Apartheid and Loss of World Cricket

Many a times I have revisited the vignettes of Barry Richards and Graeme Pollock from pre-apartheid period of SA Cricket (on YouTube and ESPN) smashing their way to announcing their presence in World Cricket. I just wonder how much we lost on the extravagant talent and extraordinary gift of these once in a lifetime players such as Barry Richards, Graeme and Peter Pollock, Eddie Barlow, Denis Lindsay, Ali Bacher, Mike Proctor and co. A historical injustice in the form of apartheid just cost us these prodigious talents. The 1969-70 series between South Africa and Bill Lawry's Australia was termed the 'World Championship of Cricket' and proved to be a high water mark in history of SA Cricket before the pall of apartheid gloom enveloped it. Australia lost 4-0 that series....they had never been humiliated in such a manner before...even the Douglas Jardine wasn't able to score this feat in the much maligned and infamous, Bodyline series of 1932-33. What an era, what dominance and such a pity we never got to witness these players turn into legends, barring Barry and Graeme.....this post is a tribute to those fallen heroes who never got a chance to redefine their legacy......‪#‎respect‬.....‪#‎nakedemotions‬

Comments

Love and Friendship

Friendship is an aspect of life that’s not controlled by its beholders. Ideal friendships, well they are the things of past now. Many a times we have seen our parents or their parents talking about their old great friends and how amusingly they tell us about their bonding, the moments they spent together and we see a ‘priceless’ twinkle in their eyes…..that’s something which is missing from modern friendships. There are terms & phrases like ‘yaar tu to apna bhai hai’, ‘yaar tu to ghar ka aadmi hai’ which even today invoke something very beautiful inside our hearts but we all know that the feelings underneath them are ‘hollow’, they are just mere words, ‘emotionless’ and ‘impassive’. Well who am I to comment on such an indefinable ‘qualitative’ perspective? I’m one of you, those wretched creatures that are still in need of true, great friendships. Well I certainly can’t say that I haven’t got friends. I’ve got friends, plenty of them in fact, and some of them are real great. I s...

Racing Extinction (2015) : A Commentary

It's really hard to switch on to a different language from the one you have constantly been tinkering with. I grew so accustomed to writing in Hindi in last few days that it started dawning on me that I might never be good again with my English. So this is a tester, ladies and gentlemen. Yesterday, one of my movie group friends, an American by nationality, questioned my fondness of documentaries. I specifically wrote in one of my columns that documentaries demand your unwavering attention and once you gave 'that' to them, you are rewarded much more handsomely than a proper, narrative, fictitious film. My reasoning for believing so is that a documentary is an experience of a creative process. It doesn't get made to 'entertain' you. They are there to reveal something to you. They teach you something. You get overwhelmed by them. 'Racing Extinction (2015)' was one such documentary. I watched it in last couple of days. I couldn't complete it in one ...

What Virat Kohli Could Learn from Sourav Ganguly's Career

This IPL season might be dubbed as 'Kohli's IPL' in years to come. He is unarguably the best exponent of white-ball batsmanship going around. However, for someone like me who places a great emphasis on longest form of Cricket i.e. Test Cricket, until and unless he proves himself in seeming and swinging conditions of England and New Zealand (I believe in him and thus shall wish him luck), I shall still rank him behind Kane Williamson and Joe Root. Just to make sure I'm impartial to this debate, I put my favorite cricketer of all time i.e. Sourav Ganguly behind Sachin, Sehwag, Laxman and Dravid when it comes to rank him in FAB FIVE of Indian Batsmanship because he simply wasn't as good as them in test cricket. Many call him a very good test cricketer and maintaining an average of 40 in test cricket from the very beginning till the very end signifies their reasoning but still, he fell short of 45/50 that makes a batsman statistical behemoth in purest form of Cricket. ...

Boredom

Search This Blog