IPL 2 is moved out of India

This is really really stupid. Apart from all the obvious benefits of conducting IPL in India, consider these:

1. An estimated 10,000 Crore Rupees is going to be transacted during the tournament.
2. Apart from the money that is being spent, it creates a flurry of economic activities.
   
3. In any downturn or a recession sporting events create the much needed enthusiasm and positive effect on people. Check out James J. Braddock (of Cinderella Man fame) and Seabiscuit.
   
4. People are going to forget about their job losses and stock market losses and enjoy their time with their family at least for 3-4 hours a day.
5. IPL won't be as good without all the noise we Indians create in the stadiums. It's not a test match after all.
   

I am a working professional. About 20-30% people in my office go home early to watch the matches despite their grievances.

I've always considered P Chidambaram as an intelligent man. His interviews and talks are usually thoughtful. How did he miss these points? He can't let economy go down even further and let people feel insecure. Feeling positive and enjoying 3-4 hours a day is going to be very good for the trembling economy.

I missed out on watching matches live last season. But I wanted to watch at least a couple of matches this season. But looks like I'll have to wait for one more year. Or who knows! Even this may not be possible if there is a hung parliament and there could be another general elections next season as well.

IPL players in ICC nominations for 2008

Here is the list of ICC nominations for 2008 along with which team they play for in IPL. (I have left out 'Women's Player of the Year', 'Spirit of Cricket' and 'Umpire of the Year' to make it relevent for IPL)

Cricketer of the Year
Shivnarine Chanderpaul (Bangalore) (Winner)
Mahela Jayawardena (Mohali)
Graeme Smith (Jaipur)
Dale Steyn (Bangalore)

Test Player of the Year

Shivnarine Chanderpaul (Bangalore)
Mahela Jayawardena (Mohali)
Jacques Kallis (Bangalore)
Dale Steyn (Bangalore) (Winner)

ODI Player of the Year

Nathan Bracken
Mahendra Singh Dhoni (Chennai) (Winner)
Sachin Tendulkar (Mumbai)
Mohammad Yousuf

Emerging Player of the Year

Stuart Broad
Ajantha Mendis (Winner)
Morne Morkel (Chennai)
Ishant Sharma (Kolkatta)

Associate Player of the Year
Ryan ten Doeschate
Alex Obanda
Niall O'Brien
Thomas Odoyo

Twenty20 International Performance of the Year

Chris Gayle (Kolkatta)
Mahendra Singh Dhoni (Chennai)
Brett Lee (Mohali)
Yuvraj Singh (Mohali) (Winner)

Teams with total number of nominations:

Bangalore - 5
Mohali - 4
Chennai - 3
Kolkatta - 2
Jaipur - 1
Mumbai - 1

Hyderabad and Delhi have no nominations. But what's surprising is, Bangalore with the maximum nominations i.e. 5 didn't do well in IPL. If Nathan Braken had played in the IPL then this number would've been 6. It may not be surprising for some because 3 of its nomination are in 'Test Player of the Year' category!

Eventual champions Jaipur have 1 nomination in 'Cricketer of the Year' while runners-up Chennai have 3 nominations in more Twenty20 relevent categories 'Twenty20 International Performance of the Year' and 'Emerging Player of the Year'.

Update: Bangalore wins 2 awards with Chanderpaul winning the top honor with the "Cricketer of the Year" award while Steyn got "Test Player of the Year" award. Dhoni from Chennai team wins the "ODI Player of the Year". Yuvraj from the Mohali team wins "Twenty20 International Performance of the Year" award.

Links:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/cricket/7603843.stm
http://content-uk.cricinfo.com/ci/content/story/368724.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080910/wl_sthasia_afp/cricketiccawards

$1.2m for 1 run!

$1.2m for 1 run! That's what both the finalists might have thought just before the last ball of the match.

What a final! It could not be better than that. This happens when two much worthy team reaches the final. Just like T20 World Cup. And the full credit goes to the captains of both the teams - Shane Warne and MS Dhoni. They both have been fantastic in making quick decisions and being very open to their team mates. They clearly understand that this format of the game is more about committing fewer mistakes than the opponent rather than just doing right.

Of course both the team performed to the best of their abilities and it was a neck-to-neck competition; if not for Chennai's batsmen forgetting to take singles till the 15th over and some poor display in fielding as well, the match would have a different finish.

But I still feel, Dhoni's leadership skills are way ahead of any other captain of present day. His straight attitude, cool headedness, knowledge of the game, decision making power and aggression is just perfect. Throughout the final match there was not a single moment when the match looked imbalanced. If it is just the last ball making the winner then only for the record's sake Rajasthan Royals' will keep the trophy; Chennai, too, well deserved it.

No one has ever seen a loosing captain in the history of cricket gathering his players together immediately after the loss to appreciate their efforts and telling them they have fought well; that is a sign of great leadership.

Having said all that, Royals are the champions and their consistent record throughout the long tournament was only justified by this final win; hats off to Warne and the boys!

The best captain have lost it to the best team.

- Kumar

 

New feature: Color Scorecard

One thing that everybody enjoys is playing with colors. And no matter how dirty it gets, it always brings pleasure.

Here we were playing with colors for our popular scorecard and finally it came up well today.



I will try to help you look around in this newly painted scorecard.

• The whole match is one accordion with two panes for each of the innings.


• You can click on the inning headers (with team names) to see the inning details.


• On the left side of the inning details is the list of batsmen and bowlers with their short statistics in the bracket against their names.


• On the right hand side is the ball-by-by run details for all the 20 overs allotted for an inning. The numbers 1 to 20 at the beginning for each row indicates the over number while those on the extreme right, the boxed numbers indicate total runs scored off that particular over.


• Positioning the mouse over the batsman name will display his full name in a tool-tip (see snapshot above - Ricky Ponting) and at the same time highlight all the balls he has faced in that inning. The same behavior applies for bowlers, too. We are working further to display more details in the mouse-over tool-tip e.g. how the batsman got out, how many boundaries he hit etc.


• Similarly you can position the mouse on one of the ball on right and see the bowler and batsman for it getting highlighted from the list on left. Now, isn't that fun?


• Each wicket is shown by underlined Capital Red letter 'W'.


• Other abbreviations used are: lowercase 'w' for WIDE; lowercase 'n' for 'NO BALL' and lowercase 'b' for 'BYES'. The bold numbers indicate boundaries scored by the batsmen.


• Yea, and finally those light orange bars!! The higher the runs scored off an over, the bigger the bar. So, how do you like that idea of combining numbers with figures in the same place for quicker understanding?

That's it for now! We will keep you updated as we go on adding cool features to this website for you.

Cheers!

Semi-final probables

Yuvraj's team winning their last match against Deccan Chargers have now fixed their berth in the semis along with Rajasthan Royals.



So with 6 matches to be played before semis, nothing can move these two teams - Royals and Kings XI Punjab.

Kolkata standing at 11 and one match to play has no chance as any result (win, loss, tie) or no-result from today's match between Mumbai Indians and Delhi DareDevils is going to put at least one of the team at or above 14 where Knight Riders can't reach.

Banglore and Hyderabad fighting for the last two positions, nothing can move these two teams as well. All they can do now is to make this tournament a little more interesting by disrupting the 3rd and 4th positions. If in Tuesday's match Deccan Chargers beat Chennai and the next day Bangalore also manages to achieve the same feat against much stronger Mumbai Indians, the equation of this tournament will be a lot interesting to look at.

In any condition, today's game between DareDevils and Indians is crucial for both of them; because if Chennai wins one of the remaining two battles then this game will decide the 4th position for semis.

Now lets look at the possibilities of these three teams, Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi. Chennai has two games in hand one against the front-runner Jaipur and the other one against the bottom-runner Hyderabad; so at least one win, which is possible looking at their history in this tournament, will put them at 16. And if they loose both of their matches they will have to hope for Mumbai to loose all of theirs, too. Mumbai is playing against two stronger teams in their remaining 3 matches and it must win at least two to secure its birth in semis. They will be confident against Banglore in their last match and knows that beating Jaipur won't be an easy task. That leaves them all out in the center with today's battle against DareDevils. Now where does the Delhi team stand? It has got only one match and that too against Mumbai Indians. Loosing this game will be the end of road for them. Though it has a better bowling squad and Gambhir-Sehwag pair to its advantage; no one can really be sure against an opponent with in-form demolishing-man Jayasuriya and the likes of Sachin and Uthappa.

Overall Chennai and Mumbai stand better chances than Delhi. Delhi winning its only remaining match doesn't confirm its reservation as it still will have to hope for Mumbai to lose at least one of their two.

New feature: Match home

Now that we have score boards for all the completed matches, there is a match home for all the matches as well. This displays our beautiful score card along with some statistics about the match and also the details about man of the match.

Navigation
There are 2 ways we can navigate to this place. The first one is from fixtures link at the top. Just mouse over that link and it slides down all the fixtures. Then mouse over any team or the day in the calendar and choose which score card you want to see and then click on it.

The second way is to click on any team and it opens up the team home. On the right hand side we have a list of all fixtures. All completed matches are striked out along with a link to their score cards. When you click on it, it takes you to its match home.

Features
This match home is still a bare minimum one. It could have a lot more details like:

• More details about the 'Man of the match' performance
  
• Highest scorer (Orange Cap)
  
• Highest wicket taker (Purple Cap)
  
• Number of sixes and fours hit in that match
• A bar chart of overs with total runs scored off it
• etc..
  

We are working on all these features at the moment. In the meantime if you think we can display some information, please let us know.

New feature: Scoreboard and Beautiful Numbers

We introduced our most awaited feature a few days back. We were so busy with the development that we couldn't even blog about it. Here is how it looks like:

Beautiful numbers

Numbers are quite boring if presented in plain text or even in a tabular form like some cricket websites do. The idea behind our score card is to prettify the numbers and make them look good. I mean compare that with the one below:

Which one looks better?

At on outset the the score card has 2 windows, one for each inning. The name of batting side appears as the title of the window. You can click on any title to open its scoreboard. Each window has slots for all 20 overs of the inning. Every ball in the over is plotted in its respective over. It also shows how many runs were scored off each ball. If some one is out on that ball, a big red 'W' is shown. On the left hand side all the batsman in that inning are displayed on their batting order of appearance. Below them is the list of all bowlers who has bowled at least one ball.

Some numbers are highlighted in the screen shot above. That's because I have moved my mouse over Rahul Dravid. When I do that the scorecard highlights all the runs scored by that batsman. It visually shows you how many runs were scored off each ball he has faced, which ball of the over and inning was it. Isn't it good? Or how about knowing who played a particular ball and who was the bowler when I mouse over 38th ball of the inning?

This applies to bowlers as well. For example when I mouse over Gony, it shows me all the overs he has bowled, how many runs were scored off each ball, total runs scored off each over and also what were the over numbers.

All the wicket taking deliveries are shown with a red 'W'. Just mouse over on top of it and it shows you who was the bowler of that delivery and who got out off that ball.

At the far right of each over, there is a total. It shows how many runs were scored off that over. There is a color coding for that number. Gray indicates total runs scored were less than 5. Blue means less than 9 runs and red is more than 9.

On a negative side there are few bugs as well. For example in some places the over total is not right. We'll get it fixed as soon as we can. Please bare with us for this inaccuracy.

We are still trying to improve this score board and build upon our 'Beautiful Numbers' philosophy. Stay tuned for more!

Let us know what you think of this feature. You have any other idea for the score card? Please let us know. We'll do our best to make the score card truly revolutionary if its not already!

Update 1: Erroneous over totals are fixed now. Along with the over totals there was another error. The no-balls weren't getting displayed properly in the scoreboard. Even that's fixed now.