Clash of the Titans

Before the start of the Indian Premier League the prospects of watching a team led by VVS Laxman and including Gilchrist, Afridi, Gibbs, and Vaas taking on a team led by Yuvraj Singh and comprising of Sangakkara, Jayawardene, and Irfan Pathan would have been nothing less than a Clash of the Titans.

The Deccan Chargers and the Kings from Punjab though have had less than ideal starts to their campaign.

Both teams lost their first few matches but have picked up recently with the Chargers winning their last one convincingly and the Kings winning their last two.

Its a downer that both teams have lost Symonds and Lee since the 2 going toe to toe, or for that matter, Lee bowling to Gilchrist would have been gruelling contests to watch. And Sreesanth also misses his chance of a bowl to Symonds.

But the match still involves some exciting stuff to watch out for:

• Adam Gilchrist and Herchelle Gibbs opening the batting - Pathan & Co. will be trembling at just the thought of this.


• Vaas bowling to the Lankan batting supremos - King Sanga and Jayawardene.


• A battle of the Indian bowling attack - Pathan on one side, RP on the other. Both have attacked for India before. They have for the U19 team as well. Here they are on opposing sides.


• Ajitesh Argal, India's U19 pacer could come in for Lee - he is an exciting prospect.


• RP bowling to Yuvi with Sanga behind the stumps. And Vaasy bowling to Sanga and Gilchrist behind the stumps.


• Will Sreesanth get into Gilly's face? Or is he a changed man after the slap?


• Everyones been waiting for Afridi to fire. After watching Symonds and Gilchrist blaze away, Afridi is raring to go. We could be in for a treat of he fires after Gilly and Gibbs.

This and Preity Zinta and a whole lot more at 2:30PM GMT.

(one of our readers and an ardent admirer of Ms. Zinta pointed out that I had been spelling her name wrong. I made a conscious effort to get it right this time round)

Well Pitched on Facebook

Just an update for all our visitors.

Obaid recently created a Well Pitched page on Facebook and you can view it by clicking on the link on the right sidebar.

Besides poviding a daily feed of all the posts that go up on Well Pitched, our Facebook page has some additional features such as pictures and videos. As of now most of these are IPL related, naturally, but we will keep adding more as we go along.

If you want to catch a glimpse of Sreesanth shedding tears and being consoled by the Mumbai and Punjabi players, hop on over and go through the Sreesanth album. We've got other albums as well of Priety Zinta cheering her team on, the cheerleaders, and those of our favorite team - the Kolkata Knight Riders.

Most of the IPL team videos are on the page thanks to the youtube video box application.

There is one video though, which I think would interest people more than others. That is of Shahid Afridi's fastest 100 against Sri Lanka back in 1996. That was Afridi's 1st ever ODI innings and he cracked a 100 off a mere 37 balls creating a world record that still stands. you can view the 30 minute highlights of that innings on our Facebook page.

Click on the right or go here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Well-Pitched/31040977176

And become a fan.

Thanks to all those who already have.

Harbhajan vs Sreesanth - Round 1

When I woke up on Saturday I had an SMS from a friend, which said: "Harbhajan slaps Sreesanth".

Hopping from place to place over the weekend I wasn't following the daily cricket news so when I finally sat down to watch the afternoon game between Kolkata and Chennai, I heard about what had happened.

At the time I thought the blogging world would be buzzing with their thoughts on this. Especially after what had transpired in Australia during December / January.

After going though the TV news and views from my friends, I had gathered my thoughts on the incident. What I was going to write was all in my head.

As always, before writing my piece I scanned through the blogs I frequent daily, and as expected most of the bloggers, in their own unique way, had posted on the Harbhajan - Sreesanth incident.

While Uncle J did some research on why animals slap, which only he could do, Ottayan posted the results of a survey about which cricketers deserve to be slapped.

Miss Field found it funny that Sreesanth cried and King Cricket wasn't surprised at all that something like this had not happened to Sreesanth before. Or for that matter Harbhajan had not done something like this before.

AYALAC posted a video footage of Sreesanth crying and like the other Aussie and English bloggers loved seeing the man shed tears.

Nestaquin talked about the disgrace that Harbhajan Singh has brought to his country and his cricket team and discussed Bhajji's past unruly behavior.

And Soulberry captured the thoughts I had in mind to a large extent.

But it was one post that went on a different path than all the above - it claimed to share the facts from the Mumbai dressing room.

Homer shares with us what actually went down. Something that has not been shown or mentioned on TV, nor has it done the rounds of reliable websites. Thus far Harbhajan has been painted as the villian by the media, but Homer's post gives an entirely different perspective.

It was due to this post that I decided not to put my thoughts down on Well Pitched.

If what Homer says is true, then the ban on Harbhajan is unfair.

But then, what is this new video evidence that Cricinfo is talking about? Apparently Harbhajan has been suspended based on this.

What exactly happened?

I want to see the video.