Monday, August 01, 2005

Langer vs Sachin
This post has nothing to do with cricket directly. The title is just to show the relative luck or bad-luck of the two batsmen. Today I had a Langer-esque day. Got answer sheets of a mid-term paper. Was expecting average marks around 60% or so. Got 90%!! . The exam had gone in the Langer fashion, lots of nicks given , trapped plumb and good balls just missing the edges , but the fielding side dropped a few catches and the umpires were lenient. In this case both these entities being the professor. And I managed to get a winning score.

On other days/exams I am like Sachin, victim of a harsh decision for a minor fault, like missing one step of the question, or getting an initial calculation wrong, or an ambiguously worded sentence, thus messing up the rest of the question, with the professor coming down harshly on me . The frustration of knowing what could have been, when I drag myself back to the dressing room (hostel room) .

Only difference with cricket is that the decision is not instantaneous (though one cannot categorize Bucknor's decisions as instantaneous also) , one still has hope even after committing big blunders that somehow the professor will overlook the mistake or give some "grace" marks.

Unlike Gilchrist I am not a walker i.e. would not go to the professor to tell him that he gave me more than I deserved or even for a scoring error on the higher side( hmm.. Has not occurred yet I guess, but most probably I will stay put and thank the patron saint of exams) .
After all have you ever heard of a batsman who got out on 100 and went to the scorer and told him, that look buddy you put an extra tally-mark in my score when I was on 42, or go to the umpire and tell him look the previous couple of runs I ran was 'one short'.

Like Tendulkar I am not a dissenter. I will not fight for those extra half-mark, or try to convince the prof that it is just a minor mistake, and the penalty is too harsh. I just take it on the chin, and start preparing for the next innings.

Also similar to cricket , every innings/exams starts on zero, you have to take fresh guard and not rely on past laurels or dwell on past failures.

As the experts of the game say that these good/bad decisions even themselves out. I also believe in that mostly , but what I feel the important ones are still skewed. Tendulkar has also been reprieved in a lot of occasions, but as far as I know they never helped India much or were not in crucial matches. On the other side he was plain unlucky in a few big ones, like in Sharjah where Javed Akhtar gave a howler; umpteen decisions in Australia, when he was the Captain which really demoralized him and the team. And the sheer bad luck in Chennai test against the Pakis in 01, when his back spasms started.

On the other hand Langer always came out with a providential double century whenever his position in the team was under threat.
Give me Langer any day.

1 Comments:

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10:17 AM  

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