Down with Doordarshan

There are some people in this world who have to go to office for their paycheques (ok, so that is different from "working" in office ... heh heh). For those people, coming back home and relaxing watching the day's play of cricket is something I cannot overstate.

Stupid Doordarshan presents a highlights package next day morning .... and as far as I can see none on the same day ... so when u come home from office and switch on the TV, u get a ball by ball recording of the day's play. Geez, who has the time to see that? We already know what happened. Even those not connected to the internet to follow the match ball by ball as I do will surely know the score half hour after the day's play ends.

And they wonder why people prefer ESPN and STAR to DD ... things about it being our national sports channel etc etc ... who cares ... they r lousy ... they have lousy commentators ... they have lousy coverage (commercials often cut into a ball from the next over) and they have no idea of how boring an entire repeat telecast of a cricket match is. With ESPN-STAR, I am sure to get a 2 hour package in the evening hours which will give me all the highlights (and lowlights) of the match.

I was hoping to update my blog through the series based on watching the highlights on TV plus all the coverage on the internet / news channels. But the highlights is the most crucial part coz here, I want to give u my view point of what happened, not what the various experts thought.

I don't know how well I am going to be able to update this blog ... so for the regular visitors (thankfully, I must say, there aren't many) kindly bear with the irregularity. I can help many things but I cannot help stupid broadcasters. Doordarshan is reall door from the realities of today ... I just hope they get very very "door" from landing more contracts to show cricket. Let them show bloody kabbadi and polo and whatever crap no one ever watches ... that is the only thing they r fit for.

On some things I did manage to catch from various news channels etc -

• Kumble took his 400th wicket and as he was leaping around, the funniest part was umpire Bucknor jumping around waving his hand to signal the players to get off the pitch.
  
• The yorker Pathan bowled Langer with was a beauty ... it swung a lot in the air and in fact, I think it hit the batsman's leg before hitting the stump coz (as far as I could see) it swerved a lot towards leg and finally took out off ... if it hadn't hit the leg of the batsman, it might just have missed the leg stump by a hair's breath.
  
• Patel's catch which was disallowed ... I think off Zaheer ... man, this kid needs to be careful and someone should tell him there are cameras around. It was clear from the camera shots that the ball touched the ground and I can't believe Patel didn't know that ... he doesn't want to get a reputation among umpires as a liar ... u know the story about crying wolf.
  
• I like to say "I told ya so" ... so here goes ... I told ya so ... regular readers of my blog would have read my concern for Clarke ... among all the batsmen in the Aussie team, according to me he is the real "danger" man ... the way I had written it before was - "he is so good he scares me" ... So ... I told ya so ... heh heh.
  

Right now India is batting and two wickets down ... Chopra and Dravid both for zero. Dravid is the real loss here ... but Gangs seems to have taken the fight to the opposition. He and Sehwag are batting nicely and positively ... trying to get runs where they can see them.

Will comment more later.

Cheers

The Chuckster