Cricket Uncut
A group blog run by professional cricket writers from across the world
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Eagles circling overhead
I'm sitting at the press box at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore, and it's a fairly surreal scene out in front of me, though I'm not sure TV audiences will see the same thing. A vast number of eagles are circling the ground, some swooping down dangerously close to the ground. It isn't so much the eagles as their shadows which have an impact, the bird-shaped specks of fluttering black which move around furiously, as if this is the negative of a laser show. To add to that, the crowd is screaming, and all of that must make it pretty ominous for the batsmen. The likes of Marshall and Thompson and Wasim and Waqar bowling to batsmen in this kind of intimidating environment would be quite something to watch.
Shahid Afridi and Yasir Hameed don't need that lot, though. They've been dismissed cheaply by Lakhsmipathy Balaji and Irfan Pathan respectively, and Younis Khan just played and missed at a ball from Balaji. An awful start on a pitch that Bob Woolmer had described as "a batting paradise". The eagles are circling.
Shahid Afridi and Yasir Hameed don't need that lot, though. They've been dismissed cheaply by Lakhsmipathy Balaji and Irfan Pathan respectively, and Younis Khan just played and missed at a ball from Balaji. An awful start on a pitch that Bob Woolmer had described as "a batting paradise". The eagles are circling.
