91Èȱ¬

The quarter finals get underway on wednesday morning with the match between Pakistan and the West Indies from Dhaka. Test Match Special will be on the air at 0815GMT on Five Live Sports Extra and Radio Four Longwave with commentary also available on ABC Radio in Australia, Radio Sport in New Zealand and SABC in South Africa. The commentary team includes the voice of Caribbean Cricket Tony Cozier, Dhaka resident Shamim Chowdhury who will have all the local knowledge, Bryan Waddle and Lee James of the 91Èȱ¬ World Service. Expert summarisers include former West Indies fast bowler Ian Bishop and ex Pakistan captain Rameez Raja. Plus during the interval we will look ahead to the other quarter finals with live previews from Ahmedabad and Colombo.

Rameez is the leading Pakistan run scorer in World Cup matches between the first two quarter-finalists. IVA is top of the tree for both sides. I've collected a few more stats in a preview of the game if of interest to anyone

Great article. Just get the sound right at games and instead of getting a 9.5 out of 10 you will get the full marks!

It has beeen good cricket so far. There was vast improvement in the level of competition from the associate nations.

If we are to encourage the game abroad and expand, it is papamount that the associates continue be part of the WC. Any thought of removing them is both premature and retrogressive. Is this what we want?


Cricket must take a backseat to nothing or to no one. Long live cricket, lovely cricket!

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

I think you've just illustrated very well why it's high time to get rid of the old wife-beater Boycott. He's now just an irritant.

Another good blog Adam, in particular thanks for the commentary team details.

@no.4 "Papamount"... tres funny. The P and R are no where near each other (brought a little tear not gonna lie)... Really enjoyable article.

I think the Royal Wedding tv coverage would be enhanced by Geoff Boycott and Jonathan Agnew- you can imagine some of Prince William's former uni chums who are not at the wedding would enjoy it.

Great coverage and blog. Thanks.

A wonderful blog entry. As a confirmed fan of Sir Geoffrey I loved the comments about him. The anecdote about CMJ is new to me: is he really that bad? Last night I was watching the highlights of Headlingley '81 and was surprised to hear him doing TV commentary: I assume that it was because he'd actually been booked for another match and had wandered into the 91Èȱ¬ box at Leeds by accident...

Please ask Alison Mitchell to tweet more often where ex-pats like me can pick up the TMS commentary on the Internet even if we are outside the UK.

*Sigh* Once again, a 91Èȱ¬ correspondent gets a basic cricket fact wrong. The Indian fans were hoping to see Sachin Tendulkar's 100th international century not his 100th ODI century. Please proof read articles before posting.

NB; Although it was the Indian TV commercial's mistake to name Harbhajan Singh as the inventor of the doosra, you should have corrected it Mr Mountford. Saqlain Mushtaq is widely accepted as the inventor of the doosra.

Justcallmeroy - pedantry of the highest order. Do you take a pen out with you to correct shop window signs? Just to correct your pedantry, Adam is not in fact a cricket correspondent, but a "producer correspondent".
*exaggerated sigh at how important and worldly I am*
Nice writing Adam, really enjoy the behind the scenes look at how the production team is run.

Thanks for all your comments so far. In answer to post 12 - many apologies that this error appeared. In my original copy i did state that it was the 100th international century that was being chased , but inadvertedly the mistake was made after the piece was edited. Hopefully this will be rectified shortly and apologies again.

Thanks for post 7 from David Shield. Just to let you know the line-up for the other games. For India v Australia it will be Simon Mann, Glenn Mitchell and Alison Mitchell with Geoff Boycott, Vic Marks, Ian Chappell and Sourav Ganguly.
For the game on Friday New Zealand v South Africa it is Bryan Waddle, Shamim Chowdhury and Lee James with some contributions from South African broadcaster Neil Manthorpe. Summarisers will include Simon Doull, Pommie Mbangwa and Danny Morrison. Then for the Sri Lanka v England game on Saturday its Aggers, CMJ and Roshan Abeysinghe with summarisers including Michael Vaughan and Russel Arnold.

The best blog on 91Èȱ¬ Sport! Would love these blogs to continue through the English cricket summer and when on tour in the winter! And the more Boycott stories you can fit in the better! Sent straight round the office after reading!

Just read Boycott's comments about Michael Yardy:"For me, he was always going to be a liability or a poor choice at international level out here."
Could somebody have a word in his ear (Boycott's) I remember him being a bit of a liability to the England team because of his selfishness.

Adam Mountford , would do me a favour and find out who (the lady) sings the england national anthem for pre-game ? Thank you !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I forgot to thank you Adam for post 15 so thank you.

Its been nice to hear from Neil Manthorpe today. I really enjoy matches like today with a mix of the great commentators from around the world Bryan Waddle, Neil and Shamim together with Lee James and also nice to have had Danny Morrison back on TMS during this world cup.

I think this has been an excellent world cup, the best one since I've been following cricket and the best feature has been having quarter-finals.

To those who caught the typo "papamount", I realsed it right after posting, but didn't bother to amend, but the regulars here will know that it was just that.


"It has been good cricket so far. There was vast improvement in the level of competition from the associate nations.

If we are to encourage the game abroad and expand, it is paramount that the associates continue be part of the WC. Any thought of removing them is both premature and retrogressive. Is this what we want?


Cricket must take a backseat to nothing or to no one. Long live cricket, lovely cricket!"

Adam , a reminder of post 18 .. :-)

gnat [18] wrote:

Adam Mountford , would do me a favour and find out who (the lady) sings the england national anthem for pre-game ? Thank you !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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I can confirm that the lady who sang for England today was, in fact, "the fat lady."

Well done Sri Lanka - what an absolute thumping!

England's exit from this year's cricket world cup is really disappointing - they certainly provided some of the most entertaining matches which were nail-bitingly tense to the very last moments.

Thankfully, England won't be able to take over the dubious Cricket Chokers of the Year title, which South Africa proudly retain after their awful performance against New Zealand last week. After 5 consecutive failures in knockout stages in world cricket tournaments, they definitely need a very new approach to to come to their rescue! Hopefully the new captain in Botha and the replacement coach will make some difference, but it's going to take at least a convincing win in a big match to recover some of the confidence.

I think Vaughan's claims that Broad should be captain imply that a change of captaincy may fix all problems when that was only a minor problem. England need to look at their ODI policies, instead of whinging about fixtures and then saying they aren't blaming them, pick less Test players or indeed none at all.

Let the Test players focus on Tests, bring in a squad of ODI players who get revised every two years and therefore have experience leading up to a World Cup. If none of them are playing regularly in the Test side they can play more ODIs and of course county matches, gives the Test players a rest.

What England have done since 1992 is make no progress whatsoever, first five World Cups we reached three finals, since then we've made no semis. We are about 20 years behind the top sides

Let's take a few positives away from this winter, which has been a brute for the England cricket team. The Ashes were a magnificent display -- how many times have Australia lost 3 matches by an innings plus in a series...? That fact alone contributed to Alastair Cook not breaking all the Don's records for runs -- he didn't get to/need to bat as many times.... Jonathan Trott -- both Ashes and 1 dayers -- for the first time in 1 or 2 generations we have a # 3 who, when we see him at the crease, we can say "It's all right. We still have him. We'll be OK." Any number of great individual performances -- Jimmy Anderson, Ian Bell, Matt Prior, Chris Tremlett, Tim Bresnan, "The Outstanding Graeme Swann" and Kevin Pietersen. So what if it all went belly-up due to fatigue, injuries, and exhaustion? We were beaten by Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka -- there are a bunch of guys who are the Rodney Dangerfields of cricket -- for some reason they never get mentioned in the same echelon as some of the other high profile teams, but they are incredibly tough to beat in their own back yard. More power to them -- and see ya later this year in the UK.

Now as to one day captaincy -- how about Ian Bell? Stuart Broad -- one worries about injuries. But I do hate to see Andrew Strauss be knocked back for all the good he has done for the team, leading by example, being a fine fellow anyone would want to play for, and lest we forget, conducting himself with utmost professionalism with the media. Go on your own terms, Straussy, and thanks for everything you've done to make this one of the most entertaining summers (Aus) and winters (UK) in recent cricket memory.

Talking about thrillers, the CWC final this evening was the most amazing match to watch and I'm glad to see India defeat Sri Lanka despite the many forecasts to the contrary. It's been an amazing tournament and for me Dhoni's captaincy was one of my - cool, calm and collected, under it seems, any circumstances.

My only regret is that Sachin didn't get to complete his 100 centuries milestone in the match today but what a well-deserved victory for India!

Nayna

@Nayna (26) - I hear you about Sachin. I think as he said in the recent interview on NDTV yesterday though that the real milestone for him was finally getting his hands on the coveted trophy rather than the 100 centuries. For me, he is the greatest cricketer of all time and certainly most of the Indian public including Bollywood celebrities have been tweeting about the indicating a similar sentiment. I think this is going to be a seriously unproductive week in India all round, and happily so!