Titan cup semi final 1996

As retrospectives go, this is not much - a group match, which is a defacto semi-final because of an earlier match being washed out. We are going to talk about the The Titan Cup 1996 semi-final featuring Karnataka Bowlers v. South Africa. 

Well Tendulkar did hit an 88 in the match, and Mark Taylor hit a century, but I had to check the scorecards to remember that. The only thing that popped up was Javagal Srinath and Anil Kumble letting loose a frenzied lower order slog which was more reminiscent of Pakistan than the Indian team of those times. 

Later on we found out that the tournament was suspect – maybe Cronje had it fixed, along with Azhar (and Jadeja probably). But unlike match fixing in other matches, these revelations came out much later – almost 6-8 years had passed, and for a lot of people, the connections were never made. 

The Renaissance

The rejuvenation is still on. For a brief time, Ashish Nehra was the bright star of the Indian pace bowling universe. Along with Srinath and Zaheer he helped India to the 2003 world cup finals, in the process returning the best bowling performance by an Indian bowler in the world cup. But, inevitably injuries crept in and Nehra became an after thought.
But, the IPL has shown signs that he is on the mend. He is still not the old Nehra, but sooner rather than later he will return.