It was a learning experience and he found the gap in the end.adharcric said:
Since you have been watching the match, you would know better but I find it difficult to believe that a player who has faced 70 odd balls couldn't play tip'n'run cricket against what must have been good but not great bowling.Mr Mxyzptlk said:It's not like he was leaving the ball alone or playing defensive shots. He was trying to score runs. It was just good bowling and some sharp fielding. Ease up on him - he played a match-winning knock.
It was a top quality over from Jerome Taylor to be honest. He could hadly have bowled it much better. Taylor bowled poorly early on, but came back tremendously in the clutch. Both he and Bravo were unlucky to surrended fine edges for four.viktor said:
The thing is that middle order batsmen often do - they come in between overs 20 and 40 with no pressure, the field spread, and it's very easy to knock the ball into gaps for runs, as opposed to find gaps through ring fields like you're forced to do if opening the batting, or if (as it sounds from this thread) they bring up the field in the last few overs.adharcric said:
Yeah you're right about that, but I was disappointed more with Kaif's slow rate in the middle-overs rather than his deadly dot balls at the end. He was batting in the middle-overs for much of his innings so it was more his inability to find the gaps rather than a tight field for the most part.vic_orthdox said:
he is not a big-shot guy while he had the original mr. big shot at the other end..why the hell could he not have tried to take a quick single and given the strike to dhoni was my point, he was rotating the strike so well till that time...? and i agree most of his knock was good but the end was really iffy and he just barely got india through the gate.....Mr Mxyzptlk said:It's not like he was leaving the ball alone or playing defensive shots. He was trying to score runs. It was just good bowling and some sharp fielding. Ease up on him - he played a match-winning knock.
True...I found this an interesting quotation from an article by Siddhartha Vaidyanathan on CricInfo "A century off 99 balls while chasing, as Greg Chappell was to later concur, must be something special. In the 22 games played before this one, ever since he was appointed full-time captain, he averaged 55.88, including one century and nine fifties. Is there a case for calling him the best current one-day batsman? Think about it."Jono said:That some is just 'one', so no dramas there.
Dravid's continous improvement in ODIs is amazing though. When Sachin returns and opens the innings, the middle order will look very very good with Dravid, Yuvraj, Raina and Dhoni with Kaif thrown in there and Pathan's pinch hitting abilities as well.
