Nisadas

The glorious thing about the internet is that even non-experts like myself can plough on and put forward silly notions on any variety of subjects. Therefore, allow me to present my proposal for future ODI visits by the Indian cricket team to Sri Lanka:

In future, there will be no need to fly in all the members of the Indian team. Instead, the captain of the team can be flown in with a bunch of tourist-journalists. The journos will be given full access to the rest of the country so that they can write about stuff the rest of the world doesn’t know much about.

On the day alloted for the match, M&M (M. Dhoni and Mahela, not our beloved spin-twins Murali and Mendis) will be escorted to the ground. After the usual talk about the pitch and the conditions, they will have the toss. Unlike any other occasions, we will have conch-blowing, drummers and even lighting of the oil lamp to herald this magnificent moment.

Once the toss has been called, the winner will have his hand shaken by the rest of the congregation. The man of the match will be chosen from a couple of names shuffled about in a cricketer’s helmet and the cheques for winning the match and other awards will be handed over as part of the ceremony.

This in turn will result in such low overhead that Small and Medium businesses can afford to sponsor the series, perhaps on a match-by-match basis. I haven’t figured out how the exposure can be fully utilised without the willow and the leather in play, but I’m sure the talents of the creators of Sri Lanka’s Dancing Stars can be put to good use. By saving over six hours per day of people’s time, productivity will increase, while there will also be a significant saving in terms of bandwidth due to lower usage of Cricinfo‘s live scorecard facility. Families will be happier for their fathers/sons/brothers/husbands being home earlier instead of dallying by the big screens at Abans/Singer showrooms on their way home.

Why do I say this? A brief look at the results of the last two series in Sri Lanka:

What about that aberration where India won a toss and Sri Lanka won? Well, that’s because MSD didn’t know that batting first works at RPS, not at the Rangiri Dambulla stadium. Let’s look at the matches by who bats first:

But seriously, have we forgotten that barely two years ago our boys were in the world cup final with Australia? Well, apparently so. This is in no small part due to the fact that the team that made it into the finals in 2007 displayed a lot more courage, intensity and overall flair than what most of us cricket-mad Sri Lankans saw in the recent past. It hurts to be beaten on home turf.

I can only hope that the itinerary for the rest of 2009 proves to be more fruitful for our team.

The tables in this post are my first in a blog post and are thanks to the tutorial at Web Design from Scratch.