World Cup Cricket Thread

Dillagii · Post by **Dillagii** » March 23 07, 8:12 pm

For India to qualify for next round, Bermuda should beat Bangladesh which is only 1% chance. India is almost out of tournament in the first round. I had so many expectations on our team. Now I have to wait 4 years for next world cup. I am so devastated.

Can I get a hug?

Mary1966 · Post by **Mary1966** » March 24 07, 12:22 pm

DiLLaGii wrote:For India to qualify for next round, Bermuda should beat Bangladesh which is only 1% chance. India is almost out of tournament in the first round. I had so many expectations on our team. Now I have to wait 4 years for next world cup. I am so devastated.

Can I get a hug?

And the latest on the Bob Woolmer murder investigation:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/stor ... d=10430742

The mystery surrounding the murder of Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer deepened last night, with TV Jamaica claiming two Pakistan players had been ordered to stay in the West Indies.

While the distraught Pakistan team prepared to fly home from the World Cup early today, the television station reported the two unnamed players had been told to remain while an inquest into Woolmer's death was conducted.

Police took DNA samples and fingerprints from the team as well as asking questions. The side's media manager, Parvez Mir, dismissed the television reports as mere speculation. He said the team would travel back to Pakistan, via London, as planned. Mir did confirm that two team officials would remain in the West Indies.

Mary1966 · Post by **Mary1966** » March 26 07, 12:21 am

http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/wc2007/ ... 87189.html

Bangladesh 96 for 3 beat Bermuda 94 for 9 by 7 wickets (D/L method)

It was a delayed, stop-start affair that was reduced to 21 overs-a-side but will go down as one of the biggest moments in Bangladesh's sporting history, a sweet seven-wicket triumph that surged them into the second stage of the World Cup. Their comfortable victory meant that India were well and truly ousted from the competition, leaving Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to carry forward the Asian hopes from here on.

It was a wet, gloomy affair at the Queen's Park Oval but one that ended in a wave of Bangladeshi elation. They kept Bermuda down to 94, largely owing to Mashrafe Mortaza and Abdur Razzak, and then got home by seven wickets in conditions where the ball was moving around prodigiously. Chasing a meagre 96, Bangladesh were shaky at 37 for 3 but Mohammad Ashraful and Saqibul Hasan stitched together a 59-run stand to seal the issue.

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Sorry, Dil. India goes home too.

Dillagii · Post by **Dillagii** » March 26 07, 8:06 pm

Mary1966 wrote: Sorry, Dil. India goes home too.

Mary1966 · Post by **Mary1966** » March 27 07, 11:05 pm

The first article I've seen trying to analyze if Pakistan's two losses in the World Cup could have been fixed:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.j ... brig24.xml

The intrigue surrounding Bob Woolmer's murder has thrown the spotlight back on Pakistan's two defeats in the opening week of the 2007 World Cup, both against teams with lower world rankings. Could one of these games have been thrown? And if so, could Woolmer have been preparing to blow the whistle on those responsible?

Since the match-fixing scandal first broke eight years ago, Pakistan have attracted rumour and innuendo whenever they lose a game that they were expected to win. Yet such blatant forms of corruption are widely believed to have been abandoned since the Anti-Corruption Unit was founded in 2000.

If there is still match-fixing going on, the devil is probably in the detail: in a batsman's individual score, for example, or the number of wides in an innings. The complexity of a cricket scorecard offers myriad possibilities, both for punters and for the illegal book makers who operate out of the Indian subcontinent.

The first instinct of anyone looking at Pakistan's progress (or lack of it) in this World Cup might be to focus on the big upset: the three-wicket loss to unfancied Ireland on March 17, which was also the day Woolmer died. On the face of it, this match might seem to resemble Pakistan's first-round defeat against Bangladesh in the 1999 World Cup - a game that roused enough suspicion to be investigated both by Indian police and a Pakistani judicial review.

However, there is one crucial difference between the two games. In 1999, Pakistan had already qualified for the next stage of the tournament when they played Bangladesh. This year, their whole campaign hinged on beating the two weaker nations in their group, Ireland and Zimbabwe. It is hard to believe that the players would have agreed to such an ignominious script, however handsome the sums they might have been offered.

In that dramatic Irish victory, Pakistan were always scrambling after a series of top-order batsmen succumbed to thin edges (a notoriously difficult kind of dismissal to fake: if batsmen could line up the ball with such inch-perfect precision, no one would ever get them out unassisted). To the outside observer, it seemed as if they simply got off to a bad start and never recovered.

So what of the tournament's curtain-raiser, which brought Pakistan together with the West Indies? If a match was to be thrown, this one would have been a more suitable choice. In theory, it should not have been a "must-win" game, though it did become crucial when Pakistan were ambushed by Ireland four days later.

Pakistan won an advantageous toss, put the West Indies in, bowled solidly and looked to be well placed at the halfway mark. The target for victory was 242 - a total that their captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq, later admitted should have been within range. But somehow they never quite built up any momentum, and fell short by 54 runs.

One anomaly that has shown up on the scorecard is the shortage of runs scored during the powerplays - the early overs when fielding restrictions are in place and teams normally expect to score quickly.

Over the first 10 overs, Pakistan scored 37 runs for the loss of two wickets, which is standard enough, but the next five produced a measly seven runs. Deliberate or accidental? In the world of sport, you never can tell - which is why the game of cricket is so well suited to shady interventions from gambling cartels. In this case, however, we must rule Pakistan innocent until proven guilty.

Mary1966 · Post by **Mary1966** » March 28 07, 8:54 pm

http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/pakista ... 87631.html

Pakistani cricketers returned home to a heated reception on Wednesday, angry fans telling them to "go to hell". The team's outing in the West Indies had ended in tragedy, their first-round exit from the World Cup being followed by the murder of their coach Bob Woolmer.

Shahid Afridi, Danish Kaneria, Kamran Akmal and Mohammad Sami were heckled by a crowd of around 100 people after arriving at the Karachi international airport. The players were protected by dozens of policemen.

"Why have you come back?" one fan shouted while another supporter bellowed "Go to hell" at Afridi, according to an AFP reporter. When Kaneria tried to leave the arrivals lounge the crowd shouted "Shame on you" and he went back inside, before asking for police protection to help him leave.

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We already knew Pakistan fans were a tough group. I wonder what India will get when they return home.

greenback44 · Post by **greenback44** » March 29 07, 10:25 pm

I hear Keith Law writes bad things about Ireland.

Mary1966 · Post by **Mary1966** » March 30 07, 10:31 pm

http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/wc2007/ ... 88022.html

England 266 for 7 (Collingwood 90, Pietersen 48) beat Ireland 218 (O'Brien 63, Flintoff 4-43) by 48 runs

England overcame some uneasy moments with bat and in the field to record a comfortable 48-run win against Ireland in their opening Super Eights match. Paul Collingwood's 82-ball 90 nursed them to a respectable 266 aided by forties from Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff. Ireland's batsmen couldn't stay up with the rate although Niall O'Brien fought a defiant hand while Flintoff added four wickets to his useful 43.

Ireland, though, were not shamed and made life difficult for England after Michael Vaughan decided to bat first. When Pietersen was removed the scoreline tottered at 113 for 4. But Collingwood, England's middle-order safety valve, again assessed the situation and calmly assured against a major collapse. Flintoff's dismissal in the 44th over left Collingwood to nurse the closing overs. His fifty came off 65 balls, then he showed that power-hitting doesn't just reside with the two men who sandwich him in the order. The final six overs added 71 runs and England always knew that all they then needed was a competent performance in the field; it was about all they produced.

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Looks like Ireland performed rather well considering that they were one of the "minnows."

Dillagii · Post by **Dillagii** » March 31 07, 9:02 am

Mary1966 wrote: We already knew Pakistan fans were a tough group. I wonder what India will get when they return home.

Surprisingly Indian team recieved a calm reception. The reason for that is the team landed at 4.30am!

I still can't believe is out of World Cup

Now I have to wait 4 frigging years for another world cup.

Mary1966 · Post by **Mary1966** » March 31 07, 8:10 pm

That's a real bummer for someone who is a hardcore cricket fan like you Dill. Probably the closest thing to that kind of frustration that an American sports fan would feel is if they were a fan of someone who competes in the Olympics. Fail there and you don't get another shot for four years.