Winning the Break-Up

Have you heard of Ted's (of How I Met Your Mother fame) concept of winning a break up? Ted theorizes that in any break up, both individuals do what they can to portray the appearance that the break up was their choice, i.e. to win the break up (do watch this particular episode, its quite funny).

I would not have thought it, but the machinations of the Pakistan Cricket Board yesterday do lead me to believe that How I Met Your Mother has a significant fan base in the PCB as well. Yesterday, the Pakistan Cricket Board tried to win their break up with Mr. Modi's IPL by stating that they were revoking the NOC's of all Pakistani players - this after each franchisee individually and the IPL as a whole had made it clear that they were not interested in Pakistan at this time!!!

It would be interesting to see whether the PCB would continue to deny Pakistani players a NOC if the IPL did in fact want them to participate. Would the Pakistani cricketers continue to sing in harmony with the PCB if they could see millions of rupees (and fame) disappearing in the blink of an eye? Would the politics of this battle between two very unequal forces result in the Pakistani soldiers deserting the PCB army and going the Flintoff way? In my experience, principles and egos do often fall by the wayside in the hunt for money - what do you think?

The Flintoff concept

England made up for a lack of spine in the batting, with an injection of spunk in the bowling. I guess that's what Freddie allows England to do - with bat as well as ball, he permits the batsmen to relax a bit. Nasser Hussain might call for wholesale changes in the composition of the batting order. Truth is that with fit Freddie around, and even a slow wicket, each run scored counts for a bit more, making the batsmen a bit more than the sum of their dismal individual selves. With a bit more from the batsmen, England can be back to challenging some good teams.

P.S. Is it wrong, really wrong, to be a fan of James Anderson?

Tick tock, tick tock

Is it conceivable that any movie can stand up to months and months of breathless anticipation and hype? The Dark Knight hits Delhi theatres today, and to try to keep my expectations low is proving futile, as I quickly dash to smear paint on my face...

Same goes for Flintoff, I guess.

We'll know soon enough.