Dada, ei rokom kotha chilo na!

Hey, you asked for a good wicket, you got it! Now, take this 341-run defeat. Well, didn't really bargain for that part of the deal, did we? Irfan Pathan isn't the first man to finish on the losing side despite taking a hat-trick, but one cannot but feel he was let down by his teammates. What more could he have done in the first innings? Watching Pathan bowl in the series against Sri Lanka and South Africa, I got a feeling he was bowling well within his limitations, especially from a pace point of view and felt a little uneasy about it. If you don't try to bowl as quick as you can at 21, you probably never will. To be fair, pace is not really the most important component in Pathan's bowling, but an extra yard always helps. In any case, Pathan has always been a handful (ask Mohammad Yousuf) on wickets that have a bit in them, and by all accounts this one had a lot on the first morning. I digress, but only because I'm still coming to terms with the disappointment. Hopefully, the one-day series will have a happy ending. One word for Sehwag - if he was talking it up as part of a psychological warfare plan, it was alright, even if it didn't work in hindsight. Hope for his sake, though, that he didn't really believe what he was saying after the first test. Or, was it Pakistan's strategy to lull Sehwag into a false sense of complacency and then spring a nasty surprise? That would be a wicked twist ;) What about Ganguly now? Where does this leave him? It's obvious he's ground it out in all his innings trying to get back among the runs, although he hasn't quite got there. A substantial score from him in the first innings could have tilted it in India's favour, and a part of me was secretly hoping for it. Not that I would have cared who bailed us out. But the real disappointment was the twin failure of the big four. - NK PS: I love that line - first heard it from a colleague of mine after he got a pasting at one of our Saturday net sessions - so had to use it :)