The last two matches of the India-England seven-match one-day series have been called off over safety fears following a series of terrorist attacks in south Mumbai on Wednesday night in which around 100 people have been killed and more than 300 injured.
An England [Images] Cricket Board (ECB) statement said the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) had agreed to its request to postpone the remaining two one-dayers.
"The ECB today requested the postponement of the 6th and 7th One Day Internationals in the current series between India and England. BCCI has agreed to this request," England team's media relations manager Andrew Walpole said in an email statement.
"The England team will not travel to Guwahati this afternoon as scheduled and will remain in Bhubaneswar overnight pending further discussions with the BCCI," he added.
ECB Managing Director Hugh Morris, captain Kevin Pietersen [Images], coach Peter Moores, manager Reg Dickaso and Walpole held initial discussions with the BCCI secretary N Srinivasan, as well as representatives from the Indian team management at the team hotel in Bhubaneswar after which it was decided to call off the last two ODIs.
A decision on the two-Test series to be played next month will be taken later on Thursday evening.
England have so far played five one-dayers and have lost all the matches to trail the seven-match series 0-5. They were also scheduled to play two Tests in Ahmedabad [Images] (December 11-15) and Mumbai (December 10-23).
Even before the tour began there had been security concerns for the ECB after bomb blasts left dozens dead in Guwahati, where the sixth ODI is due to be played on Saturday.
The teams were also supposed to stay at the Taj Hotel, one of the places attacked by the terrorists, during the second Test in Mumbai next month.
The sources said that the upcoming Champions League, to be held in three different venues of the country from December 3 to 10, is also likely to be cancelled with many of the top overseas players reluctant to tour India.
Even if the tournament takes place the matches could be moved out of Mumbai.
English county side Middlesex have already cancelled their flight to India on Thursday after reports of the attacks came out.
Gunbattles raged between terrorists and commandoes and fresh explosions rocked two luxury hotels -- Taj and Trident (Oberoi) -- after a night of terror targeting ten places in the country's financial capital killed over 100 people.
A groups of militants armed with automatic weapons and grenades burst into luxury hotels, a hospital and the CST railway station late on Wednesday and fired indiscriminately.
Should Sachin Tendulkar be playing one-day internationals?
VIEW 1
Just focus on Test cricket
During the rain-hit Bangalore one-dayer the Indian batting line-up put on a power-packed display. The only exception was Sachin Tendulkar. Playing his first game of the ongoing India-England series, he scored 11. While there’s every reason to believe that Tendulkar will better this score in the remaining games, it’s time to ask whether he should be playing ODIs at all.
A few months shy of 36,Tendulkar’s body is just not up to the rigours of the packed international schedule. Over the past few seasons, he has missed Tests and ODIs because of injury, something that was unthinkable when he was younger. The last ODI that he played was in March missing a triangular tournament, the Asia Cup, and a one-day series against Sri Lanka this year. But the Indian one-day team hasn’t really missed Tendulkar. It reached the finals of the Asia Cup, beat the strong Sri Lankan team in Sri Lanka and crushed England in the first three ODIs.
The ODI team under M S Dhoni is an explosive unit. And unlike earlier Indian teams it is an exceptional fielding side. One of the reasons for this is the team’s youth. All the players in the team are in their twenties with the exception of Virender Sehwag and Zaheer Khan, both of who turned 30 last month. So why disturb this winning combination by playing Tendulkar?
The current ODI squad should be the team that will play the 2011 World Cup. It’s difficult to imagine Tendulkar maintaining peak form and fitness in both the longer and shorter forms of the game till then. It would be much better for Indian cricket if he focuses on Test cricket where Team India has just lost two stalwarts in Anil Kumble and Sourav Ganguly. Tendulkar is needed in the Test squad not just as a batsman but also to see through a difficult transition process.
If he sticks to playing Tests, Tendulkar would in all likelihood be able to stretch his playing career. That would be a bonus not only for Indian cricket but also for millions of cricket fans.
VIEW 2
Sachin should play on
The spotlight was on Sachin Tendulkar when he walked in to open the Indian innings. It did not stay on him for long. An ungainly 11 runs later, he was back in the pavilion. At a time when M S Dhoni’s brave young gladiators are establishing their authority, this became reason enough for suggestions that he should leave the limited overs shenanigans to the youngsters and prolong his career at the pinnacle of the sport in Test cricket. They are wrong.
Four hundred eighteen oneday matches, 16,372 runs at an average of over 44, 42 centuries and 89 half centuries. The statistics bear repeating. A man cannot reach such heights without knowing every aspect of his game. There can be no better judge of his fitness and future in the one-day game than Tendulkar himself. The way he plays his cricket shows that he is no egotist. He will not cling on when he feels that he is no longer up for it or that it is detrimental to the team. The game reveals a man’s character and his has withstood the sternest examinations.
Suggestions that his latest outing proves otherwise are premature. Sourav Ganguly might have made it his USP but the Little Master is no less adept at proving naysayers wrong. Let it not be forgotten that in the last one-day series he played against Australia in 2007-08, he was the highest run scorer from the Indian side. Of late, his game has seen a rejuvenation of sorts. He has emerged from the cocoon of cautious strokeplay he had built around himself in the middle of the decade to play with something approaching his old joie de vivre. It is heartening to the team and disheartening for opponents.
For two decades he has been at the top of the game, one of its most feared exponents. His presence is talismanic, not just for the fans watching him but for his teammates. The day that it is no longer so, he will choose to step down. Until that day, he must be left alone.
He Played From The Heart
Sourav Ganguly retires from international cricket
How will one best remember Sourav Ganguly? What will be his most enduring legacy? These are questions being asked all over the cricketing world on a day when Ganguly will wear his India colours for one final time in Nagpur. While some say that he will be best remembered for his never-say-die spirit and perhaps as India’s best ever captain, history will also surely remember him as someone who rescued Indian cricket from its deepest low: the tribulations of match fixing.
At a time when the match fixing scandal was eating into the very edifice of Indian cricket and the national side under Sachin Tendulkar was in disarray, Ganguly assumed the mantle of leadership. Fans had started to lose interest in the game and only a handful in the cricket fraternity — one of them being Ganguly — was above suspicion. To compound problems, he was soon challenged by Steve Waugh’s record-breaking Australians seeking to conquer the “final frontier”. It was a team that came to India on the back of 15 wins on the trot.
Ganguly’s initiation into Test captaincy in 2000 could not have been more dramatic. To add to his woes, India was mauled at the Wankhede in a little under three-anda-half days in the first Test of the series. Add to this the scoreline at the end of Day 2 at the Eden Gardens in the second Test: Australia having scored 445 and India reeling at 128-8, the situation looked set for Ganguly to lose the captaincy even before he had warmed up to it. Reality, however, could not have been more different. India won at the Eden match thanks to a miracle partnership between V V S Laxman and Rahul Dravid and a match-winning spell by Harbhajan Singh. This was followed by a series-winning victory at Chennai. It was perhaps the best Test series ever to be played on Indian soil and suddenly to borrow the words of the man of the moment, Barack Obama, Indian cricket had a three-word mantra: “Yes we can”. Under Ganguly, nothing seemed impossible and innovation was routine.
Ganguly converted Virender Sehwag into an opener, discarding all the conventional idioms about opening the batting. It was a decision that still continues to pay dividends. Remembering the decision, Ganguly suggested in a conversation last week at the end of the Delhi Test, “In India you need quick runs at the top of the order for once the ball gets older, you can’t score fast. And if you get off to a flier the opposition will always be under pressure. Sehwag was our best bet.” He played Dravid at number six and promoted Laxman up the order, an innovation that won India the Eden miracle, and could be something we need to resort to again to get Dravid back in form. He inspired Harbhajan to become a proven match-winner in all forms of the game and motivated the team to win in adverse overseas conditions. In doing all this, his hair may have turned grey and his batting form may have suffered but the nation surely gained.
Ganguly’s personal journey may be divided into two distinct phases — the pre- and post-Greg Chappell periods. While the first witnessed near unrivalled elegance in batsmanship, the second was a more cautious and hardened phase, one in which he valued his wicket much more. While in the first, dancing down the track and hitting spinners out of the ground was routine and caressing the ball through the offside to the boundary second habit, in the second, milking the ball for ones and twos was the norm. The first phase resulted in comments like Sourav was god-like in his offside play; the second forced critics to acknowledge that he was more mature and solid after his stunning comeback in South Africa in the 2006-07 series.
The one link between the two periods was his aggression. Be it the over-thetop waving of his shirt at the Lord’s balcony after the Natwest victory in 2002 — something that he gets slightly embarrassed about when reminded of — or making Steve Waugh wait for him at the toss in the 2001 series or his valiant counter-attack en route to scoring a series-defining century at Brisbane in 2003, aggression and confidence have been his defining traits.
In retirement, too, Ganguly stands out. Even in his final Test match at Nagpur, Ganguly scored a flawless 85. Giving it up before critics call for his head, despite knowing full well that he could have continued for some more time given his current form, he remains someone who has always exceeded expectations and fought his way out of trouble. In fact, it is this ability that endears him most to the owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders, Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan.
In commenting on his legacy, one is forced to acknowledge Ganguly’s ability to surprise one and all. You may not trust him with your life if you apply the parameters of reason and rationale, but you can certainly bank on him if you think with your heart. And who better to tell us than Ganguly that modern competitive sport is more often than not played from the heart and not in the mind.
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