When Kieron Pollard slapped the fourth six of his innings against Holland on Monday, he brought up only his second ODI fifty in 34 matches.

The West Indian is a prized asset when it comes to the Twenty20 competitions, but he has struggled to find the necessary balance between batting instinctively by looking to dominate the bowling, and knowing when to apply a modicum of patience and general cricketing nous.

Two matches down, and India will be a pensieve lot. Their batting looks strong enough to blow anyone away, but what can they do about their bowling?

UDRS is one of my favorite topics in cricket and yet again the much maligned system came under the radar during the most exciting game of the World Cup so far. The match was on a knife’s edge at the start of the 25th over of the English chase. Yuvraj Singh struck Ian Bell, let out a vociferous appeal only to be denied by Billy Bowden. India were forced to play the hand that they loath. Use UDRS. Everything seemed to be alright and even the crowd let out a roar and even Bell had walked half way toward the change rooms. However there was another variable everyone had to contend with the 2.5 meter rule.

After last week’s look at the Cricketweb Uncapped XI Martin has turned his mind to the best of those many players with just a single Test appearance to their name.

The value of a wicket-taking strike bowler during the middle overs of an ODI cannot be understated, as Shoaib once again proved today.

The object of the exercise is to select a team from all those who have played the game, but never at Test level. Can anyone improve on Martin’s selection?

Following heavy defeats for Kenya and Canada on Sunday against New Zealand and Sri Lanka respectively, Zimbabwe couldn’t back up a decent showing in the first 50 overs of the match against Australia and consequently subsided against the Australian pace attack to mark another comfortable victory for the full member sides against the so-called minnows.

A comparison between England’s 2007 and 2011 World Cup squads.

Without doubt, the group stages of the ongoing World Cup have some matches, which don’t really invoke a lot of excitement. We sort through the schedule and pick some matches which look promising, atleast on paper.

As the 10th World Cup begins we have an extract from a new book dealing with what some might argue was the first ever World Cup, back in 1912.