Just Another Sports Blog

The 2019 edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) was a humdinger to the last ball of the tournament, which saw the Mumbai Indians wrest back their crown from their arch-nemesis and defending champions, the Chennai Super Kings by a margin of just 1 run. The year ended with the player auctions for the 2020 season on Thursday, 19 th December, 2019, which was the last one before the grand auction for the 2021 edition. So, without further ado, I would attempt to evaluate as to how the 8 sides performed on the auction table, as they attempted to go in for some of the biggest names today in world cricket and the “flavour-of-the-season” players. This would be a two-part article, with Part II coming soon. Chennai Super Kings: - The runners-up from the previous edition came into this auction with a very settled and experienced squad and having the slot to buy a maximum of 5 players (having released 6 players from their previous squad which included the likes of David Willey and Sam B...

West Indies are the two-time champions of the ICC World Cup and had won the inaugural edition in 1975 and then in 1979. These titles came on the back of some stupendous performances led by their skipper Clive Lloyd, Sir Viv Richards and the famed pace battery of Roberts, Garner, Holding, Croft and Marshall. Since their 1983 finals loss to India, the team is yet to make it to a World Cup final. The long-running feud between the Board and the cricketers has meant that cricket in the Caribbean has suffered and the quality of players coming through the system isn’t yet up-to-the-mark. But hopes do abound for the Windies in the 2019 World Cup and in this article, we discuss three reasons why they have what it takes to upset the apple cart and return to the summit of international cricket. Jason Holder: The Glue that binds the team: - o    When he took over as the youngest-ever Captain of the West Indies team in 2014, Jason Holder was regarded by many as being an accidental ...

2018 was a year that brought untold joy for the average Indian Cricket fan, even if there were a few disappointments around. The heartbreaking test series losses in South Africa and England were outweighed by the joy that unfolded on various fronts, be it winning the ODI series in South Africa, or winning the Asia Cup, or retaining the Border-Gavaskar Trophy with those stupendous victories at Adelaide & Melbourne or in domestic cricket, where an unfancied Vidarbha team shocked the giants of domestic cricket to win the Ranji Trophy or of seeing Rahul Dravid’s young charges in the Under-19 team win the ICC Under-19 World Cup in New Zealand. But for me, my favourite 2018 cricketing moment was of seeing a young & inexperienced Indian team being led by Rohit Sharma, win the Nidahas Trophy T20 Tri-Series in Sri Lanka in March, which was to see Bangladesh join as the third team with Sri Lanka and India. When the selectors decided to sit down to pick the team for the series, they...