the group of death...

its already started... for the last decade this has been a difficult period for M and me every 3 and a half years or so... the fun that is the cricket world cup... its all very well not to believe in borders and boundaries and be "International global citizens of the world..." but throw in a game of cricket and everything changes...

India played pretty badly today and lost to minnows Bangladesh - who played superbly, with a v. young side. As the show presenters on Sky put it, 1 point to the teenagers and nil to the OAPs, and indeed the Indian team do seem like the OAPs. The sheer frustration of it... whats the point of having a great batting line-up (Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, who between them have over 35000 ODI runs...) if they can't win matches...M tried to console me by saying that the Pakistani team were losing even more badly, that too to IRELAND (an associate member of the ICC). 'cos we do tend to support each others teams when they are playing...

but since India & SL are in the same group, labelled the group of death, we are now in the situation where we both have to wish the other's team to lose in order to progress to the Super 8 stage... the worst thing about cricket is that you wait all day hoping against hope that your team will still somehow turn it around and win the game, and until the last ball has been bowled you are hanging on a thread. The worst thing is how you end up spending an entire day watching and then have to deal with the depression. The only up-side is that we are no longer students, since the WC was always during exam time, which meant we'd spend an entire day watching cricket rather than revising, so if after all that our team lost, that was the absolute pits...

Poor Ayushi, this is going to be the start of many a tug-of-wars over which team she should support... its a good thing neither of into football, otherwise she'd have to choose b/w Switzerland and England...

Anyway, here's to a good match on the 23rd... may the better team win ;-).