Team India Knock Australia Out Of World Cup 2011!

I said in one of my posts earlier that somebody needed to stop Australia before they ran away with the ICC Cricket World Cup for the fifth time! Pakistan stopped them! Team India knocked them out tonight! Incredible, but truly so and magnificently too!

More significantly, now India meet Pakistan the semi final at Mohali on March 30. If today's match was a huge one and hugely hyped, the Mohali one will be a gigantic match and a gigantic hype may be also be inadequate! Eternal rivals clash in a big one and words are not enough to describe the sensation. But one thing is sure, one nation of the subcontinent is going to figure in the final and Sri Lanka may even make it total.

Finally, India bowled better, fielded better and Dhoni shuffled his bowlers better. He also made the right decision bringing in Raina which was strongly suggested in my earlier post on SA disaster. But what's Dhoni doing with the bat? It remains a worry. Only his sweating sweltering ad keeps on coming consistently again and again! Gautam Gambhir messed up running between wicket with Yuvjaj giving the Aussies throwing practice three times and getting hopelessly out the third time. From a winning 166 for 2 India landed up at 186 for 5 which was really tense considering Indian batting collapses in the last matches. But Raina came in at that pressure moment and his handling of the situation was the real difference between Raina and Pathan.

And Yuvraj Singh! What a match winner he has been! All round consistent performances with four half centuries and more than 10 wickets in this world cup. He batted fielded and bowled brilliantly today and more importantly saw India through this well deserved victory. I say well deserved, because India deserved to win all its matches including that against England and SA. But internal individual factors prevented that. Noting of that now. Now for two more breathtaking matches and hopefully the World Cup!

Positives are: bowling & fielding getting better, captaincy getting better, Tendulkar, Gambhir, Yuvraj and Raina batting wonderfully. Sehwag and Kohli are ready to fire next! Maybe Dhoni too! Zaheer, Ashwin bowling wonderfully. Harbhajan needs to adopt a wicket taking habit fast. How is Pakistan feeling? Maybe Afridi will speak out in a day or two!

South Africa take on New Zealand tomorrow at Dhaka. New Zealand could make it real tough for SA. After today's thriller we expect more exciting encounters. You know preparing for the gigantic one!

Comments

The VIP Brat: A Study in Contrast!

Here we’re talking about only two compartments inside a particular AC 2-Tier coach in a particular daily train under the Indian Railways that departs a particular originating station at around noontime and reaches the destination city early morning the next day. The train is popular because it is superfast and always on time. That fateful noon too, the train was ready for boarding about one hour before departure. We cut to the inside of that particular coach having those two compartments for our contrasting study. Two elderly couples were in a state of considerable distress. One of them, both technically senior citizens, had been allotted two upper berths and the husband was at his wits end how to proceed, because his wife was being taken for check-up after surgeries in both of her knees—she could hardly walk and her climbing up the berth was a sheer impossibility. The husband was also on the wrong side of the sixties, but he thought he could manage the climbing once he managed a ...

Mitali: The Trauma of Losing a Sibling

Maybe I lied to her when I used to reassure her that she was going to be alright and was going to resume her life in some measure of normalcy in the future years; maybe all my gestures/expressions were false when I used to run my fingers across her forehead or embrace her on occasions when she was able to move around a bit; and maybe all my exhibitions of love care and responsibility were exposed as superficial when I failed to turn up in Delhi where she along with my mother were treated during September-October, 2022 (my mother Urmila Chakravarty was also diagnosed with dental cancer the same month the same year as she was) and when all the members of my parental family and the in-laws converged. Since that fateful day in August, 2022 when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer to that disastrous day of March 6, 2025—the day my younger blood sister Mitali (Mainu) Chakravarty Sarma (November 2, 1963—March 6, 2025) passed away in the wee hours in a hospital in Guwahati after giving a bra...

Release of Book 'Randomized: A Dozen Short Stories'!

The fourth collection of stories titled 'Randomized: A Dozen Short Stories' by Chinmay Chakravarty has been released on Amazon KDP just now! This collection, short stories in a lighter vein plus with mild satire like the previous collections, has been published in both the E-book and Paperback formats. The links are given below: International: Click Here ! India: Click Here ! Other collections of short stories by the same author: The Cheerless Chauffeur and Other Tales(2021)--Notion Press. Funny and Fishy Tales(2022)--KDP. The Weirdos(2022)--Ukiyoto Publishing. All books of the author are available on Goodreads, apart from Amazon and other outlets! Have a look!