Food for thought

Remember this -

Although Mumbai batted first and ended up scoring only 218, both teams agreed to bend the rules. Australia's target was revised to 300 to allow their batsmen to gain more practice and make the game more competitive for the large number of spectators who filled up the temporary stands erected outside the ground.

Now read this

The Australians are known not to give an inch to their opposition and they extend their discourtesy out of it too. The quality of bowlers provided by Cricket Australia for the net sessions can be best described as pedestrian. It happened at Melbourne, Sydney and now at Perth. The local officials asked a school boy team from England called as Australian Cricket Experience to bowl in the nets ahead of the third Test.

Interestingly, it isn’t the same when the Australians are practicing. For instance, the home team batsmen batted against high quality Western Australia team bowlers.

There were similar complaints when we toured South Africa.

Now, South Africa visits us in March. And Australia in October.

What will the BCCI do?

Will we, as is our want, bend over backwards and provide the best of practice facilities and warm up games or shall we also indulge in a bit of "gamesmanship" - you know, the "hard but fair" type?

And oh, can we also cut down on the photo ops please?