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Lanka down Kiwis in final league game

Somehow, when these things happen, you always end up feeling sorry for the side that gets knocked out of a tournament on considerations other than cricketing.

I am not implying here that New Zealand did not lose a cricket match, here -- in fact, they lost both the games they played against their hosts, and were on the back foot in the two washed out games against India where some play was possible.

But I guess I am a bit of a traditionalist in these things -- I like tournaments where the participating sides actually play each other, over the specified number of games, in order to reach the final.

Going into the final league game between Sri Lanka and New Zealand in the ongoing Singer Akai Nidahas Trophy one day triangular, though, what do we have? A league phase that was supposed to feature 9 games -- of which, including today's, a mere four games were possible. And that, any way you look at it, is an unacceptable proportion.

Time maybe for the ICC to get tough on scheduling? Time for the global body to insist that a tournament, when scheduled, should be at such times of the year when play is actually possible? To impose penalties when a cricket body decides to hold a tournament in the kind of weather that would have had Noah putting a fine edge on his ark-building tools?

Not teeing off on Sri Lankan authorities here, actually, since they are by no means the sole culprits. Nor am I suggesting that cricket tournaments can be held only at the height of summer. Sure, the odd rain interruption is going to happen anyway, and that is perfectly acceptable. But increasingly, international cricket bodies, eager to take the sponsors for all they've got, schedule tournaments with no thought of weather conditions, and the cricket records certainly deserve better than to be choked with "Washed out" entries.

The vagaries of the weather introduced a further equation into this one -- it wasn't enough for the Kiwis to win, they had to do it with a sufficiency of overs to spare.

Stephen Fleming opted to bowl first on winning the toss, though the wicket was guaranteed to get slower and spin more as the game went on. His argument was that he would much rather chase knowing how much he had to make, in how many overs, to be able to make it to the final.

Former Test batsman Arun Lal -- who, despite his low profile, is a darn shrewd judge of the game -- made an interesting point during the lunch break, on the ESPN panel. "Decisions about batting and bowling should be made," said Lal, "purely on the available cricketing conditions, and not on extraneous ones."

His argument was, this was the kind of pitch that would help the batsmen initially, but make run-getting tough as the game wore on, and that therefore, the wise thing to do on winning the toss was to bat first.

What then of getting a clean bead on the target score? Again, the Lal thinking was interesting. "To win and make the final," he argues, "you don't have to bat last -- you can do the same thing by batting first, putting up a bit total, then restricting the side batting first, all you have to do in that event is win by a certain margin. And on a turning track, you had a better chance of doing that, than batting first against a team packing six spinners."

Point well taken, I thought. Just incidentally, it was Arun who took the raw Saurav Ganguly, at a point when the left-hander's mind was all messed up after the disaster of his debut tour, and moulded him into what he is today.

The game itself followed a pretty predictable pattern. Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharana came out to open, and strutted their stuff despite some fairly tight bowling by Chris Cairns and Dion Nash. With those two batsmen, in the first 15, it doesn't really matter how accurate you are, really. Unless you have the pace to push them right back on the back foot and beat the bat, they are going to plonk a leg well forward and give it a go.

Of the two, it was Kalu who really fired while Jayasuriya looked rather off colour. The explosive left-hander needs one big innings in a hurry -- while he still is murder if you give him room wide of off stump, his drives over the straight infield, or even the pick-up shot he used to play so effectively while taking deliveries on or around off and despatching them over midwicket or squarer, ain't firing on all cylinders just now, and that hampers his strike rate, producing impatience and the error.

Here again, he got rather tired of motoring along at a slow-ish pace, tried to thump Vettori out of the park, but failed even to clear the fielder on the 30-yard line.

Kalu meanwhile reversed his rather poor form of late with a few lusty hits, then over-reached himself and went for one big one too many of his patented sweep pulls that he plays down on one knee, and only made it as far as the fielder at mid on.

But that produced the best batting display of the tournament, with veterans Aravinda D'Silva and Arjuna Ranatunga getting together (both, incidentally, upping themselves one step ahead in the batting order) in a classical one-day partnership.

Those two make the knack of run-scoring in a limited overs situation look ludicrously simple. Both are sound on the basics, their strokes are out of the copybook, but at the same time, both are brilliant improvisers when the need arises. Most importantly, though, they are wonderful workers of the ball around the field, judging the singles to inch-perfect precision.

Never a dull moment for the scorers, thus, when they are together and on song -- and today was one of those days, with the hugely consistent Aravinda making the most of the initial running, while Ranatunga took a few sighting shots, settled himself in and, eye well in, exploded into a scintillant century at better than a 100 per cent strike rate.

One thing I can't figure about Ranatunga is how come he has only four centuries in ODIs -- the man has oodles of talent, and surely should have a few more to his credit? Ranjit Fernando, for one, tends to put it down to unselfishness -- he was telling a few of us, when the Lankans were in India last, that though Ranatunga had the talent and natural ability to bat anywhere in the order, he preferred the low down slot, effacing himself and letting his collegues hog the limelight.

Thanks largely to the 132 run partnership between the veterans and a typical cameo by Upul Chandana who, of late, has finally looked like living up to his billing as a dangerous big-hitter, Lanka posted 293/4 in the allotted 50 overs.

A challenging enough total on a pitch of this nature against a side where almost everyone except the keeper appears able to bowl spin -- but what made it trickier still for the Kiwis was that if they wanted to get into the final, they had to get past the target in 41.3 overs, at a shade over 7 an over.

That kind of ask (over the distance, that would have meant the Kiwis needed to score what, 351 runs in 50 overs, not something you do every other day) almost inevitably ends in disaster, because getting over a run a ball consistently through 50 overs works on your nerves and forces all kinds of mistakes.

Seen in that perspective, the Kiwis played wonderfully well to get to where they did. Consider this: till the 35th over, the New Zealand score was consistently ahead of the corresponding Sri Lankan score, this despite a track where the odd ball was turning square and bouncing straight up at Kalu's dentures.

Sri Lanka: 24/0 in 5; 61/0 in 10; 78/1 in 15; 101/2 in 20; 152/ in 30; 176/2 in 35; 221/2 in 40; 252/3 in 45.

New Zealand: 25/1 in 5; 68/1 in 10; 97/3 in 15; 116/4 in 20; 171/8 in 30; 189/9 in 35...

That set of tables tells the tale of the game, really -- the Kiwis kept the run rate where it needed to be, but they were always apt to lose wickets in such a flat out assault on a wicket like this, facing bowlers like Muralitharan, Dharmasena and Jayasuriya who are all well versed in the knack of exploiting such conditions.

Nathan Astle was the pick of the batsmen, playing with calm assurance and really exploding once Chris Cairns joined him out in the middle. But there was just too many runs on the board, the ask rate was too high, and the collapse therefore pretty inevitable -- it didn't really matter which bowler Ranatunga used, when.

The Kiwis, though, have only themselves to blame for their plight -- and I am not referring here to what Arun Lal argued was an error of judgement in opting to field first. I mean, these guys are among the best fielding sides in the business, but their display today was if anything worse than the most dismal fielding performance India, not quite in the Kiwi class, has ever put up.

They just went to pieces out there, misfielding, giving away overthrows, not judging high hits and making a horrible meal out of holding on to those -- in sum, they messed up in every possible way they could, Wiseman even inventing his own method when he stood at square leg, close enough to stop the single, and watched an Upul Chandana paddle pass him in seeming slow motion en route to the boundary.

Having given away far too runs in the field, the Kiwis found the Sri Lankans not sharing their prodigal mood. And lost. End of story, and it sets up an India-Sri Lanka final on Tuesday.

Postscript: Rediff will be covering the final of the Akai Singer Nidahas tournament live, on July 7. Since the chat log has been reconfigured and cleaned out, we suggest that you re-log in, and get a new password. The link will be up on the cricket page Monday evening.

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