How
Australians plotted Dravid’s fall
MELBOURNE,
Dec 30: Australian
pacer Mitchell Johnson today revealed that his
side gambled on Rahul Dravid’s orthodox
batting style to get the better of him in the
Boxing Day Test here.
"I kept it
outside the off-stump for him. That was the plan,
to be patient to him because we knew he was a
patient type of batsman," said Johnson at
the MCG today.
"Unfortunately,
a dropped catch in the gully and then a catch off
a no-ball was disappointing," he added.
Dravid was twice
let-off on nought in the first innings of the
Test, which India lost by a massive 337 runs,
both off Johnson, and had trouble in getting the
ball offside the square. In general, he scored at
five runs per hour.
He ultimately fell
to part-time spinner Andrew Symonds after
labouring to 16 runs against a miserly spell by
Johnson and pace partner Brett Lee.
Johnson said he
was constantly telling himself not to get
overawed by the reputation of the Indian batsmen.
"I remember
the game in the DLF Cup. I was more excited about
bowling with Glenn McGrath at that time. I
wasn’t thinking about the reputation of the
Indian batsmen," he said.
"I think in
this Test I gave it a little more though. I
backed myself and didn’t think much who was
at the other end. I think once you start thinking
about who you are bowling to, you might start to
struggle. I just backed myself," he added.
Johnson has a good
success rate against India. In nine one-dayers
against the Indians, Johnson has claimed 19
wickets, including career-best figures of 5 for
26.
In a solitary Test
match, he has conceded just 46 runs from 28
economical overs and claimed three wickets at
15.33.
Johnson was
wicketless in the first innings but he believed
he had bowled as well as he has ever in his still
nascent Test career.
"I really
thought my rhythm was good in this game, perhaps
the best I have ever bowled. I was hitting the
areas where I wanted to. The back-up of Brett Lee
and Stuart Clark was tremendous and it just made
a lot of things easier," he recalled.
Despite going
wicketless in the first innings, Johnson was
persisted with in the second innings and he
claimed three Indian scalps.
"It was a
little bit of relief to get those wickets. I
didn’t have much luck in the first innings.
But to get the ball to reverse swing like I did
at the end was a good sign for me," he said.
Johnson
acknowledged team’s bowling coach Troy
Coolley’s help in getting his seam and wrist
position right for the game.
"In the first
innings, I didn’t swing the ball. When we
were batting, we (with Coolley) we had a bit of
discussion about seam and wrist position. It
started to work for me, I started reversing the
ball. In the second, I did and get my wrist up
nice and straight."
Johnson said he
was over the moon after the team’s success
here but cautioned his mates against getting
complacent.
"They are a
great batting side. You have greats like Sachin
Tendulkar and Dravid and guys like Yuvraj Singh.
So they are definitely going to bounce back from
this."
"But we are
going to try and be patient and do as we did by
keeping the pressure on him," he said. (PTI)
T20
World Cup, 2 world champions
make 2007 a memorable
year
NEW
DELHI, Dec 30: As yet another rollercoaster
year of heady high and abysmal low passes by,
Indian sports can afford a smug smile as it looks
back on 2007 when Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his
band of boys brought home the Twenty20 World Cup
and chess and archery threw up two world
champions in Viswanathan Anand and Dola Banerjee
respectively.
India had its fair
share of heartbreaks in the year where Rahul
Dravid and Co. were cruelly shown the door in the
West Indies before the World Cup had reached its
business end. Indian shooters did bag nine
Olympic berths but squandered a few while ageing
tennis aces in Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi
returned empty-handed from wherever they went.
Even Jeev Milkha Singh found the golf courses not
as benign as they were last year.
The setbacks
notwithstanding, Indian sports can take a
glass-half-full view of the year, which gave
enough reasons to celebrate.
It was a year when
Indian cricket oscillated between beauty and
banality. The country that plunged into a mass
depression after their heroes were hanged, drawn
and quartered in the World Cup in the West Indies
erupted in unbridled joy when its next generation
cricketers returned home with the holy grail from
the Twenty20 World Cup in South Africa.
All hell broke
loose in the Caribbean were Bangladesh scripted a
stunning triumph of the minnows over the mighty
Indians and Sri Lanka then buried the Indian
hopes under the 22-yard strip of the Queen’s
Park Oval at Port of Spain.
Soon Greg
Chappell’s rollercoaster two-year stint with
Team India came to an unceremonious end and as
usual, BCCI dragged its heel before finally
finding a replacement in Gary Kirsten.
Dhoni and his team
decided to apply balm on the wounds later this
year. He led a side with scant experience of the
Twenty20 format, and sans the big three of Sourav
Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar and Dravid, and still
went all the way to win the tournament, thumbing
nose at the Aussies and cocking a snook at
arch-rivals Pakistan in that high-voltage final.
Yuvraj Singh went
ballistic and against England, hit six sixes off
a Stuart Broad over to immortalise himself.
There was enough
action off-the-field as well. A never-say-die
Sourav Ganguly staged and consolidated what can
easily be the mother of all comebacks, Dravid
abdicated the crown of thorn with Mahendra Singh
Dhoni and Anil Kumble being the beneficiaries and
Kirsten emerged out of the blue to take over the
coaching reins.
BCCI was kept on
its toes by the Essel group-backed rebel Indian
Cricket League (ICL), forcing the board to
retaliate with announcing the cash-rich Indian
Premier League with ICC backing.
Away from the
hullabaloo that is generally associated with
cricket, Viswanathan Anand provided a double
delight by topping the world ranking and also
becoming the world champion.
He won the Amber
Rapid and Blindfold, Morelia-Linares super GM
tournament and the Mainz Rapid title.
Koneru Humpy
became only the second woman member, after Judit
Polgar, of the 2600 ELO point club and won a
couple of gold medals at Asian indoor games in
Macau.
Among others,
Tania Sachdev, the Sania Mirza of chess, won the
Asian women’s title and the national
women’s A crown, while Krishnan Sasikiran
crossed the 2700 ELO rating for a brief period.
Along with chess,
archery too saw an Indian, Dola Banerjee,
conquering the world to raise hopes for an
Olympic medal.
In the Dubai World
Cup finals in November, Dola sprang a surprise by
pipping Olympic champion Korean archer Choi Eun
Young in a cliffhanger to become the world
champion in her pet event. Earlier, Dola and her
teammates had booked three berths for the country
in the 2008 Olympics after making it to the
quarterfinals of the Leipzig world outdoor
championships.
Her male
counterparts, however, looked ordinary and
managed just two Olympics qualification spots,
ruling out the possibility of India’s
participation in the team event of the Beijing
games.
Though downgraded
from its previous status of being a priority
sport, hockey showed signs of resurgence that
coincided with the revival of its fan following,
largely due to the spell of magic cast by
bollywood blockbuster ‘Chak De! India.’
joaquim Carvalho
took over as the new coach to guide the Indian
team, packed with young turks, to podium finishes
in all three tournaments they played this year.
India defended
their bronze in Azlan Shah Cup in Kuala Lumpur
and again finished third at the Champions
challenge tournament in Boom, Belgium.
On the home turf
in Chennai, they really excelled in the Asia Cup
to get the better of teams like Korea, Pakistan,
China and Malaysia and retain the continental
title in style.
In the meantime,
‘Chak De! India’ happened and gripped
the whole nation. Loosely based on a glorious
moment associated with Indian women’s hockey
team, the movie infused life into the sport by
reviving the fans’ interest in it.
The appointment of
Australian great Ric Charlesworth as technical
advisor of Indian hockey came as a significant
step towards the country’s bid to regain its
status among the elite.
On the domestic
front, underdogs Orissa Steelers bagged the third
edition of the path-breaking Premier Hockey
League that has rendered the national
championships needless. Individually, striker
Prabhjot Singh was among the nominees for FIH
player of the year award while veteran defender
Dilip Tirkey made it to the all star team for the
second time in a row.
Like hockey, it
proved a breakthrough year for Indian football as
well with the national team ending a long drought
for an international title by claiming the Nehru
Cup under its venerable coach Bob Houghton.
The Nehru Cup
success in front of packed galleries at
Delhi’s Ambedkar Stadium gave a fresh lease
of life to Indian football.
Though the team
fell in the first round of qualifiers for the
2010 FIFA World Cup going down to Lebanon over
home and away legs, India’s standing in the
game improved as can be gauged by the year end
ranking of 143, compared to 157 in December 2006.
The visit of FIFA
president Sepp Blatter and Asian Football
Confederation chief Mohammad Bin Hammam to
inaugurate the All India Football Federation
headquarters also added to the positive vibes.
The year was also
significant for the launch of the I-League, a new
version of the national football league which ran
for more than a decade. It is hoped the new
competition will bring professionalism in the
domestic game.
There was enough
buzz in the boxing ring as well. A I Lakra
booking his Beijing Olympics berth and
16-year-old Vipin Kumar becoming the first Indian
to bag the best boxer award in a world
championship were the highlights of a fantastic
year for the country’s pugilists at the
international stage.
Lakra achieved the
feat in world championships in Chicago, while
Vipin, a teenager from an Uttarakhand hamlet, was
named ‘best boxer’ at the sixth world
cadet championship held in Baku, Azerbaijan.
The boxers were
also India’s top performers at the fourth
Military World Games in Hyderabad in October with
P Narjit Singh being the lone individual gold
winner, while four of his colleagues bagged
bronze.
The women
pugilists, had a rather disappointing year as
world champion Jenny R L was slapped with a
two-year ban after failing a dope test in the
Guwahati National Games in February.
Three-time world
champion M C Mary Kom (46kg) remained out of
action after becoming a mother of twins and in
their absence, K Mandakini’s silver medal in
the Asian championship was one of the moments of
glory for women’s boxing in 2007.
The shooters too
failed to live upto the high expectations they
themselves had created. India added only three
more quota places through Samresh Jung (pistol),
Sanjeev Rajput (rifle) and Mansher Singh (trap)
to have a team of nine shooters for the Olympics.
But they were done
in by their big stage fright at the Asian
championships in Kuwait where double trap shooter
Ronjon Sodhi, pistol shooter Harveen Srao and
Sushma Rana missed out on Olympics berths.
Tejaswini Sawant
too could not claim an Olympic berth, as was the
case with Zorawar Singh.
There was hardly
anything to cheer about Indian Tennis in 2007 and
the patch-up between Leander Paes and Mahesh
Bhupathi for the sake of country’s Olympic
campaign was the lone bright note to end the
year.
In the year gone
by, Paes and Bhupathi were nowhere near winning a
Grand Slam, while Sania Mirza missed much of
action with injury even though she still managed
a career-best singles rankings of 27.
Sania found her
nemesis in Russian Ana Chakvetadze but the Indian
still managed victories over five top-20 players
—Tatiana Golovin (19) and Patty Schnyder
(17) at Stanford, Shahar Peer (18) and Dinara
Safina (14) at San Diego and Martina Hingis (12)
at Los Angeles.
In golf too,
titles were not easy to come by. But while a
couple of Asian tour titles may not count for
much, Indian golf was clearly on the upswing as
the year set the tone for a bumper 2008 with mega
co-sanctioned events lined up in the country.
Individually,
country’s top-ranked pro Jeev Milkha Singh
had an average year and he could not come
anywhere close to replicating last year’s
phenomenal success, which yielded four titles.
In contrast, Jyoti
Randhawa became only the second player, after
Australian legend Peter Thomson, to lift three
Indian Open titles to continue his love affair
with the Delhi Golf Club. Gaurav Ghei also had
reason to smile after he won the inaugural Pine
Valley Beijing Open to add a third Asian tour
title to his credit.
Adding to the
convivial mood at home is the anticipation
surrounding the European tour’s
co-sanctioned Indian masters and the prestigious
Johnnie Walker Classic to be staged in February
next year that would feature players like Ernie
Els, Lee Westwood, Thomas Bjorn, Colin
Montgomerie, Nick Dougherty, Adam Scott, Vijay
Singh and Ian Poulter.
In athletics, the
scene was not too bad with India finishing second
behind sporting powerhouse China in the Asian
athletics championship held at Amman.
Kerala athlete
Renjith Maheshwary broke the long standing
national record at the Asian Grand Prix in
Guwahati and the quartet of Joseph Abraham
(400m), Vikas Gowda (discus), Preeja Sreedharan
(10,000m) and Sudha Singh (3000m) too rewrote
national records.
In badminton, a
feud between top shuttlers and the federation was
the highlight of the year.
Individually, Anup
Sridhar created a sensation by reaching the
quarterfinals of the premier event slaying
formidable opponents, including current Olympic
gold medallist Taufiq Hidayat of Indonesia.
Unseeded Sridhar
followed that victory with one over the then
world No 16 Muhammad Hafiz Hashim of Malaysia
before fighting tooth and nail and then going
down to world No 1 Chinese Lin Dan.
Fellow
bangalorean, Arvind Bhat was out of action since
August last year after a knee surgery, but made a
scintillating comeback to top-flight badminton
this year and rose to become the second highest
Indian in international rankings.
Just before the
Sudirman Cup, the players were up in arms against
the Badminton Federation of India for making the
training camps mandatory and disallowing them
from participating in super series events.
The country’s
top doubles pair of Jwala Gutta and Shruti Kurian
and Chetan Anand were the three players who chose
to defy BAI’s diktat and faced the wrath of
the association. The stand-off was ultimately
resolved only after the intervention of the
sports ministry.
In Table Tennis,
Achanta Sharath Kamal reached a career high of 73
in world ranking. He reached the final of the
Indian Open where he went down to long time
nemesis Singapore’s Gao Ning even though the
tournament fetched him important points and
provided him an entry into the top-100. (PTI)
Williams
arrives to fine-tune for Australian title defense
PERTH,
Dec 30: Serena
Williams is not taking any chances in the leadup
to her defense of the Australian Open title next
month.
The No. 7-ranked
Williams had a hitting session in Perth today and
is expected to play in the United States’
second round-robin match at the Hopman Cup on
Monday after missing the opening match because of
illness.
"I just had
the stomach flu. I was really sick and
that’s not very fun to have. But I’m
good ... I recovered really fast," Williams
explained of her absence from yesterday’s
2-1 U.S. win over India.
Meghann
Shaughnessy substituted for Williams and won her
singles match over Sania Mirza before Mardy Fish
secured the opening contest in the mixed teams
competition for the United States by winning his
singles match.
Williams is set to
replace Shaughnessy for Monday’s match
against the Czech Republic, which lost 2-1 to
Australia.
"I was so
glad when I heard that she won and Mardy won
yesterday. I was really excited. I owe her a big
thank-you."
Williams had a
terrible buildup to the last Australian Open,
struggling in a leadup tournament in Hobart and
going into the first major of the season unseeded
and with a No. 81 ranking. But she beat six
seeded players en route to the Melbourne title.
She is planning to
take the week off this time before the Australian
Open starts Jan. 14.
"Last year
was cutting it close. I never really like to play
a week before a Grand Slam. And especially as a
defending champion, I really want to make sure
I’m here trying to get ready," she
said.
Williams combined
with James Blake to win the Hopman Cup title in
2002.(PTI)
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