Finally a game to watch

Well in this world cup, there have hardly been games that can be watched keeping our fingers crossed if not for a game or two. One game that I can cite here would be the game between India and England at Bangalore and the one between England and Ireland on the same venue. Despite India piling up 339 runs on the board aided with century from Sachin Tendulkar and a half century from Yuvraj Singh, the match ended in a tie with England also being unable to make it theirs. And regarding the match between Ireland and England, a score of 320+ was not sufficient to keep Ireland from winning.

This is not totally due to the games involving the non-test playing nations alone and instead, even the match between England and South Africa happened to be a viewers' nightmare with South Africa coming so close and leaving things to England to finish their task. Now, there has been some excitement from the world cup with just 4 overs of the game changing the game totally. One cannot even figure out how on earth someone could smash 92 runs from 4 overs with every ball fetching close to 4 runs. Had it not been for these four overs, even a 4 an over average would have been tough.

A tougher thing to figure out was how could Pakistan drop the catch of the same player who towards the end of the New Zealand innings be equally devastating as calm he was in the beginning? One has to recall the way Pakistan dropped the easy catch of Sachin Tendulkar in the league match against India (obviously) in the 2003 world cup. Had it not been for Sachin Tendulkar, the match would have gone the Pakistani way with Ganguly going out for a duck and with Yuvraj Singh not being as fit as he is this time with half centuries in four games.

Even in the game against Sri Lanka, Sangakkara was put down repeatedly and though Pakistan eventually won, the margin of victory was just ten runs which should have been a warning to the Pakistani fieldsmen to improve upon the same. Finally, they paid a price for their first ever defeat in this world cup when they surrendered to New Zealand. The lone fifty from the Pakistani innings came from the blades of the number 8 batsman Abdul Razzaq who scored 62 runs along with a partnership of 68 runs for the 8^th wicket. That was all the Pakistanis could manage.