THE BUZZ OF CRICKET

                                                                             Jaffa for Jaffna

High-profile cricket is all set to make its debut in Jaffna after years of a bitter and bloody civil war. The Northern Province, of which Jaffna is the capital, is among the seven teams that will be part of the Sri Lankan Premier League (SLPL) Twenty20 tournament beginning on July 19. “The decision to include Northern Province as one of the teams was taken to promote the game in the region, where the talent pool has been largely untapped because of years of fighting,” Sri Lanka Cricket secretary Nishantha Ranatunga told theIndian Express. “Since the end of the war, we have tried to promote the game in the Northern and North-Eastern Province.”

There have been ongoing efforts over the past year to develop cricket in the region with plans to construct two turf wickets at selected Jaffna schools. “Over 20 qualified coaches have been working to promote the game through the Jaffna Schools Cricket Association and the Jaffna District Cricket Association. Former fast bowler Ravindra Pushpakumara has been in charge of coaching in the Northern Province over the past year and the talent is very promising,” Ranatunga said. Sri Lanka’s cricketers have been doing their bit in Jaffna with former batsman Aravinda de Silva having been involved in school cricket training programmes, while the likes of Muttiah Muralitharan, Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara were involved in relief efforts when the tsunami struck the region in 2005.

                                           Kieswetter's "car tweet"

Craig Kieswetter was forced into damage limitation mode after seemingly posting a picture on twitter while driving on the motorway.

On Wednesday he tweeted the following message: "My view right now", followed by a link to a picture taken out of the car's windscreen.

The following day Kieswetter had seemingly cleared his twitter account, kiesy22, which showed no followers and though it said 198 tweets were listed none was available to view.

However, a search of the internet brings up archived versions of his tweets, including one where he said: "Just so everyone knows! That picture wasn't taken by me in my car! Mate took it over my shoulder! Very silly."

                              

Parore's 'Himalayan' task

Former New Zealand wicketkeeper-batsman Adam Parore is just days away from scaling the biggest challenge of his sporting career - the Mt. Everest. According to a report in the Dominion Post, Parore, who is is climbing the world's highest mountain to raise funds for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, left for Nepal on March 27 in a bid to train and acclimatise for the task. However his first attempt to reach the summit ended in disappointment, as the climbing group had to turn back because of 50kph-to-60kph winds and poor weather forecast for what was to have been their summit day, May 14. Parore, who has been regularly updating a Facebook page while trying to scale the 8848m mountain, wrote about the first failed attempt, after the group returned to base camp. "All up a 16-hour day – Sherpa-esque. 1000m up, 2000m down and about 15km covered all up. 100 calories intake, about 20,000 expended. I was a bit tired after that. Unsurprisingly I slept like a dead man. Strangely I woke yesterday morning feeling 100%, like I normally do at sea level. Go figure? I feel better now than before we left for the summit."

However, he posted on Sunday that the the group was heading off at two in the morning "for another crack at the big girl". Parore said the group was expecting to summit about mid-day on Saturday, all things equal. "Same drill as last week except we are hoping the weather window holds this time. I was just thinking that it all seemed a little easy – not any more. Everest the hard way we're calling it. Fingers crossed for blue skys and happy trails," he posted.

In the season racing past, cricket, to Virat Kohli, must have felt like a washing machine. Through his 12 months with India, Delhi and the Royal Challengers Bangalore, Kohli found himself in all manner of cycles - high-speed tumble, delicate, spin, rinse, permanent press. Just over a month ago, the groundswell of India's World Cup victory just beginning to die down, Kohli was lining up against players he had wept with at the Wankhede. One day it was his captain, MS Dhoni, but he wasn't his captain anymore. The next day Yuvraj Singh had to be stopped from scorching turf, Harbhajan Singh had be stepped out to, and a way had to be found to make Gautam Gambhir step over the line. Kohli had played the IPL before, had understood what it was all about, but this year getting right into it took slightly longer. Kohli describes his first week in the IPL as "confusing". For the World Cup winners, he said, "it was tough, to motivate ourselves, to actually be at our best. We weren't up to that mental level, to be honest". Now, though, with only two games left in the tournament's fourth season, Kohli is second behind Chris Gayle in the run-scoring list, (Sachin Tendulkar is within six runs of both men) and has been among the best fielders in the competition. He has even led Bangalore in Daniel Vettori's absence, and on Tuesday he did everything to help Bangalore inch closer to the final: an unbeaten 70 not off 44 balls, followed by a gymnastics-floor exercise special in defence of 175 - attacking the ball, diving, somersaulting and giving the ultra slow-motion cameras plenty to drool over. Yet at the end of it all, Bangalore and Kohli tumbled to defeat. Once again on Friday, Kohli will be inside the IPL's playoffs machine - and the second qualifying final - versus Mumbai Indians. He'll be asking himself: Again? More? When viewed from a distance, the game often does not make sense as to how it pans out over the course of a season. To Kohli, though, the past year has brought with it clarity about his batting in the limited-overs game. His is a special ability: to retain what he believes is essential, pure even, about his cricket and yet fit into the whirl of Twenty20, with its insane strike rates and volcanic ash cloud of boundaries that blur perspective and logic. Whether in 50 overs or 20, when Kohli and his A game take the crease, the rest of him - his image, the tattoos, the emphatic eyebrows, the fin hairdo, the adverts featuring Bollywood starlets and love bites - evaporates. All that remains is the man and his bat. Off the field, though, Kohli's engagement with the world is mostly through his image as seller of "youth brands." When old fogeys get him to sit still for a few minutes, however, he morphs from punk rocker to cricket philosopher; an open, thoughtful speaker. A short conversation is peppered with words like "self-realisation" and "channelised", and he describes India's performances in the World Cup knockout stages, much like someone from the Tiger Pataudi generation would: "It was probably the best display of team effort I've seen from the Indian team in a long, long time." In less than four years Kohli has put himself up and ahead of his other contemporaries for a place in what may well turn out to be the new-look Indian middle order in a few seasons. His first step into prominence was as India's Under-19 World Cup winning captain, whose invective-spewing celebration rang a few alarm bells about what India's next generation was going to be like. That was followed by the IPL hellraiser and then the supporting role in a once-in-28-years World Cup victory. In between all those monumental events, Kohli has survived the unseen: every young cricketer's meaningless wander through the jungles of celebrityhood. About a year ago a switch was thrown in his mind about what he really wanted to achieve. "Actually, I switched off." he says. That's where all the talk about self-realisation comes from. The junior World Cup victory brought with it mutterings about his bad-boy ways, much like it had for dozens of other youthful sporting success stories. Everyone in Indian cricket is familiar with the tale of how the teenage Kohli resumed his Ranji Trophy innings against Karnataka a few hours after losing his father in December 2006. What happened afterwards is not so well known. Not his lingering personal grief nor the roiling success of the junior World Cup victory. In a world where "brands" really matter, tags can be terribly destructive things. Kohli tried to shake off a few with some simple questions and answers. "I said, what am I doing? There's no way I'm going to play for India like that. And that is one thing I wanted to do as a child" "I had seen a very tough time, when I was about 17, and it was very hard for me to recover from that for the next two years. Not many people have taken that into consideration before giving me that tag and just thinking of me like that." 'That' means the bad boy in fast burn. "I agree, I made a lot of mistakes at that point in time... those were the kind of things I would have done in a normal life but not a stage like the IPL, where a lot of people were watching you." It is as if, in his mind, he is still sorting through the debris. "I couldn't handle what happened after we won the World Cup. People looking up at you and thinking that you were someone who could play for India and just giving you tags like 'blue-eyed boy' and stuff like that. I couldn't take it, honestly. I made a lot of mistakes." In a world where "brands" really matter, tags can be terribly destructive things. Kohli tried to shake off a few with some simple questions and answers. "I realised I'm going on the wrong track. It just came from within. I said, what am I doing? There's no way I'm going to play for India like that. And that is one thing I wanted to do as a child." He returned to cricket and the monotony of practice and nets and the ground, trying to erase 18 months of mistakes. "I used to stay on the field as long as possible and come back home and stay at home. I totally cut off from everything else that I was doing for one and a half years. It started to pay off in my cricket." This shift in his frame of reference has kept Kohli's game at its simplest, treating Twenty20 as a ladder to a better percentage game in 50 overs. He says the Twenty20 format and the six-week IPL helps a batsman one rung up the ladder - in international 50-over cricket. "You improvise more, and that can help you in the one-day format, say whenever you need to attack in a difficult situation." He lets field hockey keep its scoops and reverses and just fine-tunes what he already possesses. "I know my strengths and weaknesses and I can't play a shot that I'm not used to. I haven't tried to play special shots. I still play the normal shots in Twenty20. But you need to execute them a bit more [thoroughly] than you do in one-dayers just to get results." Like the delicious six over extra cover - off Albie Morkel - which gave Bangalore the kick in its last few overs on Tuesday night. Twenty20's short attention span meant that effort was obliterated by Suresh Raina's match-winning innings that followed. "It's different to develop a shot over a period of time, but I don't like to try new shots in every match. I just try to stick to my game plan and score runs sticking to the game plan I have." That game plan has been mostly about seeking gaps to overturn the field, hard running, and turning over strike before picking the moment to move up a gear. At no stage in his international career has Kohli looked uncertain. Five centuries in 57 ODIs for India, three scored chasing (along with nine of his 13 fifties) - what once used to be considered an Indian impossibility. When India field first, Kohli averages over 55, 10 points higher than his career score. It led ESPNcricinfo blogger Andy Zaltzman to predict that Kohli was so good in the chase, "a post-cricket career as a Hollywood stunt car beckons". Even if completely devoid of a multi-coloured, surround-sound off-field life, Kohli's career itself should not be dull. For a start, he is aware of where he stands. The two cup victories, he says, make him feel "a bit lucky" but they are not his path to entitlement. "I feel very good when I think about it - you have played in your first World Cup and you end up on the winning side - but I feel a bit lucky as well. But I don't want to treat this as if I have achieved something special. Okay, these milestones have come along but I still have a lot of goals I want to achieve. I want to elongate my cricketing career as a consistent player. I have personal goals I would like to achieve someday." Test cricket, he has often said, is one of those goals, and Kohli is just behind Cheteshwar Pujara in the middle-order queue. After the IPL he will set out on the first leg of India's six-month travels in what will be unfamiliar terrains. Only 15 of his 57 international games have been played outside Asia. But everywhere India go now, they go as world champions. Kohli says the World Cup win has doubled his confidence in international cricket, "but given all of us a sense of added responsibility as well. If you go on top, you need to remain on top. It takes a lot of character." He has dealt and survived one heavy round of that character-defining stuff. It helped him seal a spot in the World Cup XI, a title victory and a place among the most promising young cricketers in the international game. There's no time to celebrate though; on Friday, in the IPL's second qualifying final, Virat Kohli must go through yet another spin cycle.

In the season racing past, cricket, to Virat Kohli, must have felt like a washing machine. Through his 12 months with India, Delhi and the Royal Challengers Bangalore, Kohli found himself in all manner of cycles - high-speed tumble, delicate, spin, rinse, permanent press.

Just over a month ago, the groundswell of India's World Cup victory just beginning to die down, Kohli was lining up against players he had wept with at the Wankhede. One day it was his captain, MS Dhoni, but he wasn't his captain anymore. The next day Yuvraj Singh had to be stopped from scorching turf, Harbhajan Singh had be stepped out to, and a way had to be found to make Gautam Gambhir step over the line. Kohli had played the IPL before, had understood what it was all about, but this year getting right into it took slightly longer.

Kohli describes his first week in the IPL as "confusing". For the World Cup winners, he said, "it was tough, to motivate ourselves, to actually be at our best. We weren't up to that mental level, to be honest".

Now, though, with only two games left in the tournament's fourth season, Kohli is second behind Chris Gayle in the run-scoring list, (Sachin Tendulkar is within six runs of both men) and has been among the best fielders in the competition. He has even led Bangalore in Daniel Vettori's absence, and on Tuesday he did everything to help Bangalore inch closer to the final: an unbeaten 70 not off 44 balls, followed by a gymnastics-floor exercise special in defence of 175 - attacking the ball, diving, somersaulting and giving the ultra slow-motion cameras plenty to drool over.

Yet at the end of it all, Bangalore and Kohli tumbled to defeat. Once again on Friday, Kohli will be inside the IPL's playoffs machine - and the second qualifying final - versus Mumbai Indians. He'll be asking himself: Again? More?

When viewed from a distance, the game often does not make sense as to how it pans out over the course of a season. To Kohli, though, the past year has brought with it clarity about his batting in the limited-overs game. His is a special ability: to retain what he believes is essential, pure even, about his cricket and yet fit into the whirl of Twenty20, with its insane strike rates and volcanic ash cloud of boundaries that blur perspective and logic.

Whether in 50 overs or 20, when Kohli and his A game take the crease, the rest of him - his image, the tattoos, the emphatic eyebrows, the fin hairdo, the adverts featuring Bollywood starlets and love bites - evaporates. All that remains is the man and his bat.

Off the field, though, Kohli's engagement with the world is mostly through his image as seller of "youth brands." When old fogeys get him to sit still for a few minutes, however, he morphs from punk rocker to cricket philosopher; an open, thoughtful speaker. A short conversation is peppered with words like "self-realisation" and "channelised", and he describes India's performances in the World Cup knockout stages, much like someone from the Tiger Pataudi generation would: "It was probably the best display of team effort I've seen from the Indian team in a long, long time."

In less than four years Kohli has put himself up and ahead of his other contemporaries for a place in what may well turn out to be the new-look Indian middle order in a few seasons. His first step into prominence was as India's Under-19 World Cup winning captain, whose invective-spewing celebration rang a few alarm bells about what India's next generation was going to be like. That was followed by the IPL hellraiser and then the supporting role in a once-in-28-years World Cup victory.

In between all those monumental events, Kohli has survived the unseen: every young cricketer's meaningless wander through the jungles of celebrityhood. About a year ago a switch was thrown in his mind about what he really wanted to achieve.

"Actually, I switched off." he says. That's where all the talk about self-realisation comes from. The junior World Cup victory brought with it mutterings about his bad-boy ways, much like it had for dozens of other youthful sporting success stories. Everyone in Indian cricket is familiar with the tale of how the teenage Kohli resumed his Ranji Trophy innings against Karnataka a few hours after losing his father in December 2006. What happened afterwards is not so well known. Not his lingering personal grief nor the roiling success of the junior World Cup victory.

	In a world where "brands" really matter, tags can be terribly destructive things. Kohli tried to shake off a few with some simple questions and answers. "I said, what am I doing? There's no way I'm going to play for India like that. And that is one thing I wanted to do as a child"

"I had seen a very tough time, when I was about 17, and it was very hard for me to recover from that for the next two years. Not many people have taken that into consideration before giving me that tag and just thinking of me like that." 'That' means the bad boy in fast burn. "I agree, I made a lot of mistakes at that point in time... those were the kind of things I would have done in a normal life but not a stage like the IPL, where a lot of people were watching you." It is as if, in his mind, he is still sorting through the debris.

"I couldn't handle what happened after we won the World Cup. People looking up at you and thinking that you were someone who could play for India and just giving you tags like 'blue-eyed boy' and stuff like that. I couldn't take it, honestly. I made a lot of mistakes."

In a world where "brands" really matter, tags can be terribly destructive things. Kohli tried to shake off a few with some simple questions and answers. "I realised I'm going on the wrong track. It just came from within. I said, what am I doing? There's no way I'm going to play for India like that. And that is one thing I wanted to do as a child."

He returned to cricket and the monotony of practice and nets and the ground, trying to erase 18 months of mistakes. "I used to stay on the field as long as possible and come back home and stay at home. I totally cut off from everything else that I was doing for one and a half years. It started to pay off in my cricket." This shift in his frame of reference has kept Kohli's game at its simplest, treating Twenty20 as a ladder to a better percentage game in 50 overs. He says the Twenty20 format and the six-week IPL helps a batsman one rung up the ladder - in international 50-over cricket. "You improvise more, and that can help you in the one-day format, say whenever you need to attack in a difficult situation."

He lets field hockey keep its scoops and reverses and just fine-tunes what he already possesses. "I know my strengths and weaknesses and I can't play a shot that I'm not used to. I haven't tried to play special shots. I still play the normal shots in Twenty20. But you need to execute them a bit more [thoroughly] than you do in one-dayers just to get results."

Like the delicious six over extra cover - off Albie Morkel - which gave Bangalore the kick in its last few overs on Tuesday night. Twenty20's short attention span meant that effort was obliterated by Suresh Raina's match-winning innings that followed. "It's different to develop a shot over a period of time, but I don't like to try new shots in every match. I just try to stick to my game plan and score runs sticking to the game plan I have."

That game plan has been mostly about seeking gaps to overturn the field, hard running, and turning over strike before picking the moment to move up a gear. At no stage in his international career has Kohli looked uncertain. Five centuries in 57 ODIs for India, three scored chasing (along with nine of his 13 fifties) - what once used to be considered an Indian impossibility. When India field first, Kohli averages over 55, 10 points higher than his career score. It led ESPNcricinfo blogger Andy Zaltzman to predict that Kohli was so good in the chase, "a post-cricket career as a Hollywood stunt car beckons".

Even if completely devoid of a multi-coloured, surround-sound off-field life, Kohli's career itself should not be dull. For a start, he is aware of where he stands. The two cup victories, he says, make him feel "a bit lucky" but they are not his path to entitlement. "I feel very good when I think about it - you have played in your first World Cup and you end up on the winning side - but I feel a bit lucky as well. But I don't want to treat this as if I have achieved something special. Okay, these milestones have come along but I still have a lot of goals I want to achieve. I want to elongate my cricketing career as a consistent player. I have personal goals I would like to achieve someday."

Test cricket, he has often said, is one of those goals, and Kohli is just behind Cheteshwar Pujara in the middle-order queue. After the IPL he will set out on the first leg of India's six-month travels in what will be unfamiliar terrains. Only 15 of his 57 international games have been played outside Asia. But everywhere India go now, they go as world champions. Kohli says the World Cup win has doubled his confidence in international cricket, "but given all of us a sense of added responsibility as well. If you go on top, you need to remain on top. It takes a lot of character."

He has dealt and survived one heavy round of that character-defining stuff. It helped him seal a spot in the World Cup XI, a title victory and a place among the most promising young cricketers in the international game. There's no time to celebrate though; on Friday, in the IPL's second qualifying final, Virat Kohli must go through yet another spin cycle.

PAKISTAN CRICKET GOSSIP: VEENA MALIK, MOHAMMAD ASIF'S EX SAYS IT ALL IN INDIA'S BIG BOSS

Glamour and sports go hand in hand. We all were avidly interested in the now allegedly “disgraced” Pakistani fast bowler Mohammad Asif and Pakistani actress cum model cum reality star, Veena Malik’s blame game in the past few months. 

First, the reports of their marriage came into the media. Veena threatened Asif to make their marriage public in an official manner. The Press conferences and TV appearances on each Pakistani local channel followed. Then all hell broke loose on Mohammad Asif, as the spot-fixing allegations came into the tabloids which opened a Pandora box with reports suggesting that Asif has been involved in a number of match fixing situations.

Veena Malik’s PR- if she has one- took the best advantage of this situation with TV channels and news reports fighting for dates with the self-proclaimed star. She was more than ready to give all the nitty gritty details of Asif’s life claiming that she was “the one who first noticed Asif’s “mysterious behaviour”. She went on to claim that she even “warned” the PCB officials about his suspicious nature and that he was being very secretive about something. Disappointingly for her, all the attention that she was getting from the media fizzled away in two three days. Amidst all these controversies, Asif married a girl named Sana Bilal in Lahore, Pakistan and then Veena slapped him with a legal notice demanding Rs. 1.5 crore that he, allegedly again, “borrowed” from her.

However, all that attention was unsubstantial for the Pakistani actress, as she wanted more of it. In comes Bigg Boss season 4- the Indian version of Big Brother fell into Veena’s lap. The officials of the programme wanted a “house inmate” who had a bigger personality and an even bigger list of controversies. Veena Malik was the right choice as she was recently in the news- not for her profession but for the most talked about topics in the cricket crazy country.  On the other hand, this was an opportunity of a life-time for Veena as she needed to break into the Indian media with her story of Asif’s scandal, already giving interviews prior to the announcement that she is a part of Big Boss season 4.

Big boss is a popular reality show in which thirteen to fourteen contestants or housemates (as they are known) live under a custom built house for a period of almost three months. Microphones and cameras are present everywhere in the house and their each day is recorded for television. The contestants need to do everyday household chores, practically live with each other, have fights etcetera and then get eliminated one by one every week. The last one ‘living’ is the winner who has three-months of fame and gets cash!

As predicted, on the very first day Veena decided to ‘spill the beans’ to her housemates. She started crying and this time she went a little further with her story. Veena revealed her bitter relationship with the fast bowler and replayed the story to everyone and anyone who would listen. She even declared that Asif was an “alcoholic” and that he used to “beat” her when she didn’t give him money- the point at which she started crying uncontrollably. She also said that the cricketer was jealous of the fact that she was a more renowned figure than Mohammad Asif.

The programme is in its third week currently and Veena has been nominated for elimination round. The Indian media is predicting that Veena Malik would be out of danger of being eliminated. The TRPs of the show has suddenly increased. Her popularity is still not understood by the media in India and even in Pakistan, but then Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan are super stars.

It is hard to believe the story of Veena Malik, as it seemed a bit twisted than her original story but it’s even harder to believe Muhammad Asif, as already he is in deep trouble.