Were you expecting improvements in Indian team in terms of team selection after a dreadful performance in the World T20 2010? If yes then you might have to wait for a few more months since the Indian selection committee still trust the young guns. There is no Sachin, Dhoni, Sehwag, Harbhajan, Zaheer and Yuvraj in the team for the Zimbabwe tri-series. The team will be led by the young Suresh Raina who performed nicely in the ICC T20 World Cup 2010.

There are good selections like Naman Ojha, Pragyan Ojha and Amit Mishra in this new team but there are some selections which need to be reviewed.
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127 in just 56 balls, one of the best innings in IPL which was scored by India’s newest talent Murali Vijay from Chennai Super Kings which also lead them to easy win against Rajasthan Royals. His name was all over the blogs, newspapers and televisions. People started calling him to be “India’s upcoming superstar” and also compared him to openers like Sehwag.

He was a luck guy who got a golden chance to play in ICC T20 World Cup 2010 from India when Sehwag was declared unfit. In the first match against Afghanistan, he opened the batting for India and made his International T20 debut. First ball, four! “Here comes the big talent” “What a shot man!” “Wow”. Indians cheered everywhere. Vijay scored 48 runs in the first match and impressed everyone. People thought that they finally have got a replacement for Sehwag.

Second match, out! “He is out on first ball!” Was that expected from him? Okay no problems, sometimes that happens. Third match, he played just 7 deliveries in which he wasted 5 and scored just 2 runs. In his fourth match, he scored just 7 runs and finally changed the minds of Indians.

He was able to score only 57 runs in 4 matches in the tournament with an average of 14.25. The most amazing thing is that 48 runs were scored against a team who just managed to qualify to the World Cup.

The simple logic behind this is, Indian pitches are pretty easy to score runs but if you’ll look around International pitches of South Africa, West Indies or England, you’ll see uneven bounce which won’t allow you to score runs easily. Dhoni should have selected Dinesh Kartik who is an experienced batsman than the debutant Murali Vijay. You would be shocked to see that in all his 4 innings, Vijay was caught out which showed his weird selection of shots and lack of experience against world’s best bowlers. Mistakes repeated again and again, in the end, end of India.

Fans should keep in their mind that Virender Sehwag is world’s one of the best opener and a young boy cannot replace him.

The one and only speed gun who represented New Zealand cricket over the past few years with his excellent bowling skills has announced his retirement. Yes, he is none other than New Zealand’s “Best fast bowler” Shane Edward Bond. This young guy has not played too many matches in his career but still he has pinned his named along with world’s leading pacers like Australian’s Brett Lee and Pakistan’s Shoaib Akhtar. Shane Bond is compared to legendary New Zealand fast bowler ‘Sir Richard Hadlee’ and is considered to be the best fast bowler New Zealand have got after him.

Shane already announced his retirement from Test cricket in December 2009 while just after coming back from ICC Twenty20 World Cup 2010; he announced his retirement from all forms of cricket. Shane’s fans were expecting him to play in IPL but it seems he is not interested in playing cricket any more since. This 35 year old rocket has taken this decision because of his fitness.

Shane Bond is well known for his impressive bowling average in test and ODI cricket. Shane has taken 87 wickets in just 20 test matches with an impressive average of 22.09 and 147 wickets in 82 ODI matches with an average of 20.88. He has not even played 100 ODI matches and has proved himself to be one of the best fast bowlers. Shane Bond was also the most costly player in Indian Premier League when Kolkata Knight Riders bought him for US$750,000.

Shane has been struggling with many injuries and many surgeries. Fitness is a key point for a fast bowler to stay alive in cricket rather than the age. Shane Bond also faced International restrictions from New Zealand Cricket Board due to his involvement in Indian Cricket League which brought a huge break in his short career.

What I think is, New Zealand has definitely lost their “Best bowler” but they should thank this man who has made New Zealand proud of something. Shane Bond feels proud to represent New Zealand in T20 World Cup in his last match. It may not be possible for New Zealand to replace Shane currently but there are also some young talents like Ian Butler who can help to fill this gap in the future.

“While taking the catches near the boundary line make sure that you are at least one meter distance from the rope and you are not stretching your body backwards too much. This can make you when when you’ll try to catch the ball. Stand on your position, look the ball carefully and then jump in a bit forward direction towards the ball.”

If you want to see a demo, try to think of David Hussey’s catch in IPL 2010. You’ll definitely get the basic idea.

It isn’t a shocking news that Sachin Tendulkar and M.S Dhoni are dropped from the Zimbabwe series but there may be some shocking results of this. First impression of this says that Zimbabwe is not a toughest team to play with and hence this won’t matter much but if looked from another angle, one can see that there may be some bad effects of this. In Absence of Sachin in T20 WC, Indian players can be seen with lack of confidence and now in the absence of Dhoni also in the Zimbabwe series, players may lose confidence and may not be able to handle the situation correctly.

Though there are some other senior players like Zaheer, Harbhajan, Gautam and Sehwag but the presence of Sachin & Dhoni can improve the condition of the team at higher level.

Zimbabwe is not too good in cricket but it cannot be said on the bases of stats because in cricket anything can happen and any time.

You may be surprised that why it’s “Twitter on Sachin Tendulkar” instead of “Sachin Tendulkar on Twitter”. There is a very funny reason. It’s not even 2 days when Sachin opened his Twitter account and made a very small shout and he has got around 180,000 followers. The most amazing thing is he is getting around 30 new followers “every second”. It seem Twitter has climbed on Sachin Tendulkar and he might have to take out some time to reply to tweets.

I hope he’ll be the man with most number of followers. That’ll probably add one more record in his records. Sachin is tweeting at http://www.twitter.com/sachin_rt

He is not a man from any International squad. He plays for a very small country who somehow managed to qualify for the ICC T20 World Cup 2010. He is from Afghanistan. He is the speedstar Shapoor Zadran. Though Afghanistan didn’t qualified for the super eights but this man has impressed lot of people from all over the world. This tall guy bowl at a high speed and is probably the fastest bowler for Afghanistan. His personality resembles Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Akhtar. With his high arm bowling action, he has impressed a lot against South Africa. Shapoor has played Pakistani county with Umar Gul and has also played other county matches.

He has really proved himself and he may be another big star soon.