of the spectators, who could even time the athletes themselves if they so desired. By contrast, cross country skiing took place through the forests, with the athletes appearing one by one as they crossed the finish line. In addition, skating arenas were close to the major city centres, and were often used as football or athletics stadiums in summer. However, much the same applied to ski jumping, where the major event of the season took place at Holmenkollen - three miles outside Oslo. Thus, the ski jumpers, led by the Ruud family from Konsgberg, enjoyed good standing throughout the 30s, while the cross country skiers - who admittedly didn’t win much in competition with Swedes and Finns - were largely forgotten. They were also faced with competition from the athletes in Nordic combined, the ski jumping and cross country put together, using a complicated system similar to that in decathlon.

(more…)

Was it France-Italy or Argentina-Brazil? The match was played at the pace Barcelona usually attacks for most of the time. I loved the game, not the least because many of the Euro 2008 qualifying has been one sided to put it mildly (13-0 drubbing of San Marino any one?). A whole debate has resurfaced regarding qualifying matches. I have had some interesting talkathons on the topic and continue having them. I do agree with most of what Alan Hansen has already said though.

Coming back to the match - players are always guarded in the world cup finals and big matches as they don’t want to be the one who commits the error which costs their country the big tournament. Yesterday, all the inhibitions were gone and it seemed like France will run away with it after an early 2-0 lead. The Gilardino goal in the 20th minute made you get on the edge of the seat a bit more as Italy weren’t going to take it lying down. In the end, France won it 3-1 and despite the players not being as fast on the reflexes as they were during the world cup final, it was exciting and a match in which you couldn’t take your eyes off the tv screen.

France didn’t deserve to win

France did play better football but if we dissect the match, Italy were very unlucky. The first goal France score in the couple of minutes was the result of the perfect cross from Gallas. Govou then made no mistake in converting that pass into 1-0 from a very narrow angle. However, Gallas was probably off side when he received his pass. I cannot say for certain though as they never showed it from a 90 degree angle in the television replays. Even if we forget that, Italy had two situations in the match when they should have been awarded penalties. No, I am not an Italian supporter and I did want France to win the game. Many more Italians would have been complaining had this been the world cup final.

Impressive - Govou, Coupet and Pirlo

Coupet showed quick reflexes in the little chance he got. He has been over shadowed by Barthez all his career and it is pleasing to see him get some more international football finally. Pirlo was accurate as ever with his passes. The player who impressed me most was Sidney Govou. Coming into the first XI in the place of Saha, Govou was fast on his legs and seemed strong as well. What was most noticeable was him being in the right place at the right time - an easy thing to say but very difficult to achieve during a game. We should be hearing a lot more of Govou for many years in international football.

Was it a revenge?

Not really. In 1983, India defeated West Indies in the cricket world cup finals in one of the biggest upsets. Soon after, West Indies toured India and clean sweeped them. It lead to the glorious world cup winning captain, Kapil Dev, sacked from captaincy. How many people remember West Indies clean sweeping India? People still talk about India defeating West Indies in the world cup final. A revenge can only occur if it is done at the same stage when the same trophy or a bigger trophy is at stake. So if France defeats Italy in the 2010 world cup final, only then can we call it a revenge.

Italy digging itself a hole

Italy’s situation is precarious in the group now lying second from the bottom. Ukraine is also in the same group and Scotland is topping it. Italy’s real battle was to be with Ukraine but with Scotland threating to come into the equation, it can all get very tricky. There are a lot of matches still to go but a good start saves a lot of heart wrenching moments. Will history repeat itself? (Italy hey didn’t qualify for the subsequent Euro after winning the world cup in 1982). Maybe most matches are boring but this is definitely the group to keep track of!

[BBC report]

My thoughts after the 2006 France-Italy world cup final can be read here.

Picture: Fred Savage in The Wonder Years

Many years ago, I got my first cricket bat - a yellow plastic bat. As time went by, I got my cheap quality wood bat and then the Kashmir Willow which was every kid’s dream. However, I kept that plastic bat with me for a number of years. I still feel a rush of blood when I see a photograph of me holding that plastic cricket bat. Some how, I never felt the same with the cricket bats I got later although, without doubt, they were of a much higher quality.

The same goes for sports persons we idolise. We might see many over our life time – some of who will be unquestionably better. However, the newer sportspersons will never leave the same impression on our minds. You forge a bond with the player you see on the television set and the bond inspires you in many multifarious ways in those impressionable years. The sports person becomes a part of you sooner than you can realise.

It is obvious that we will feel sad when the group of sports persons we grew up idolising start retiring one after the other. Nanda Kishore, a sports blogger I love reading whenever he does write, after reading an interview of Sandip Patil says this:

The interview is a routine one, but it is so easy to forget people like Sandip Patil. One of my great regrets is not having watched him at his peak, when he famously took on the likes of Len Pascoe and Bob Willis. Like most Indians who grew up in the eighties, I have watched clips of the 1983 World Cup semis and finals over and over again, and Patil remains a dashing, enigmatic hero, a Jim Morrison kind of figure. Watching that disdainful hoick off Bob Willis that sails over deep square leg gives me the goosebumps everytime…

… So Sandy (Sandip Patil) is 50. Steve Waugh has retired. Boris Becker is in the commentary box or on the Laureus foundation panel. In a couple of weeks or so, Andre Agassi will be just another suburban Dad. I feel old. Actually, I feel fucking ancient.

Why does Nanda Kishore feel old, ancient and disgusted? One by one, he has seen the sports persons he grew up with hang up their boots. So, he is all familiar with this horrid feeling. With the realisation that with Agassi, the last of the pack would have gone, the feeling is painful. Agassi played a large part of his tennis when I grew up as well and with him, the last of the tennis players from my era is gone. I won’t see Sampras, Monica Seles or Andre Agassi play professional tennis live again. I might feel sadder even when Kumble, Lara and Tendulkar finally call it quits because I would have no one from my wonder years playing.

Why do feel so sad? A part of us dies with the retirement of these heroes. That’s why.

On a related note, my remembrances of Agassi and a take on Sampras and the greats can be read here and here respectively.