Cricket: Balancing power

I followed the current Ashes series between Australia and England with a greater curiousity than I followed the triangular series involving India, New Zealand and Zimbabwe. The reason was the superlative performance by the English team, and especially 2 folks: Andrew Flintoff and KP Pietersen. Result: England regaining the series after almost 16 years. Now, 16 years is a long enough time for a lot of people to give up – but not the current England team. Lately, Australia have been in the habit of winning – a very dangerous habit of winning all the test series in the last few years. India did give them a hard time and also managed to break their winning streak once but, overall, Australia was a far superior team than any other team.

This victory of England over Australia makes me happy. Not because I like the England team more than Australia or vice-versa but because I see yet another team who has the balls to take on Australia in a test series. Happy because this would only mean balancing of cricketing powers and, hopefully, fewer one-sided matches. Happy because, again hopefully, I get to see some less arrogance from a few members of the Australian team. Happy because the other team will, hopefully, not get as intimidated by the Australian team as has become the norm.

Now that I am on the topic of cricket – I can’t stop mentioning how hurt I was when I read an article in today’s newspaper that there is again a doubt on whether the last tri-series involving India, New Zealand and Zimbabwe was fixed or not. I think it’s actually a good sign that I still get hurt when I read news of this kind – I only fear that I will start ignoring all this if this starts becoming more frequent.

BTW, I did receieve a few compliments for the current theme at my blog. To be fair (under pressure ), let me pass on the compliments to Madhavi for the photo at the top. This was a photo that was taken by her and edited by me to fit this blog.