Ashish Kumar from Tekriti Software

I followed the current Ashes series between Australia and England with a greater curiousity than I followed the triangular series involving India, New Zealand and Zimbabwe. The reason was the superlative performance by the English team, and especially 2 folks: Andrew Flintoff and KP Pietersen. Result: England regaining the series after almost 16 years. Now, 16 years is a long enough time for a lot of people to give up - but not the current England team. Lately, Australia have been in the habit of winning - a very dangerous habit of winning all the test series in the last few years. India did give them a hard time and also managed to break their winning streak once but, overall, Australia was a far superior team than any other team.

This victory of England over Australia makes me happy. Not because I like the England team more than Australia or vice-versa but because I see yet another team who has the balls to take on Australia in a test series. Happy because this would only mean balancing of cricketing powers and, hopefully, fewer one-sided matches. Happy because, again hopefully, I get to see some less arrogance from a few members of the Australian team. Happy because the other team will, hopefully, not get as intimidated by the Australian team as has become the norm.

Now that I am on the topic of cricket - I can’t stop mentioning how hurt I was when I read an article in today’s newspaper that there is again a doubt on whether the last tri-series involving India, New Zealand and Zimbabwe was fixed or not. I think it’s actually a good sign that I still get hurt when I read news of this kind - I only fear that I will start ignoring all this if this starts becoming more frequent.

BTW, I did receieve a few compliments for the current theme at my blog. To be fair (under pressure :-)), let me pass on the compliments to Madhavi for the photo at the top. This was a photo that was taken by her and edited by me to fit this blog.