Interesting Questions

Munaf Patel - in good company!How many times has a batsman hit a bowler for 6 consecutive fours in an over?

Off the top of my head I can remember three:- Sandeep Patil off Bob Willis, Chris Gayle off Matthew Hoggard and recently Ramnaresh Sarwan off Munaf Patel. Interestingly, Willis was a really accomplished bowler and Hoggard as of now seems to be well on his way there. Munaf too has shown a lot of promise in his young career. Clearly being thrashed about once is not such a big deal, it seems.

Talking of Munaf, he seems to be taking a lot of his wickets either bowled or lbw. Who are the other bowlers in history to do this? Off the top of my head I can definitely remember Waqar Younis and to a lesser extent Shoaib Akhtar. To an even lesser extent, Wasim Akram. The key factor here? Reverse swing, a liking for yorkers.

Staying with Munaf he definitely seems to be a long term prospect for India. Oh hang on. Haven’t we been down this path before? How many bowlers have in the recent past promised so much only to let us down? Off the top of my head and leading the list Englands ODI woes continuedefinitely Zaheer Khan closely followed by Ajit Agarkar and Ashish Nehra. One who seems to be going that way (I hope he doesn’t) is Irfan Pathan.

How many times recently have Sri Lanka beaten England convincingly? 4! The Trentbridge test and the 3 ODIs were as comprehensive thrashings as you can imagine. Throw in a close win in the 20-20 game in there as well. Sri Lanka are clearly a team on a high finally delivering the promise they have held and converting potential into performance in a foreign setting. England meanwhile have serious problems. The Ashes is now only a distant memory. Since then they haven’t managed to win a single test series and have lost ODIs faster than you can say … well ODI!!

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Comments

  1. Comment by Angshuman Hazra | 2006/06/27 at 12:39:21

    Hi Gaurav

    List of overs in Test matches conceding the highest runs can be had here: http://ind.cricinfo.com/db/STATS/TESTS/BATTING/TEST_BAT_MOST_RUNS_OVER.html

    As for Munaf and his similarity with Waqar and Wasim, bowlers often discover methods to counter the adverse circustances facing them. The Pakistani greats had little options as (1) sub-continent weather & pitches were still as unforgiving as they are now and (2) to add to their woes Pakistan catching was ordinary in their time. Hence less outswing, more inswing & reverse swing, fuller deliveries and consequently higher bowled / lbws.

    Munaf too will continue to show such high percentages of bowled / lbws in coming years (the other alternative is to disappear like his predecessors) unless India starts preparing better home pitches and unearths good young slip fielders soon.

  2. Comment by Ankur Nagpal | 2006/06/28 at 00:50:26

    Another thing that I have noticed about Munaf is that he hardly gets any conventional swing and movement of the seam (especially compared to someone like Pathan). He relies more on bowling a good line and length and at decent pace, as well as a bit of reverse swing. Hence he targets the ball more at the batsmen.

    And lets just hope Munaf doesnt go down the road of Nehra, Balaji, Kuruvilla, Salvi etc. More importantly, lets hope Pathan doesn’t go down that road!

  3. Comment by Ashton | 2006/06/30 at 00:03:43

    Make that 5! Yet another comprehensive win for the Lankans - I really believe it’s time to bring back Darren Gough, Graeme Hick and Nick Knight - Surely they can’t do much worse than the way we’ve been doing of late! I don’t even know if Strauss is really an ODI player, let alone captain. Without Flintoff & Pietersen, I guess the Scots or Irish could beat us the way we’re playing our cricket at the moment


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