There are all sorts of whirlpools going on in cricket, what with Ireland playing Zimbabwe and Australia playing Sri Lanka. Then there was New Zealand playing an ODI with Pakistan. Well, you might have noticed the commonality: all involve white teams beating brown or black teams on their home turf.
Sri Lank prepared a spinning wicket at Galle, with the result that Australia opened the bowling with Kuhnemann, their slow left-armer. Time was, on a spinning wicket, when you had loaded your team with spinners, you would give some medium pacer the ball for a couple of overs, so as to get the shine off the ball. It used to be someone who had played as a batsman, but who could bowl a bit. India particularly used this, because they had four spinners of class in the 1970s. Only one Test, I believe, saw the quartet picked. Usually, the Indian selectors went with three. And because they were such rotten batsmen, there was a batsman picked who could turn his arm over.
But somewhere around 1980, there developed the idea of opening the bowling with spin at one end.letting the spinner having a nice shiny and hard ball, with which he could better get movement in the air. Pakistan prepared a spinning wicket for the West Indies for both Tests at Multan, and both sides started each innings with a spinner. But there was always a pacer at the other end it was not until the last innings, when Pakistan flubbed getting 254, being bowled out for 133, that any team started the innings with an all-spin attack.
It seems Sri Lanka tried something similar in Galle, with similar results. The Sri Lankan captain, Dhananjaya De Silva will clearly want to copy a leaf out Shan Masood’s book, and cling like limpet to his job. There are similarities. Shan Masood suffered the only innings defeat after making more than 500. De Silva led the team to its worst ever defeat. Shan probably has the edge, for he has managed to lose a match to the West Indies, nd at home. These days, that takes some doing.
That was an interesting match, for it involved one black team playing another. If a white team plays a black team, the black team is supposed to roll over and play dead. As Pakistan did when it lost the first fixture of the Champions Trophy. Even Ireland has got that white privilege, as it almost won in its sole Test with Zimbabwe, stopped only by the tsin.
Well, the Champions Trophy has happened with Indian captain Rohit Sharma being saved from the polluting presence of having to come to Pakistan. One is reminded of the Pre-Partition Maharaja of Kashmir who went to the UK with special shoes, which had a special compartment between the sole and the inner, filled with Kashmiri soil, so that he never set foot on foreign soil. Brahmins have a thing about this, because when the British tried to use Indian troops in Burma, some Brahmin soldiers got worried that they could lose caste. So Rohit Sharma has been saved a load of purification ceremonies, including bathing in this winter weather. I’m not sure he would be spared having to make gifts of clothing to other Brahmins. But perhaps the Indian government would simplify things by having Sharma give the money equivalent to a BJP official who would give the money to the right people.
Trump is showing every sign of having lost it, by suggesting that the USA would take over the Gaza Strip after it was emptied permanently. There is the problem of what to do with the Gazans. He didn’t present any ‘final solution’, but that seems the next step. After all, if Hitler could kill off six million Jews 80 years ago, surely a few million Palestinians won’t be a problem.
The real-estate approach shed a new light on politics. Maybe we should try Malik Riaz. Or Alim Khan.. Or any other property dealer we might like.
Just think of all of those huge cricket grounds converted to housing schemes. The revenue would be enough for us to be able to lend to the IMF.
