Samir Chopra

What is consistent about Indian teams is that they are not very consistent

After three years of the IPL, and several more years of the financial domination of the BCCI, how much richer in cricketing terms is India?

Now that the IPL is on (and on and on) there is, as might be expected, plenty of talk about big-hitting, and especially talk of the biggest hits and hitters

A couple of years ago, after I read Sambit Bal's wonderful piece on his cricket-watching experiences at Galle , I got to thinking about which cricket ground had provided the best cricket-watching experience for me

Here is a little bet I set myself: I could open Ray Robinson's On Top Down Under (a collection of biographical essays on Australian Test captains) to any page at random, and find a memorable turn of phrase

When I stepped out into the windswept, icy canyons of Manhattan later that afternoon, my naturalization papers in my backpack, I had to restrain a giggle or two

 

In buying and reading these books, I rediscovered several pleasures which had started to become distant memories: the idle browse through several decades of cricket history, the serendipitous discovery of a classic, and most importantly, when reading

There is a way of describing Pakistani cricket, which used to be tiresome but which has now started to strike me as patently offensive

That sports-writing is full of clichés is, well, a cliché

Ignoring the headline and looking at the text with the expectation that the author did not believe in a culture of failure, it reads to me as a fine debunking of the idea which has begun circulating among the backwoodsmen and newspapers of the Little

An international cricketer could do with a little apprenticeship in umpiring as part of his graduation to the highest form the game

British Asians are not a monolithic bloc

 

There are other reasons why Modi's comments make sense for they raise an interesting point about the very nature of the IPL, about whether it is a domestic tournament or an international league

War remains a bloodthirsty pursuit

Despite the lopsided nature of the games (at least far as the margins went), these were both very good Tests, just because there was so much outstanding cricket on display

It is internally incoherent, is poor cricketing strategy, and when the captain does it to protect his wicket, it looks especially pusillanimous

Why don't Indian captains of recent years set more attacking fields for their spinners?

At a time when cricket has increasingly become a batsman dominated game, when the single biggest threat to Test cricket is not the IPL or T20 but the roads that are routinely produced by groundsmen the world over, what precisely is the case against