Yeah.. he seems to have recovered completely from the injury. And the good thing is that despite the injury, his speed hasn't gone down. He is just 22 years old, and if properly groomed he can become one of those legendary pace bowlers. Today Quetta Gladiators are taking on Quetta Gladiators. Both the teams have lost their last match, so will be looking forward to a win today. These two teams are at the bottom of the points table now, despite the presence of some of the most talented players in their squads. We will get to see Mohammad Hasnain and Naseem Shah in action once more, but this time they will be up against some of the most talented batsmen, including Fakhar Zaman and Sikandar Raza. 

At least one of the poor performers have been kicked out of the team and that is good news for everyone. KL Rahul will be out of the test squad for at least a couple of years now. Now I guess Cheteshwar Pujara is going to be the next. Anyway he is already 35 years and the BCCI should be ideally looking towards younger players to replace him. Since 2020, he hasn't been scoring runs and persisting with him in the squad is so unfair to the other players. There are a few more in the squad, but for me KL Rahul and Cheteshwar Pujara were the most undeserving members.

That is why I am saying that European countries are stagnating. England, Spain, France and Portugal (?) are exceptions, but the European dominance in general is declining or starting to decline. Some of the countries really performed pathetically during Qatar 2022. I am not talking about Spain or Netherlands. I am talking about teams such as Danmark, Germany and Belgium, who couldn't even get past the group phase. Before the kickoff, who would have thought that Germany would fail to make it to the round of 16? It was pathetic. 

If you talk about the culture, then the entire CONMEBOL region is football-crazy. There is so much talent there. This region has a mix of different cultures - Iberian, African, Italian, German, Amerindian.etc. And the advantage with Brazil is that in terms of population they are the largest country in CONMEBOL. Their population is 5 times larger when compared to other countries such as Argentina and Colombia. If we look on a per capita basis, then I would say that Argentina is more talented than Brazil. But as a result of their huge population, in the end it is Brazil which dominates.

I hope that South Africa will lose today and New Zealand would be able to qualify to the semi-finals. Trans-Tasman encounters are always exciting, and this time Australia and New Zealand facing off in the Women's T20 World Cup would be exhilarating to watch. But given their current form, South Africa in all probability will qualify to the semi-finals as the second team from Group 1. Anyway, for India, it is almost certain that they will be facing Australia in the semis. It is going to be one of the most keenly awaited matches - Smriti Mandhana vs Ellyse Perry, Tahlia McGrath vs Renuka Singh.. and so on.. 

LOL.. I never expected that Nepal would be able to win. When I checked the scores, Nepal was struggling at 138/8, with another 75 runs needed for a win. The 20-year old Rohit Paudel played an excellent innings, by scoring 95 not-out from 101 balls, and Karan KC provided him with excellent support for the 9th wicket partnership. And apart from Mark Watt (and to some extent Brandon McMullen), the other Scottish bowlers failed to impress. Sandeep Lamichhane performed well in this match as well, bagging 4/45.

Scotland has now completed their campaign in ICC Men's Cricket World Cup League 2. They have 50 points from 36 matches and are miles ahead of any of the other teams. Nepal got some valuable points during this series, but they are at 6th position with just 26 points. If they can overtake the United States of America and the United Arab Emirates, then they can get to the 4th position.

I don't know whether the spectators will be happy, if it turns out to be yet another one-sided match. Let's remember the fact that Australia won the toss for the two completed matches so far, and it played a small part in reducing the victory margin for India. I can't even imagine what will happen, in case the Australians need to bat on 4th or 5th day against the Indian spinners. Their batsmen simply have no clue against Indian bowling, once the ball starts to turn. And this is the same Australian team, which had several successful tours of India back in the 1990s.

Both the factors mentioned here (COVID19 and Russo-Ukrainian war) has not contributed a lot to the ongoing economic difficulties around the world. They have acted as triggers. During the last 10-15 years, governments around the world have resorted to distributing freebies and subsidies to the unproductive population. In order to fund this largesse, they have to either increase the taxes, or print shiploads of money. And in most of the cases, they have done both. The M1 money supply has gone up by 10x-20x in many of the countries in the past decade or so. Obviously there will be economic repercussions when these things are done.

We already had this discussion infinite times. My question is why should anyone else decide on which is the "wisest" decision to take for Ronaldo? I believe that he is completely capable of taking any such decision. And his decision is to leave European clubs and move to Al Nassr. And I am not too sure whether money alone played a deciding role in this decision. There maybe other factors as well. Anyway, it is his career and he has complete freedom to take whatever decision he want. For an athlete, his prime is quite limited in duration. And for Ronaldo, he is well past his prime. Now let him have the opportunity to wind down his career in a respectful way. 

Getting a full house one or two times a year can't save test cricket. Even in this series, we had a fair share of lop-sided matches so far. Fans don't spend their hard earned money to watch this undiluted shit. And here we are talking about the matches between two of the pig-3 teams. Just imagine how bad the matches are between more lop-sided opponents. Recently there was a series between West Indies and Zimbabwe, which served just one purpose - to improve the personal stats of some of the players.

India is a country of 1400 million people and obviously there will be no dearth of spectators whenever the national team plays. But that shouldn't be linked to any revival of test cricket. Outside the pig-3, test cricket has become completely irrelevant. And the ICC's refusal to implement a tiered system with promotion-relegation has resulted in the situation deteriorating even further.

^^^ There were no surprises in Group 2, as England and India were the only strong teams. Other teams were West Indies, Pakistan and Ireland, who haven't performed well recently. And as expected these two teams finished on top. But the problem for India is that they will face Australia in the semi-finals. So far it looked as if Australia is the strongest team in the tournament, by a distance. For the Indian women, it is going to be a tough challenge to face the Aussie women on 23rd February, during the first semi-final.

BTW, New Zealand surprised everyone in Group 1. No one expected them to qualify, especially after they lost the initial two matches by such big margins. But they fought back to contention, with wins against Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Sri Lanka on the other hand wasted a very good opportunity. There is still a chance that South Africa may qualify instead of New Zealand, if they get a big win in their match against Bangladesh today. Their run rate is better than that of New Zealand.

You are right that the turnout was much higher in 2020, when compared to 2016. Back in 2016, Sanders supporters were not happy with the choice of Hilary and they didn't got out to vote. But in 2020, Joe Biden emerged as a the consensus candidate and that pushed up the voting numbers. But despite all that, the margin in popular vote was not that great. And Trump still received 11 million more votes when compared to what he got in 2016. So there was a polarization from both the sides, with white working class preferring Trump.

And the voting patterns have roughly remained the same, as evident from the results of 2022 midterms. And in swing states, I guess the Democrats have got much stronger. The Republicans have almost written off states such as Arizona, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and at the same time they are facing heat in many of the red states like South Carolina, Georgia and Alaska.

Brazil is one of those teams who are blessed to have an uninterrupted flow of younger talent, as far as football is concerned. During the 90s, they had Ronaldo, Leonardo and Cafu. A decade later it was the turn of Willian, Hulk and Fred. And now they have Neymar, Gabriel Jesus and Richarlison. By the time of the 2026 World Cup, it will be a different set of players. And one more thing that I have noticed is that while the players may come and go, there have been no complaints about their team bonding (unlike the case with some of the European teams).

Both the teams are comprised of experienced players. Afghans are really good in T20 format, while many of the players in the United Arab Emirates team have played first class cricket for either India or Pakistan. In the end, the deserving team won the series, with Afghanistan beating the UAE 2-1. BTW, it is strange that richer boards such as the Emirates Cricket Board (ECB) managing matches from test nations against their national teams, when poorer boards like Nepal and Namibia don't enjoy any such luxury.

For Quetta Gladiators, Naseem Shah and Mohammad Hasnain bowled their hearts out. These two had combined figures of 8-1-32-3. The problem is that they received zero support from the other players. For the rest, bowling figures are: 10.3-0-125-3. The spinners (Mohammad Nawaz and Qais Ahmad) failed to block the flow of runs in the middle overs. And that is the reason why Zalmi won, despite losing wickets at regular intervals. Quetta got the worst possible start to their season. They have played three matches, and won just one against the Karachi Kings.

Australians lack a world class spinner and they can't blame India for that. And home advantage works both ways. Australia could have prepared green and bouncy wickets, when India toured that country for the previous edition of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. But then, they don't have any quality pace bowlers as well. Cummins and Starc are like a shadow of legendary pacers such as Glenn McGrath and Brett Lee. The Australian team has got degraded over the years and that is the reason for their defeat. They need to revamp their side rather than blaming the pitch conditions.

Today Scotland will play their last match in the ICC Men's Cricket World Cup League 2, against Nepal. Each of the teams will be playing a total of 36 matches, and after today's match Scotland will not be having anymore remaining for this season. Namibia do have two more matches, and they will be played this week against the United Arab Emirates. Now coming to Nepal, today's match is their 28th. They have two more tri-series remaining, with the one against United Arab Emirates and Papua New Guinea starting by the end of this month. Then there is one more tri-series involving these same teams in March.

Nepal is not a very rich country and therefore the players can't expect a lot of fund from the government. Nepal, like most of the other associate nations are heavily dependent on funding from the ICC. But the problem is that ICC funding for Associate nations got reduced by around 80% in 2015, due to the big-3 formula. In case of Nepal, the decrease was even steeper, because they lost some matches to teams like Oman and UAE. It was like a chain reaction. Players were forced to retire due to lack of funds, and as a result they lose crucial matches. And when they lose matches, their funding goes down even more.

And although the BCCI has refused to support Cricket Association of Nepal (CAN) till now, they are receiving some support from the PCB. A few days back, Mohammad Rizwan met the CAN officials, and some of the Nepal players including Lamichhane.

Now coming to the issue between Sandeep Lamichhane and Scotland players, I believe that it could have been avoided. Of all the teams, I am surprised that it is Scotland who are over-reacting here. Scotland Cricket is under investigation for 22 allegations of racism, directed against players of Asian origin. This issue was first raised by their ex-player Majid Haq. An investigation recently found Scotland Cricket to be institutionally racist.

India is fortunate to have so many allrounders - Axar, Ashwin and Jadeja. If they can have one pace-bowling allrounder as well (similar to Sourav Ganguly two decades back, or Vijay Shankar or Venkatesh Iyer in the recent past), then they can become almost impossible to defeat when they play in SENA nations as well. But then, the importance of pace has gone down over the years. Now spin and medium pace are preferred, especially due to the proliferation of T20 leagues. Apart from Cameroon Green and Ben Stokes, we don't have too many pace bowling allrounders in international cricket these days.

LOL.. interesting to see Nathan Lyon bowling so well (6-1-10-3), after getting hammered around the park during the first match. Virat Kohli and Shreyas Iyer are out there, trying to stabilize the Indian innings. And I am not sure why Todd Murphy hasn't bowled yet. The other two spinners had long spells and Murphy is yet to bowl his first over. BTW, the strategy of including three spinners in the XI seems to have worked for Australia (till now). And for both KL Rahul and Cheteshwar Pujara, their horrible form continues in this match as well. These two made 17 runs between them in the first innings.