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A Gallery Of Roguish Quotes At The US Open 2010
What they said, what they really meant and what they definitely didn’t.
Our beloved tennis players are eminently quotable. They can rise to the occasion and serve up wonderful sound bytes – some terrific , some terrible – when accosted at their press conferences and when grilled at interviews.
A sampling from the articulate geniuses.
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Four Reasons Why It Could Be Federer All The Way At Flushing Meadows
The Poached Egg
The hiring of Paul Annacone as coach appears a masterstroke in hindsight. Federer’s results and ranking since have shown an upward trajectory.
He has reached two consecutive finals: The Rogers Cup and Cincinatti Masters, winning the latter.
A new resilience and a willingness to slug it out with the best of them exemplify Federer’s ascendant star. He expects no easy wins and is willing to stay the course. This was so not the case earlier when Federer’s opponents were overawed by his reputation and gifted away easy victories.
The mortality of Federer has unlocked a new stream of consciousness in his opponents that there is life in professional tennis despite his looming presence.
As to how Annacone has added luster to Federer’s glory, the answer is still in the realm of speculation.
Roger, what is it? Is it validation? Is it motivation? Is it technical? Or is he a trophy coach?
Either way, Annacone is there to egg Federer on to his sixth US Open title.
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Dhoni’s pressing concerns
Image via Wikipedia
Post another inept batting display aided by a slew of umpiring errors, Team India slid to an abysmal loss against the Lankans on Sunday at Dambulla.
However, this article is not going to lament another inconsistent performance by Dhoni’s boys. There is probably enough media coverage of the defeat.Nor am I one of those who like to get down to it as the match progresses or as soon as it finishes.
An interesting sideshow of yesterday’s loss was that MS Dhoni and his boys refused to attend the press conference that immediately follows the match. This caused the print journalists to throw up their arms in frustration and boycott the press conference.
The captain was ostensibly busy playing football when the scribes frantically tried to contact him. What a s(h)occer!
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IRace Results
Image via Wikipedia
The IRace results were declared last weekend.
According to the rankings, I performed at 39% of my capacity; the rankings are adjusted for age,height and weight.
Tell me something I don’t know!
I am publishing the email sent out by the race coordinator to race participants.
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Yuvraj Singh: What a boy!
Yuvraj Singh now has a brand new sobriquet ‘ Water Boy’. No, it’s not a reference to the movie of the same name starring Adam Sandler.
A few inebriated fans at the 3rd Test Match between India and Sri Lanka decided that they were not quite ‘having a ball’ imbibing various liquors,the cricket was not entertaining enough and hence decided to vent their spleen on the players and cricketing officials.
Yuvraj Singh was the target of their ire; ‘water boy’ was the insult they came up with when he was performing 12th man duties for the Indian team.
Yuvraj Singh, however, was not one to take it lying down and decided to retaliate in kind.
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Asian cricket blues!
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The inability or unwillingness of the BCCI to field an Indian cricket team for the Chinese Asian Games has been greeted with widespread consternation by the Indian public or so the media channels would have us believe. I , for one, am not of the view that India needs to field their best team for the Asian Games and thus the BCCI could have been somewhat more diplomatic and said yes to fielding a second string team like they have for the tri-series in Zimbabwe. Besides apart from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, no other teams of cricketing note will be there! And surely, the Indian cricket team cannot do worse than their performance at the World T20!
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Disastrous run at World T20!
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With India’s 2 matches of the Super 8 match over and with them effectively India’s hopes of qualifying for the semis, it is time to make a couple of points about India’s no-show at this tourney.
1> The standard of cricket exhibited at the IPL and the World T20 are reams apart. In the latter, we have the best teams representing their country, whereas the IPL teams are constrained to having just 4 foreign internationals representing them and at the same time they need to ensure that deserving youngsters (read youngsters with potential) are given a chance to ware their talents. So suddenly we have our IPL heroes peppered with short-pitched balls and when you are a team batting second and chasing a large total, you have to try and hit every ball and the proclivity to succumb to the short-pitched variety is both exposed and exploited. Besides, since when have Indian batsmen known to be masters of the short ball?
Urbanomics: Is Sachin Tendulkar "choking" his opponents into submission?
Urbanomics: Is Sachin Tendulkar “choking” his opponents into submission?
Is there something about high-performing stars having an adverse effect on their opponents?
Do not their opponents rise to the challenge?
Is there not a case for improving one’s game in the presence of greats?
Maybe not!
Have a great day!
We’re too self-absorbed!
Image via Wikipedia
What do you think?
I agree, to a large extent, that cricket, the Indian public’s passion, is not a true team sport.
Team sports are about understanding, a true choreography , a meeting of minds, hearts, souls translated into fluid motion, team action.
A similar thing could be said about tennis , specially the Indian Davis Cup team except for the doubles pair. And, mind you, team harmony does not mean that 2 players should be buddy-buddy. They just need to be civil and challenge each other to be better, to complement each other. Perhaps, that’s why we may never see another champion Davis Cup pair like Paes and Bhupathi come out of India for a long,long time.
But then, I guess, that’s why we are about genius and individual excellence. Not bad traits by themselves but then why in a population of over a billion do we have such few instances of them? Ah then, the excuses for this failing have been trotted out by our politicians for over 6 decades and hence I refuse to recount them here.
Just as we could never be another US or a Japan, but come on , China faces the same challenges as us, maybe even more! So why cannot we be the tiger we were meant to be? Our national animal is the tiger, after all!
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon can then have quite a different undertone! Quite a notion! But then nations are formed of notions, are they not?
Have a great weekend!
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