Watching ... painfully

As one tries to make sense of what exactly happened in the cricket today, when Pakistan gorged themselves in batting heaven, one needs to spare a thought. For a talented young batsman who had to spend 141.2 overs in the dressing-room, watching his team-mates plunder runs to their heart’s content. Poor ol’ Salman Butt.

He spent ten minutes in the middle, faced six balls and hit just one measly boundary while his gluttonous friends spoilt themselves with 86 between them. Obviously he was happy for them, but surely, at some point, he wondered what he could have achieved on this pancake-flat surface, masquerading as a Gaddafi Stadium cricket pitch.

He could look forward to cashing in when the second innings came around, but, wait, Pakistan reached a situation where they might not even bat again. He probably thought of Faisalabad and Karachi, remembered his big knocks there and promised himself not to give it away early.

He probably saw the tripe being served up and kicked himself often. More than anything, he probably rued his method of dismissal - needlessly run-out in the third over of the first morning of the opening day of a Test series and to add to it all, against India. One can only conjecture, but maybe, sometime in between all these thoughts he ventured a bit further and applied a convoluted logic.

If Ganguly hadn’t played then Gambhir might have played instead; if Gambhir was in the XI he would almost surely have been fielding at short leg; considering he is a right-hander, unlike Yuvraj, there is no way he would have swooped down so fast and thrown down the stumps. It's dynamics such as these that make sport so alluring; and in fact it's probably one of the reasons why a few of us watch