India prove they are cheats by batting on turning pitches for decades
And Sri Lanka Cricket doesn't even try to make our correspondent work for his jokes
Over the years, India have sneakily trained their batsmen to blind the opposition by kicking up dust from their carefully designed pitches • BCCI
Clearly if the ball turns from the first day in a Test in India, the home side is winning underhandedly. Having lost the first Test, the pitch for the second Test in Chennai was described by some pundits as "a sandpit", with England collapsing for 134 and 164, and India going on to score more than 600 runs across two innings. If that wasn't outrageous enough, apparently, this isn't even the first time India have dominated an opposition on a spinning surface. Can you believe this? This means that not only do India produce pitches unfit for Test batting, they have gone as far as producing generations of batsmen who can score loads of runs on these pitches, the cheats.
Spare a thought for the media pundits who used their staunchest anti-pitch rhetoric up in the second Test, where 914 runs were scored, and then found that in Ahmedabad, where the match aggregate was 387, no one really trusted them anymore. Like hunters using all their ammo up on a rat while a bear sneaks up behind them.
Do we have to do this again? Do we really have to mock the ever-living crap out of SLC yet again? At some point it becomes boring. I mean, every month. Every single month, it's the same thing with these people. It's like they think that after one decent Lanka Premier League, everyone has suddenly forgotten how resplendently incompetent they have been for years.
…who after the IPL auction, put up videos on social media in which cricket director Mike Hesson is shown to be outsmarting other franchises by bidding for players RCB don't necessarily want (thus driving up the amounts other teams will have to pay for those players) in order to secure the likes of Kyle Jamieson and Glenn Maxwell in later rounds of the auction. I don't know about you, but for a team that's notorious for making too little of the talents at their disposal, it seems a little early in the process to gloat. Either they are right to be this confident or they have made their eventual shaming even more hilarious. In which case, see you back here in three months.
Australia are not going to tour South Africa in March, as had been planned, Why? Officially, Cricket Australia is citing an "unacceptable health and safety risk" to its players, due to the prevalence of Covid-19 in South Africa. Here are some facts, though:
Andrew Fidel Fernando is ESPNcricinfo's Sri Lanka correspondent. @afidelf