Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Cricket World cup

 The first multilateral competition at international level was the 1912 Triangular Tournament, a Test cricket tournament played in England between all three Test-playing nations at the time: England, Australia and South Africa. The event was not a success: the summer was exceptionally wet, making play difficult on damp uncovered pitches, and crowd attendances were poor, attributed to a "surfeit of cricket". Since then, international Test cricket has generally been organized as bilateral series: a multilateral Test tournament was not organized again until the triangular Asian Test Championship in 1999.

The first international cricket match was played between Canada and the United States, on 24 and 25 September 1844.However, the first credited Test match was played in 1877 between Australia and England, and the two teams competed regularly for The Ashes in subsequent years. South Africa was admitted to Test status in 1889.

Representative cricket teams were selected to tour each other, resulting in bilateral competition. Cricket was also included as an Olympic sport at the 1900 Paris Games, where Great Britain defeated France to win the gold medal. This was the only appearance of cricket at the Summer Olympics.

The number of nations playing Test cricket increased gradually over time, with the addition of West Indies in 1928, New Zealand in 1930, India in 1932, and Pakistan in 1952. However, international cricket continued to be played as bilateral Test matches over three, four or five days.

In the early 1960s, English county cricket teams began playing a shortened version of cricket which only lasted for one day. Starting in 1962 with a four-team knockout competition known as the Midlands Knock-Out Cup, and continuing with the inaugural Gillette Cup in 1963, one-day cricket grew in popularity in England. A national Sunday League was formed in 1969. The first One-Day International match was played on the fifth day of a rain-aborted Test match between England and Australia at Melbourne in 1971, to fill the time available and as compensation for the frustrated crowd. It was a forty over game with eight balls per over. The success and popularity of the domestic one-day competitions in England and other parts of the world, as well as the early One-Day Internationals, prompted the ICC to consider organizing a Cricket World Cup.






Sunday, June 29, 2025

Cricket history

 The earliest known definite reference to cricket is to it being played in South East England in the mid-16th century. It spread globally with the expansion of the British Empire, with the first international matches in the second half of the 19th century. The game's governing body is the International Cricket Council (ICC), which has over 100 members, twelve of which are full members who play Test matches. The game's rules, the Laws of Cricket, are maintained by Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) in London. The sport is followed primarily in South Asia, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Southern Africa, and the West Indies.



Traditionally, cricketers play in all-white kit, but in limited overs cricket, they wear club or team colours. In addition to the basic kit, some players wear protective gear to prevent injury caused by the ball, which is a hard, solid spheroid made of compressed leather with a slightly raised sewn seam enclosing a cork core layered with tightly wound string.

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game that is played between two teams of eleven players on a field, at the center of which is a 22-yard (20-metre; 66-foot) pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails (small sticks) balanced on three stumps. Two players from the batting team, the striker and non striker, stand in front of either wicket holding bats, while one player from the fielding team, the bowler, bowls the ball toward the striker's wicket from the opposite end of the pitch. The striker's goal is to hit the bowled ball with the bat and then switch places with the non striker, with the batting team scoring one run for each of these swaps. Runs are also scored when the ball reaches the boundary of the field or when the ball is bowled illegally.

The fielding team aims to prevent runs by dismissing batters (so they are "out"). Dismissal can occur in various ways, including being bowled (when the ball hits the striker's wicket and dislodges the bails), and by the fielding side either catching the ball after it is hit by the bat but before it hits the ground, or hitting a wicket with the ball before a batter can cross the crease line in front of the wicket. When ten batters have been dismissed, the innings (playing phase) ends and the teams swap roles. Forms of cricket range from traditional Test matches played over five days to the newer Twenty20 format (also known as T20), in which each team bats for a single innings of 20 overs (each "over" being a set of 6 fair opportunities for the batting team to score) and the game generally lasts three to four hours.

While traditionally, cricket has largely been played by men, Women's cricket has experienced large growth in the 21st century.


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Friday, June 27, 2025

will Jasprit Bumrah play at Edgbaston?

 While Jasprit Bumrah came to the ground, he didn't bowl or bat in the nets. As it was a closed-door training session, it was not possible to tell whether Bumrah was doing fitness work or bowling alone inside the ground. Siraj had a hit with the bat before he went off to join Bumrah and Prasidh inside the ground.

it has been learnt that Bumrah's chances of playing at Edgbaston are low. The pre-decided combination, apparently, was the first and the third Test, and then a choice between the fourth and the fifth based on the state of the series. There are big gaps between the first and the second, and the third and the fourth Tests.

Arshdeep Singh and Akash Deep bowled long spells in the nets. Arshdeep spent almost half the nets session bowling with an old, somewhat "made" ball. With the old ball, he went around the wicket to the right-hand batters. This could have been something India decided to do after looking at the conditions. They could well be expecting reverse swing to be a factor.

The general mood in the camp is to not overthink the defeat at Headingley, where they repeatedly got themselves in positions to dominate, but let it slip away. The message is to not make dramatic changes to how they play, but repeat the processes to get into strong positions again and then react better.


Thursday, June 26, 2025

India's 2036 Olympics hopes on hold

 

New IOC President Kirsty Coventry announces a pause and review of the Olympic host city selection process. The decision comes at a time when India has emerged as one of the leading contenders to host the 2036 Summer Games.

Sport



Sport includes all forms of competitive physical activity or games which, through casual or organized participation, at least in part aim to use, maintain or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants, and in some cases, entertainment for spectators. Sports can bring positive results to one's physical health. Hundreds of sports exist, from those between single contestants, through to those with hundreds of simultaneous participants, either in teams or competing as individuals. In certain sports such as racing, many contestants may compete, simultaneously or consecutively, with one winner; in others, the contest (a match) is between two sides, each attempting to exceed the other. Some sports allow a "tie" or "draw", in which there is no single winner; others provide tie-breaking methods to ensure one winner and one loser. A number of contests may be arranged in a tournament producing a champion. Many sports leagues make an annual champion by arranging games in a regular sports season, followed in some cases by playoffs.


Sport is generally recognized as system of activities which are based in physical athleticism or physical dexterity, with the largest major competitions such as the Olympic Games admitting only sports meeting this definition, and other organizations such as the Council of Europe using definitions precluding activities without a physical element from classification as sports. However, a number of competitive, but non-physical, activities claim recognition as mind sports. The International Olympic Committee (through ARISF) recognizes both chess and bridge as bona fide sports, and Sport Accord, the international sports federation association, recognizes five non-physical sports: bridge, chess, draughts (checkers), Go and xiangqi, and limits the number of mind games which can be admitted as sports.


Sport is usually governed by a set of rules or customs, which serve to ensure fair competition, and allow consistent adjudication of the winner. Winning can be determined by physical events such as scoring goals or crossing a line first. It can also be determined by judges who are scoring elements of the sporting performance, including objective or subjective measures such as technical performance or artistic impression.


Records of performance are often kept, and for popular sports, this information may be widely announced or reported in sport news. Sport is also a major source of entertainment for non-participants, with spectator sport drawing large crowds to sport venues, and reaching wider audiences through broadcasting. Sport betting is in some cases severely regulated, and in some cases is central to the sport.


According to A.T. Kearney, a consultancy, the global sporting industry is worth up to $620 billion as of 2013.The world's most accessible and practised sport is running, while association football is the most popular spectator sport.

Cricket World cup

 The first multilateral competition at international level was the 1912 Triangular Tournament, a Test cricket tournament played in England b...