Category

not baseball

• not baseball

  They Know Not Cricket

  02.22.06 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  “Cricket as Art”. An amazing Radio 3 presentation by Darkus Howe on CLR James and Cricket. Must listen. [via CT].
  There is a gorgeous paragraph in Beyond the Boundary that I can merely echo:
  Our house was superbly situated, exactly behind the wicket. I doubt it for some years I knew what I was looking at [...]

• not baseball

  Give This Guy a Book Contract

  01.11.06 | Permalink | 3 Comments

  Come, little Iqbal, I* will tell you about Pakistani bowlers. As a genetic anomaly, they emerged from the banks of that old river Ravi. Weaned on a diet of buffalo milk and hearty roots, they were found to have great upper body strength. This provided them with a natural advantage over the rest of the [...]

• not baseball

  Ashes to Ashes

  12.03.05 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  There was England with six series wins in a row, including the little matter of the Ashes. There was Pakistan, with a new coach, without having won a test series in who knows how long. I certainly don’t. In 12.1 overs after lunch, eight English wickets fell and they lost the match by an innings [...]

• not baseball

  Mystic Test

  11.16.05 | Permalink | 7 Comments

  Guardian’s Richard Williams is in Multan covering the first Eng-Pak test. Multan is a city of saints and sun. It may make a mystic out of anyone but cricket and sufism proved a deadly combo for Williams. He wants to write about the use of instant replay in adjudicating a run-out [caught off-base]. But [...]

• not baseball

  Sox Win Bush Lose

  10.27.05 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  I won’t say that this trumps the ‘92 World Cup win by Pakistan….but it comes close. The Grand Slam and the el Duque in the 9th were the highlights for me. Seeing Bush Sr. cheering the ’stros was also a moment. Of intense hilarity, of course.
  My condolences to my peep, Rajeev, who had the misfortune [...]

• not baseball

  GO SOX GO

  10.16.05 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  Somebody call Shoeless Joe Jackson and tell him…we’re going to the World Series. Crede! SoouthSIDE!

• homistan, not baseball

  Faith in Cricket

  09.21.05 | Permalink | 24 Comments

  Recently, WaPo and NYT did pieces on the growing dominance of Christian prayer in baseball. Jesus is my designated hitter, indeed. I chuckled at the conflation of sports and religion in present day USA. Why can’t the Americans keep their religion off the pitch? The overt religiosity has always grated me in, what I perceive [...]

• not baseball

  After the Ashes

  09.12.05 | Permalink | 6 Comments

  Bloody good show, eh? England win back the Ashes from the Ozzies who have been hoarding them since 1987. The Ashes, lore has it, symbolized the cremation of the English cricket after their first defeat by Australia on home ground in 1882 [at the Oval]. The urn doesn’t really exchange hands - it just sits [...]

• not baseball

  Immigration Cricket

  05.23.05 | Permalink | Comment?

  As I mentioned, yesterday we went to hang out at Washington Park for some sporty fun. The park is an amazing urban space. Someone recently was grouching that Chicago parks have no character and I wish they had come with us to see how much character and life they do have - from people, [...]

• not baseball

  The God of Batting

  04.26.05 | Permalink | 7 Comments

  A few days ago, I hit a perfect drive over mid-on. It was a gorgeous shot, really. The bat moving as an extension of myself. I saw the very moment that the ball hit the pitch and, seemingly, slowed down for me. I have hit that shot hundreds of time, in real matches even. During [...]

• homistan, not baseball

  Watans, Wickets and Walis

  04.17.05 | Permalink | 5 Comments

  Pakistanís Military Dictator-cum-President Parvez Musharraf is in India this weekend, in what is being hailed on both sides of the border (India, Pakistan and even in vilayat) as another successful round of cricket diplomacy (the first being Ziaís surprise trip to meet Rajiv Gandhi in Rajasthan in 1987). This cricket match, played in the Firuz [...]

• not baseball

  PostColonial Cricket

  04.17.05 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  Played a few games of cricket yesterday. The venue was the entrance to the Reg. Ostensibly, we were all there for this. But, the sun was shining blue and I had a bat in my hand after a long, long time. The teams and the audience were a mixed bag of subalternists, cambridge wallas, and [...]

• not baseball

  Bangalore High

  03.29.05 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  We were seniors or juniors, I cannot remember. The sun had baked the earth of Lahore into clay even in early March. I was a new convert to cricket. Having been raised on the mean streets of Doha, the game was as foreign to me as Gulli-Danda [also a source of shame]. However, in any [...]

• not baseball

  Head Before Wicket

  01.25.05 | Permalink | 7 Comments

  No fun being a fan of Pakistani cricket lately. Of course, I have risen above such petty nationalisms a long time ago. I am now an objective connoisseur of the tao of cricket. But for those that care, Pakistan has taken a beating far surpassing their usual flameouts. Consider this: First Test - Australia wins [...]

• not baseball

  Crickets Chirping

  10.22.04 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  Over at tsk, is an ad hominem attack on Cricket. And I am asked to defend it. Just as tsk has to defend white man’s brutal colonialism that has led to the unfortunate situation where a poor sepoy has to defend the landed gentleman’s leisurely pursuit of sipping tea and knocking around a leather ball [...]