Days elapsed: 306
Matches Played: 13
Innings: 21
Mode of Dismissals: Caught (13), LBW (5), Bowled (2), Run Out (1)
Highest Score: 94
Lowest Score: 1
Runs Scored: 875
Half-Centuries: 8
Latest Villain Bowler: Michael Clarke
Most Dismissals: Peter Siddle, Stuart Broad and James Anderson (2 each)
International centuries scored by all other players during this period: 100+

(These statistics updated as on January 12, 2011)

This scorecard by Sunil Rajguru

Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Aussie ki….
Aussie ki… who?
Aussie ki taisi ho rahi hai Indian batsmen ki!

Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Hussey ki….
Hussey ki… who?
Hussey ki taisi hone waali thi meri. Thank you India, tum ne mujhe bacha liya!
P.S. Ponting sends his warm regards too!

Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Mahashatak.
Mahashatak who?
My shatak when, where and how???

Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
The Wall.
…
If The Wall is knocking at The Door, then you can imagine what the condition of Indian cricket has become…

These versions by Sunil Rajguru

∙ Future discussions will shift from…
When will Sachin Tendulkar get a 100? To
When will the Indian top order get a 100?
And from…
Will Virender Sehwag ever get another Test 300? To
Will 10 Indian batsmen together ever get a Test 300 on foreign soil?

∙ Pakistan can’t play at home.
India shouldn’t play abroad.

∙ The Mahashatak solution…
Include First Class centuries as part of the equation.
Voila! He scored his Mahashatak ages ago!
Next step, include his school and other unofficial centuries.
Aila! He has scored 200 centuries.
Then the question will automatically become…
When will he score his 300th century?

∙ India might as well start a new “Seven bowler four batsmen theory” for Tests on foreign soil. We might actually fare better.

© Sunil Rajguru

Reference: Second India-Australia Test at Sydney, January 3, 2012.

See Also: Melbourne Test debacle musings…

That’s because while everybody was celebrating the many changes that were taking place, in effect nothing really changed.

(Other names suggested were The Year of the Kela and the Year of the Bakra)

A look at the lemony series of unfortunate events…

1. The Lokpal Lemon: Anna Hazare fasted. His team fumed. Lakhs protested. Millions cheered in their living rooms. Parliament united in August. The result? No Lokpal Act by December 31!

2. The Arab Spring Lemon: People thundered and kicked out the dictators. But who’s coming in their place? Inexperienced fundamentalist parties! Take Egypt: Revolution 1: Kick out the British. Revolution 2: Kick out monarch. Revolution 3: Kick out the dictator. Revolution 4: Coming soon in the future for complete democracy?

3. Cricket Team Lemon: India won the World Cup after 28 years. But no time to celebrate. No victory parades. Immediately play IPL and get fatigued and injured and get thrashed in England. Crash in Melbourne too. Do we really feel like champs?

4. The Sachin Tendulkar Lemon: It’s so glorious to score 99 international centuries. However most fretted and fumed over the 1 century that was not scored for 10 odd months.

5. The Europe Lemon: Heads of states were sacked. But do the new leaders have magic wands to solve the grave financial crisis?

6. The Kudankulam Lemon: Construction on the nuclear plant began in 1997. So what changed in 2011? Fukushima in Japan! So how does that affect Kudankulam?

7. The Mullaperiyar Lemon: The dam is more than 100 years old. So what changed in 2011? A movie called Dam999. Eh?

8. The Andhra Pradesh Lemon: AP won the maximum number of Lok Sabha seats for the Congress in 2009. The reward? In 2011, the Centre fiddled while Telangana was burning!

Of course, most of the events spill into the next year, so there is still time to make lemonade and 2012 could well be The Year of the Lemonade!

© Sunil Rajguru

∙ From now on the Ashes will be re-branded.
Whenever England and Australia host India at home, the series will be dubbed as the Indian Ashes.

Overheard…

Indian cricket fan: Oh God! Why do I have to keep suffering this humiliation Test after Test?
God: Didn’t I answer a billion prayers in 2011? Now don’t disturb me till 2015!

English bowler: We had an awesome bowling session of Indian Ten Pins last season.
Aussie bowler: Our season has just begun!

© Sunil Rajguru

Reference: 2011 Boxing Day India-Australia Test at Melbourne

Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Anna.
Anna who?
An’ now another fast is on the cards in December. After August Kranti, will we have a December Dhamaka or a Damp Squib?

Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Windies.
Windies who?
Win these close ones on a regular basis Team India and we’ll all have a regular case of nerves.

Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
NATO.
NATO who?
Na to your apology says Pakistan over the deathly strike!

These versions by Sunil Rajguru

Thak Thak.
Kaun hai bhaaya?
Mallya.
Mallya kaun?
Maal laya kya, udan khatole ko udaane ke liye, warna zameen pe hi rahe chup chaap!

Thak Thak.
Kaun hai bhaaya?
Michael.
Michael kaun?
Michael ki cycle stand gir gayi thi, Aussie 21/9 isi mahine hui thi!

Thak Thak.
Kaun hai bhaaya?
Yuvaraj.
Yuvaraj kaun?
Yuva ka raj hain abhi, tu Test cricket ke liye buddha ho gaya hain!

Thak Thak.
Kaun hai bhaaya?
Bhajji.
Bhajji kaun?
Kya sawaal pooch raha hai guru? BCCI ka selector hain kya?

These versions by Sunil Rajguru

Lord of the Cups: The Return of the King, MS Dhoni

Lord of the Spins: The Two Towers, Pragyan Ojha and R Ashwin

Bbuddah… Hoga Tera Baap, Rahul Dravid

Mission Impossible 100, Sachin Tendulkar

Players of the Caribbean: At Wit’s End, the West Indies team

One Wedding and Four Batting Funerals, R Ashwin

Vidarbha Express, Umesh Yadav

The Exile, Harbhajan Singh

These Versions by Sunil Rajguru

∙ You may have heard of 2-in-1s and 3-in-1s.
Well they’ve just launched 4-in-1s in cricket.
At least one ball of all four Test innings was bowled in a day.

∙ Pakistan match-fixers are studying the tremendous Australian collapse for tips on how to do it better in the future.

∙ When an Aussie fan heard that his team was 21/9, he thought that a new T10 tournament had been launched.

∙ Today Australia joins the League of Extraordinary Collapsers which already boasts of West Indies, Pakistan and India as their members.

∙ It’s being called Australia’s greatest fight back in their history.
The last wicket put on 124% of the runs put on by the first nine wickets combined.
(21/9 to 47 all down)

∙ Today the ICC has decided to launch a new team called Michael Clarke. Here are the scores across two innings…
Michael Clarke: 153 All Down
Australia: 178 All Down
(Close)

∙ Let’s round it off with some bakwaas shaayari…
Ye pitch nahin ditch hai,
History nahin mystery hai,
Michael Clarke nahin Clarke Kent hai,
Ten Wickets nahin Nine Pins hai…

Reference: First Test, Australia-South Africa at Cape Town (November 9).

© Sunil Rajguru

Point One Point One Cricket or .1.1 Cricket (also called derogatorily as POPO Cricket and Pappu Cricket) is a form of cricket, originally introduced in Jhumri Tilaiya for a professional inter-club competition by the New Jharkhand Board of Control of Cricket in 2027.

Point One Point One Cricket involves two teams where each has only one ball to bowl in an entire innings. One ball is 0.1 overs and hence the name .1.1 Cricket.

1 History

1.1 Origins

.1.1 Cricket resulted as a successive natural shortening of the game from the five-day Test format. After One Day Internationals, Twenty20s gained popularity. Then came the age of T10s, F5s and ultimately One1s, where each team bowls only one over in an innings.

But the spectators wanted something more exciting than the One1s, something shorter and more instant. That’s how .1.1 Cricket was born.

In the historic Jhumri Tilaiya match, when there was rain-interruption after the bowling of just one ball in a One1 match, the organizers decided that the opposition too would bowl just one ball for a result. The positive response of the spectators followed by the popularity of the .1.1Premier League led to international .1.1s.

1.2 The .1.1 Cricket World Cup

64 countries participate in the .1.1 Cricket World Cup that takes place every year during the weekend around April 24, the birthday of God and Grand Master, Nobel Laureate and Bharat Ratna Sachin Tendulkar, who holds all the batting records of the largest formats of the game (the now extinct Tests and ODIs).

Matches begin early Saturday morning when the first round takes place. The 64 teams play 32 matches in a direct knockout format. The winning 32 teams make it to the second round, followed by 16 in the pre-quarters and eight in the quarter-finals and so on.

The new champions are crowned by Sunday late night, in the shortest world cup tournament on the planet. The only problem is that the city hosting the event comes to a standstill given the amount of teams and the volume of cricket packed into a single weekend.

1.3 .1.1 Cricket Worldwide

The new format became a rage all over the world and its popularity surpassed that of even football. Currently all the 200 odd nations of the world play .1.1 Cricket and there are flourishing domestic and continental leagues.

“Even Shorter Than Twitter” is a popular slogan of .1.1 Cricket aficionados.

1.4 Influence on cricket

Test cricket was phased out in 2016 and ODIs followed soon after in 2017. Empty stadiums in the 2024 T10 World Cup led to the Great Cricketing Financial Crisis of 2025, something which was revived by .1.1 Cricket.

In fact, F5 matches have been called the “New Tests”, because spectators call it a “test” of their nerves and patience to actually sit for five complete overs an innings in a stadium.

One1s, however are surviving for they serve the connoisseurs of the game and are called an actual test of skills and technique as against the total slam-bam attitude of.1.1 Cricket.

1.4 Criticism

.1.1 Cricket has come in for a lot of criticism. For one, the general level of health and fitness has come down among cricketers, who spend much more time on ad shoots, inaugurations and award shows.

The tradition of the all-rounder is also over. A bowler only bowls. A batsman only bats. A wicket-keeper only keeps the wicket. None of them field and the fielders themselves have become glorified ball boys many of whom have absolutely no understanding of the game of cricket.

Their only aim is to catch or stop the ball and throw it back at the fielder instantly to effect a run-out. In one incident, a shot put champion threw the ball so hard that it fractured the rib of a star bowler. That led to the infamous Eden Garden Riot of 2029.

2 Match format and rules

2.1 Format

Every team consists of one bowler (pacer or spinner), one wicket-keeper, one batsman, one 100-metre dasher (the runner at the non-strike end) and seven athletes for fielding to form a team of 11 players.

2.2 General rules

The toss is extremely important as most people want to bat second. All the rules are the same as the regular forms of cricket except for the fact that the Third Umpire is the most crucial element. The room for error is zero per cent. In the DRS, Snickometer, Hot Spot, Ball Track, Hawk Eye and Quantum Mechanics Probability Formulae are all used to get a perfect verdict.

2.3 Q-D/L Method

The Q-D/L (Quantum Mechanics, Duckworth & Lewis) method continues to be controversial. Since many games end in a tie, sudden death takes place where both teams bowl an extra ball each till a result is reached. One Indo-Pak match went till 13 balls with the score being tied at 24-24 at the end of 12 balls. A hit-wicket by the Pakistan batsmen on the 13th ball led to a new round of match-fixing allegations, something which .1.1 had been spared till now.

If any team plays one more ball than the other team when rain ends play, then the Q-D/L Probability Curve  predicts whether the other team would have got the required runs or not from the final ball. It’s pretty controversial, but no-one has come out with a better method yet.

3 Records

First Century: SNVR Singh of Ireland became the first player to hit a century in .1.1s by scoring 100 runs in a calendar year. Tom Peter Jones of Canada became the first to hit a double century. Fans are currently waiting for the first .1.1 triple century.

First hat-trick: Usutuaije Riruako of Zimbabwe was the first person to take three wickets in three consecutive matches.

Most catches: Vladimir Gramotin Bezborodko of India. Vladimir was a Russian citizen who was spotted in a friendly match with the Moscow Siberian Cricketing Tigers. A popular newspaper claimed that Vladimir far from understanding cricket, doesn’t even know its spelling yet. He took Indian citizenships and is currently one of the richest sportsmen in the world.

This version by Sunil Rajguru