ICC Champions Trophy 2004

[SirBloody Idiot]

Purely and simply that they (Australia) are unquestionably the best - and anyone worth their salt, given the choice, would take the option of measuring themselves against the cream.

That, and America's mentality to sport is that they are the best at everything...

I can't wait to see the Yanks get killed.

 

[krkode]

That, and America's mentality to sport is that they are the best at everything...

I can't wait to see the Yanks get killed.

Not only is that wrong, but it comes off as extremely ignorant.

Sure the 'yanks' will get killed, but don't go about propogating something that isn't true. America is the best at a lot of things, undoubtedly, but they don't think they're the best at everything.

 

[Neil Pickup]

That is very true, but how come the England cricket team isn't more balanced. There is a lot of talented Asian and Black players in the UK county cricket scene but when they do get picked they get only a couple of matches. The England selectors should persevere with these players more like they have done with Steve Harmison and Andrew Flintoff, both who had disappointing starts to their international career but have gradually made their mark. If the selectors fail to persevere with a base of Asian and Black players, the England team will not realise the talent of players such as Vikram Solanki, Kabir Ali and Alex Tudor.

All due respect, but that's a load of rubbish.

Tudor's injury record makes Darren Anderton's look unblemished and had far more chances than he should have had. Solanki scares me every time he bats and I think he's had more than enough to prove he's not up to it. Kabir just did not look up to it on debut - Vaughan was reluctant to give him the ball, and that says a lot.

The fact that Shaftab Khalid, Kadeer Ali and Bilal Shafayat didn't get launched off the nearest jetty into the Indian ocean during the England A tour also suggests that your statement is utterly baseless

 

[THE G-TRAIN]

I think you guys are underrating sri lanka...And dare i say overrating England. Sri Lanka are very unpredictable, but generally do well in these tournaments, and definately have the players to go all the way. A couple of people have said pretty confidently that england will go through, but not the Lanks. England have been pretty crap for a few years, but are finally on the up. I dont think they are good enough to beat sri lanka, even though sri lankas form has not been great lately. As for the rest of the competition, One - day cricket is anyones game. Australia and india are deserved favorites, but i think its pretty open. Every team in this comp (with the exceptions of the minnows) and perhaps W.I have a chance of winning this comp, as a majority of the teams have been very unbalanced lately in teams and performance. Still, ill be backing the Aussies

 

[Sehwag309]

The US may never adopt cricket as many argue (read somwhere ) that cricket doesn't offer the same physical exercise that their sport has.

Although I feel competiton between countries is more exciting than just "Yanks V/S Mets", or "bugs bunny v/s daffodils or something".

I mean look at American Football, its like WWF with a ball which looks like baked bread.

 

[chicane]

The US may never adopt cricket as many argue (read somwhere ) that cricket doesn't offer the same physical exercise that their sport has.

Although I feel competiton between countries is more exciting than just "Yanks V/S Mets", or "bugs bunny v/s daffodils or something".

I mean look at American Football, its like WWF with a ball which looks like baked bread.

My NRI firends in the US also believe that cricket is not a team game (They hate cricket). They just compare it with basketball and baseball.

It'll be very difficult for cricket in the US because they already have NBA, baseball, American Football etc... I don't think any country avidly follows more than 3 sports.

 

[Dasa]

The pace of cricket is probably too slow for American tastes, matches going for hours, or days doesn't seem too suited for the USA.

 

[Sehwag309]

..Thus the 20/20, which might please the Americans..if we add sledging+bat fighting, it will surely be a hit

.........and then in few years, you will see movies where a thief enters someones house, the husband picks up a cricket bat to go after him

 

[luckyeddie]

..Thus the 20/20, which might please the Americans..if we add sledging+bat fighting, it will surely be a hit

Well, Glenn McGrath IS being coached by Dennis Lillee, so we're nearly there.

 

[Neil Pickup]

I think you guys are underrating sri lanka...And dare i say overrating England. Sri Lanka are very unpredictable, but generally do well in these tournaments, and definately have the players to go all the way. A couple of people have said pretty confidently that england will go through, but not the Lanks. England have been pretty crap for a few years, but are finally on the up. I dont think they are good enough to beat sri lanka, even though sri lankas form has not been great lately. As for the rest of the competition, One - day cricket is anyones game. Australia and india are deserved favorites, but i think its pretty open. Every team in this comp (with the exceptions of the minnows) and perhaps W.I have a chance of winning this comp, as a majority of the teams have been very unbalanced lately in teams and performance. Still, ill be backing the Aussies

Were this tournament in Sri Lanka, I wouldn't give us much of a chance of progress. However, it's in England, and the SL seam attack is on the not-too-great side of less-than-average - so I can only see 30 overs of ineffectual bowling from the Sri Lankans leading to an England win.

The 2002 NW Series - with a stronger SL side than today, arguably, was a very difficult one for the Sri Lankans.

 

[Loony BoB]

The US may never adopt cricket as many argue (read somwhere ) that cricket doesn't offer the same physical exercise that their sport has.

Although I feel competiton between countries is more exciting than just "Yanks V/S Mets", or "bugs bunny v/s daffodils or something".

I mean look at American Football, its like WWF with a ball which looks like baked bread.

Not enough physical exercise? Ha! Okay, let's have a look at this. You have Baseball, aka American Cricket. Count the average length a baseball batter walks/runs and then count the average of a cricket batsman. Don't even get me started on the bowler vs. pitcher scenario. As for American Football, rugby and rugby league have that hands down. Although the 'mericans do have a lot of weight to carry around with all that padding, the amount of physical resiliance and endurance you need to survive a rugby game is a tad over the good ol' US way of things.

The only thing that Americans need is not exercise but 'bang'. They need to have less restrictions, too, when it comes to baseball - why bowl a ball when you can just throw the damned thing? And American Football has the option of every single guy on the field smacking into each other at the same time, which is more fun for them to watch than the one man dodging his way through fifteen other players and then scoring a brilliant rugby try. Again, also, the lack of restrictions - you can make forward passes.

EDIT: Although I must admit that sometimes I wish F1GP had less restrictions. It would be neat to see motorsport without restrictions because then it really would be showing off the fastest in the world rather than the fastest in the restricted world.

 

[badgerhair]

That is very true, but how come the England cricket team isn't more balanced. There is a lot of talented Asian and Black players in the UK county cricket scene but when they do get picked they get only a couple of matches. The England selectors should persevere with these players more like they have done with Steve Harmison and Andrew Flintoff, both who had disappointing starts to their international career but have gradually made their mark. If the selectors fail to persevere with a base of Asian and Black players, the England team will not realise the talent of players such as Vikram Solanki, Kabir Ali and Alex Tudor.

Yes, Nasser Hussain's imminent 100th Test is a big demonstration of how England never persist with players of Asian or African ancestry, isn't it?

And you can find plenty of people who will wax lyrical about the idiocy of the England selectors in giving Mark Ramprakash game after game after game in which to fail.

You can point to Devon Malcolm being mistreated by the selectors, specifically Ray Illingworthless, but Angus Fraser can make exactly the same complaint, and he's as white as white can be.

It's no good just asserting that because India have a got a brilliant team full of Asian players, England will have similar success if they too pick Asian players. There's no particular reason to suppose that they are bringing up a bunch of Indians in Bradford and Southall rather than a bunch of Bangladeshis, and I think England can do without trying to emulate the Bangles right now. And if the present Zimbabwean team is an example of how talented Black players are, I don't really want much of that particular pie either.

It's actually a volume thing, more than anything else.

I just had a quick flip through the 1994 Playfair. Overseas players apart, there were then no more than a dozen black/Asian players with county contracts. The average county now has two or three, with one of them a first-team regular and the other two (probably aged about 20) knocking on the door with useful performances in the seconds.

And the talk of the future generation of players makes as much mention of Sajid Mahmood and Bilal Shafayat as it does of people like Alex Gidman or that Cook fellow whose first name escapes me just now.

Cheers,

Mike

 

[Neil Pickup]

Alistair..

 

[marc71178]

I think you guys are underrating sri lanka...And dare i say overrating England. Sri Lanka are very unpredictable, but generally do well in these tournaments, and definately have the players to go all the way.

If it were held in the Subcontinent.

Late English Summer conditions aren't quite the same though...

 

[luckyeddie]

Following on from badgerhair's point, although there weren't many coloured players in the county game a decade or more ago, many that did make it to county standard went on to play for England.

Now what that proves, I haven't a clue. It depends which side of the fence you sit, I suppose. Some might argue that the relative rarity was indicative of grass-roots institutional racism, others could point out that the ones that made it showed real character and as they ended up representing their country then that was an argument AGAINST the game in England being prejudiced.

 

[badgerhair]

Following on from badgerhair's point, although there weren't many coloured players in the county game a decade or more ago, many that did make it to county standard went on to play for England.

Now what that proves, I haven't a clue. It depends which side of the fence you sit, I suppose. Some might argue that the relative rarity was indicative of grass-roots institutional racism, others could point out that the ones that made it showed real character and as they ended up representing their country then that was an argument AGAINST the game in England being prejudiced.

I don't know what it proves either, because it could be a number of things.

One point to ponder is that the proportion of non-white county players who went on to play for England is rather similar to the proportion of Oxbridge graduates who went on to play county cricket and got picked for England, which is much, much higher than the proportion of county cricketers arriving from other sources. My guess on the Oxbridge front is that someone who can get themselves a degree from Cambridge is not going to bother with cricket as a professional career unless they are very good indeed and have genuine chances of making it to international level - merchant banking pays a great deal more than cricket does unless you are a star.

The Asian and Caribbean "communities" tend to involve children paying a great deal of attention to what their parents tell them, and there is oodles of anecdotal evidence of promising teenagers effectively giving up the game in order to get involved with the family business or qualify as a doctor or accountant because that's what daddy told them to do. So it would take a lot of determination to take up cricket as a career.

Now, there's no doubt in my mind that the paucity of non-white players 15 years ago was down to low-level racism, but that it was not something peculiar to cricket. 15 years ago, it would have been a major issue that there were members of the Cabinet who are gay, who have smoked marijuana, or are black, but now it passes with little comment. And I remember musing with a friend in 1998 that it was a mark of progress that the next England cricket captain would have a brown skin (Hussain and Ratracash being the only visible candidates) and that the only debate was about which of them would do better, not what colour their skin was - and there would have been endless comment about their skin colour only 10 years earlier.

It's a mistake to think that cricket can be far in advance of, or far behind, the society in which it is embedded (except in times of great upheaval such as in Zimbabwe now or South Africa some years ago). Britain has moved far enough in the last 20 years that what you can do now matters far more than what your skin colour is (although you'd have to have an excessively optimistic view to assert that there is no colour prejudice at all).

So we'll be able to tell that Britain has become truly integrated when the proportion of "Asian" county cricketers who get picked for England is as low as the proportion of "white" county cricketers who get picked.

Cheers,

Mike

 

[krkode]

Maybe the proportion of Asian cricketers being picked should correspond (and does correspond?) to the proportion of Asian people in England.

Who of Asian descent represents England now? Hussain is the only one for now. That's 1 out of, say, 15 players. A solid 7%.

And what is the racial make-up of England? Are 7% Asians or are asians actually overrepresented in the English side?

 

[Neil Pickup]

It's about 4-5m out of 60m (including Scotland, Wales and NI) - around 7%.

However, cricket is a sport that's more commonly played in Asian 'communities' than white ones - so that's a flawed measure.

 

[luckyeddie]

Maybe the proportion of Asian cricketers being picked should correspond (and does correspond?) to the proportion of Asian people in England.

Who of Asian descent represents England now? Hussain is the only one for now. That's 1 out of, say, 15 players. A solid 7%.

And what is the racial make-up of England? Are 7% Asians or are asians actually overrepresented in the English side?

Here's the breakdown by ethnicity for the UK:

2001 census figures

As you can tell, there should be one non-white in the English team - he should have one Indian leg, one Pakistani leg (below the knee), one Bangladeshi hand, fingers from other Asian countries (mixed), etc etc.

 

[Albion]

Funnily enough people have been saying who they think might win.

But has anyone else thought that the tournament might be a complete wash-out?

I mean - scheduling cricket for late September in England!