Adil Rashid is the best spinner in the world

Eff the cases spiralling out of control, the IPL “MUST BE” conducted in India

SC Take: Last time I checked, which was a couple of seconds ago, India had just the 10,93,848 cases more than the UAE. The active cases on just August 2 alone ‘almost’ exceeded the overall count of UAE, which is 60,760. Thus I don’t know if Mr.Aditya Verma has been living under a rock or if he’s just willfully ignorant, but his grasp of reality seems off. Of course, as pointed out by him, the World 7s Rugby Event in Dubai that was scheduled for November got cancelled owing to Covid-19 fears, yes, but that is just those organizers being extra-precautious. The United Kingdom has reported over 1,000 new cases in the last two weeks, but the ECB did just about alright in safely and successfully hosting multiple bilateral series. Indeed hosting the IPL will be a big challenge and it won’t be 100% safe, but hosting the tournament in a country with just over 600 active cases over a country with 568,599 active cases seems like a no-brainer to me.

Brace yourself to witness Sanju Samson transform into Bradman when the new season begins

SC Take: I would love for this to happen but I, along with a million other people, have heard this tale too many times in the past to not take this statement with a pinch of salt. For starters, the little cameo Sanju had with the Indian side at the start of the year did little to indicate that he was a changed batsman. But let’s forget that for a moment and let’s focus on his 2019/20 domestic campaign where his double century made fans rally behind him for selection. Barring that double ton, in the Vijay Hazare Trophy, Samson scored just 198 runs in 7 innings @ 28.28 and his tally of 410 runs in the season was the 16th best. His knocks of 15 and 0 which succeeded the double-ton, and the solitary fifty-plus score he’d scored in the 4 knocks prior to it, also did little to prove that his double-century wasn’t a freak one-off. It remains to be seen what kind of effort Samson put in and what kind of technical tweaks he made during this break but I’m guessing we would, as usual, witness a couple of genius knocks that would be sandwiched in-between two bread slices of mediocrity. Biju George, I respect your words, but I refuse to believe this claim for I’ve been duped way too much by Samson’s ‘talent’ in the past. 

Technology to expose cheating batsmen?

SC Take: Ravi Ashwin has had this “Me vs the world” attitude ever since the mankad incident involving Buttler and you can’t help but admire it. This suggestion of his was, obviously and expectedly, received with criticism and trolling, but, in my opinion, he’s actually got a point here. We’ve all been brainwashed to the extent where we feel that it’s okay for a non-striker to leave the crease early, and it’s the bowler who is ‘unethical’ if he takes the bails off and mankads the batter, and it is a mindset which, in many ways, is idiotic. So Ashwin’s suggestion makes a lot of sense. I mean, think about it - if umpires can take a run away from the batsman if he fails to touch the crease with his bat whilst he is running, and call it ‘one short’, then there is no reason why they should not do the same at the non-strikers’ end. We lose our minds if umpires don’t call no-balls so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be outraged if a non-striker tries to gain an unfair advantage. You can even probably go a step further and punish the batting side for it. A bowler bowling a no-ball is punished with a free-hit, so a non-striker leaving the crease early should ideally result in a five-run batting penalty for the batting side, along with the delivery in which the incident happened being considered as a dot ball.