A match-up that's worth the wait?

It's taken 73 games, but we're finally here. Seventy-three. Chew on that number for a moment. The IPL has had 50% more games than World Cup 2011, which was faulted for being too long. It's had 16 games more than the first three World Cups combined. The IPL has tested viewer appetite and player endurance to the limit, in the process turning the less-is-more norm on its head. The audience has spoken: there is only so much cricket India can take. The players have started breaking under the strain: several overseas signings flew home early, the India squad going to West Indies is severely depleted. Seventy-three is a big number.

The verdict, though, can wait until No. 74 is out of the way. An exciting knockout phase is capable of glossing over all the faults of a bloated tournament, and IPL 2011 has been fortunate on that front - Bangalore's hammering of Mumbai in the virtual semi-final notwithstanding. The impact of a good, well-contested final can be even more far-reaching. The success of the most recent World Cup, and the equally resounding failure of the one that preceded it, are quite closely linked to the manner in which the final moments of the respective events panned out. For three years running, the IPL final has been a closely fought game. Can 2011 continue the trend?

Chennai Super Kings and Royal Challengers Bangalore are opponents capable of producing that gripping denouement. Going by where they finished in the league table, they are the two best sides in the tournament. Both sides have been incredibly consistent, which is a considerable achievement in a tournament that goes on forever. Skeptics will point at Bangalore's dependence on Chris Gayle, and Chennai's dependence on home advantage. The former is a disservice to Virat Kohli and Bangalore's well-rounded bowling attack, while the latter betrays a poor grasp of the roller-coaster ways of Twenty20 - winning seven games on the trot at the same venue in this format is no mean achievement, regardless of the conditions.

Chennai and Bangalore have a storied Twenty20 history: in the one season when Chennai did not make the final (2009), it was Bangalore who stopped them in the semis. Chennai returned the favour in Champions League 2010, hustling their South-Indian neighbours out of contention. This year, they have traded blows three times already, with Chennai leading 2-1.

IPL 2011 has thrown everything at us, and the feeling at the end of it all is one of gluttonous excess. A cracking final, witnessed by a full house, and featuring good cricket (and that doesn't always mean scores of 200 from both sides) might be a good way to sign off. A Super Over finish will be "just what the doctor ordered".

'I realised I was on the wrong track'

In the season racing past, cricket, to Virat Kohli, must have felt like a washing machine. Through his 12 months with India, Delhi and the Royal Challengers Bangalore, Kohli found himself in all manner of cycles - high-speed tumble, delicate, spin, rinse, permanent press.

Just over a month ago, the groundswell of India's World Cup victory just beginning to die down, Kohli was lining up against players he had wept with at the Wankhede. One day it was his captain, MS Dhoni, but he wasn't his captain anymore. The next day Yuvraj Singh had to be stopped from scorching turf, Harbhajan Singh had be stepped out to, and a way had to be found to make Gautam Gambhir step over the line. Kohli had played the IPL before, had understood what it was all about, but this year getting right into it took slightly longer.

Kohli describes his first week in the IPL as "confusing". For the World Cup winners, he said, "it was tough, to motivate ourselves, to actually be at our best. We weren't up to that mental level, to be honest".

Now, though, with only two games left in the tournament's fourth season, Kohli is second behind Chris Gayle in the run-scoring list, (Sachin Tendulkar is within six runs of both men) and has been among the best fielders in the competition. He has even led Bangalore in Daniel Vettori's absence, and on Tuesday he did everything to help Bangalore inch closer to the final: an unbeaten 70 not off 44 balls, followed by a gymnastics-floor exercise special in defence of 175 - attacking the ball, diving, somersaulting and giving the ultra slow-motion cameras plenty to drool over.

Yet at the end of it all, Bangalore and Kohli tumbled to defeat. Once again on Friday, Kohli will be inside the IPL's playoffs machine - and the second qualifying final - versus Mumbai Indians. He'll be asking himself: Again? More?

When viewed from a distance, the game often does not make sense as to how it pans out over the course of a season. To Kohli, though, the past year has brought with it clarity about his batting in the limited-overs game. His is a special ability: to retain what he believes is essential, pure even, about his cricket and yet fit into the whirl of Twenty20, with its insane strike rates and volcanic ash cloud of boundaries that blur perspective and logic.

Whether in 50 overs or 20, when Kohli and his A game take the crease, the rest of him - his image, the tattoos, the emphatic eyebrows, the fin hairdo, the adverts featuring Bollywood starlets and love bites - evaporates. All that remains is the man and his bat.

Off the field, though, Kohli's engagement with the world is mostly through his image as seller of "youth brands." When old fogeys get him to sit still for a few minutes, however, he morphs from punk rocker to cricket philosopher; an open, thoughtful speaker. A short conversation is peppered with words like "self-realisation" and "channelised", and he describes India's performances in the World Cup knockout stages, much like someone from the Tiger Pataudi generation would: "It was probably the best display of team effort I've seen from the Indian team in a long, long time."

In less than four years Kohli has put himself up and ahead of his other contemporaries for a place in what may well turn out to be the new-look Indian middle order in a few seasons. His first step into prominence was as India's Under-19 World Cup winning captain, whose invective-spewing celebration rang a few alarm bells about what India's next generation was going to be like. That was followed by the IPL hellraiser and then the supporting role in a once-in-28-years World Cup victory.

In between all those monumental events, Kohli has survived the unseen: every young cricketer's meaningless wander through the jungles of celebrityhood. About a year ago a switch was thrown in his mind about what he really wanted to achieve.

"Actually, I switched off." he says. That's where all the talk about self-realisation comes from. The junior World Cup victory brought with it mutterings about his bad-boy ways, much like it had for dozens of other youthful sporting success stories. Everyone in Indian cricket is familiar with the tale of how the teenage Kohli resumed his Ranji Trophy innings against Karnataka a few hours after losing his father in December 2006. What happened afterwards is not so well known. Not his lingering personal grief nor the roiling success of the junior World Cup victory.

"I had seen a very tough time, when I was about 17, and it was very hard for me to recover from that for the next two years. Not many people have taken that into consideration before giving me that tag and just thinking of me like that." 'That' means the bad boy in fast burn. "I agree, I made a lot of mistakes at that point in time... those were the kind of things I would have done in a normal life but not a stage like the IPL, where a lot of people were watching you." It is as if, in his mind, he is still sorting through the debris.

"I couldn't handle what happened after we won the World Cup. People looking up at you and thinking that you were someone who could play for India and just giving you tags like 'blue-eyed boy' and stuff like that. I couldn't take it, honestly. I made a lot of mistakes."

In a world where "brands" really matter, tags can be terribly destructive things. Kohli tried to shake off a few with some simple questions and answers. "I realised I'm going on the wrong track. It just came from within. I said, what am I doing? There's no way I'm going to play for India like that. And that is one thing I wanted to do as a child."

He returned to cricket and the monotony of practice and nets and the ground, trying to erase 18 months of mistakes. "I used to stay on the field as long as possible and come back home and stay at home. I totally cut off from everything else that I was doing for one and a half years. It started to pay off in my cricket." This shift in his frame of reference has kept Kohli's game at its simplest, treating Twenty20 as a ladder to a better percentage game in 50 overs. He says the Twenty20 format and the six-week IPL helps a batsman one rung up the ladder - in international 50-over cricket. "You improvise more, and that can help you in the one-day format, say whenever you need to attack in a difficult situation."

He lets field hockey keep its scoops and reverses and just fine-tunes what he already possesses. "I know my strengths and weaknesses and I can't play a shot that I'm not used to. I haven't tried to play special shots. I still play the normal shots in Twenty20. But you need to execute them a bit more [thoroughly] than you do in one-dayers just to get results."

Like the delicious six over extra cover - off Albie Morkel - which gave Bangalore the kick in its last few overs on Tuesday night. Twenty20's short attention span meant that effort was obliterated by Suresh Raina's match-winning innings that followed. "It's different to develop a shot over a period of time, but I don't like to try new shots in every match. I just try to stick to my game plan and score runs sticking to the game plan I have."

That game plan has been mostly about seeking gaps to overturn the field, hard running, and turning over strike before picking the moment to move up a gear. At no stage in his international career has Kohli looked uncertain. Five centuries in 57 ODIs for India, three scored chasing (along with nine of his 13 fifties) - what once used to be considered an Indian impossibility. When India field first, Kohli averages over 55, 10 points higher than his career score. It led ESPNcricinfo blogger Andy Zaltzman to predict that Kohli was so good in the chase, "a post-cricket career as a Hollywood stunt car beckons".

Even if completely devoid of a multi-coloured, surround-sound off-field life, Kohli's career itself should not be dull. For a start, he is aware of where he stands. The two cup victories, he says, make him feel "a bit lucky" but they are not his path to entitlement. "I feel very good when I think about it - you have played in your first World Cup and you end up on the winning side - but I feel a bit lucky as well. But I don't want to treat this as if I have achieved something special. Okay, these milestones have come along but I still have a lot of goals I want to achieve. I want to elongate my cricketing career as a consistent player. I have personal goals I would like to achieve someday."

Test cricket, he has often said, is one of those goals, and Kohli is just behind Cheteshwar Pujara in the middle-order queue. After the IPL he will set out on the first leg of India's six-month travels in what will be unfamiliar terrains. Only 15 of his 57 international games have been played outside Asia. But everywhere India go now, they go as world champions. Kohli says the World Cup win has doubled his confidence in international cricket, "but given all of us a sense of added responsibility as well. If you go on top, you need to remain on top. It takes a lot of character."

He has dealt and survived one heavy round of that character-defining stuff. It helped him seal a spot in the World Cup XI, a title victory and a place among the most promising young cricketers in the international game. There's no time to celebrate though; on Friday, in the IPL's second qualifying final, Virat Kohli must go through yet another spin cycle.

Misbah, Afridi script Pak's 11-run win over SL

Despite a gloomy morning, all roads in the Sri Lankan capital led to the R Premadasa Stadium on Saturday. With one of the most high-profile World Cup clashes between the Asian rivals to be played at the home of Lankan cricket, it wasn’t a surprise. More than a victory for the home team, what the fans awaited was an intense battle between the boys in blue and those in green.

Even though Pakistan were playing away from their home, with Sri Lanka being their adopted home for the tournament, the crowd lent solid support to Shahid Afridi’s men. It was evident in the rousing cheer at the end of Pakistan’s national anthem prior to the match. But as the afternoon wore on, the near-packed crowd changed its stand, making it more difficult for the visitors’ batsmen.

Solid Total

Considering the adverse support from the stands and a quality bowling attack despite the absence of Lasith Malinga, one would say that Pakistan did a decent job to put on 277 for seven at the end of the stipulated 50 overs after Afridi had elected to bat.

Crowd support

Later in the night, it was indeed surprising to see the crowds clinging on to their seats even after the Lankan slide started in the middle overs after Afridi struck with his spin bowling. Probably, they were living on the hope of the home side pulling off an improbable victory on a wicket that was getting slower with every passing over.

While the crowds were hoping for a miracle, the Lankan dressing room was hoping that Chamara Silva, who had skipped the opening tie due to the demise of his elder sister, would do it for them, and more importantly, for his beloved sibling.

But by the time Silva started timing the ball sweetly, it was a little too late. With the asking rate surging into double digits and wickets falling regularly at the other end, thanks to Shahid Afridi's another dream spell, the inevitable had to happen.

Too much to get

As a result, when Silva was stumped by Kamran Akmal, who had an off day behind the stumps, off Abdur Rehman in the 47th over, Sri Lanka needed 44 runs off 23 balls with just two wickets remaining.

Soon after that, when the Pakistani team huddled to celebrate their 11-run victory after Muttiah Muralitharan managed a single off Umar Gul, they deserved all the applause that the sporting Premadasa spectators gave them.

Kenya cricket coach clashes with players

The national Cricket coach Eldine Baptiste has fallen out with some of his senior players at the World Cup according to reports from a cricket official.

Kenya has already been well beaten in their opening two matches of the 19th February to April 2nd tournament and face an uphill task to qualify for the final stages.

Cricket Kenya Chairman Samir Inamdar said that the coach has his own way of doing things which did not go down well with some senior players.

New Zealand routed Kenya by 10 wickets after they were defeated by 69 runs in Chennai last Sunday. Kenya captain Jimmy Kamande attributed that debacle to nervousness and promised to do better against Sri Lanka on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Kenya's Paul Biwott finished second in today's Tokyo international marathon behind winner Ethiopia's Hailu Mekonnen.

The 30-year-old Mekonnen, who only began competing in full distance marathons last year, slowly outdistanced Biwott before the 35 kilometre mark to cross the finishing line in two hours, seven minutes and 35 seconds.

Biwott was second in time of 2 hours 08 minutes and 17 seconds, followed by Japan's Yuki Kawauchi, who clocked 2 hours 08 minutes and 37 seconds to qualify for August's world championships in South Korea.

In the women's race Russia's Tatiana Aryasova emerged victorious ahead of Noriko Higuchi of Japan.

Canada ponder changes, Zimbabwe bank on spin

It might be a clash of the lightweights, but both Canada and Zimbabwe know this could be one of the few opportunities to earn victory points. Little wonder then that both captains sounded confident at the weighing scale. "It is a big game for us," Elton Chigumbura said. "We have to win this match as that puts us in the running for the next stage, the quarterfinals." Later Ashish Bagai, Canada's banker-taking-a-break captain, spoke as if the victory tomorrow was a done deal. "Zimbabwe and Kenya are going to be the best chance to win," Bagai said. "Those were our team goals coming into the tournament."

Zimbabwe have more experience of playing on a big stage, more experienced players and many guiding lights like Heath Streak, Grant Flower and Alastair Campbell to keep an eye on them. Facing them are Canada, mostly a motley crew of amateurs. The only known name, and professional, being John Davison - the oldest player in the tournament, whose belligerent 111 (against West Indies in 2003), the second-fastest century in a World Cup, has now gathered cobwebs. So far in this edition, including the warm-up games and the first group match against Sri Lanka, the 40-year-old opener has a highest of 3.

The top three have failed consistently and Bagai did not rule handing a World Cup debut to the youngest player in the tournament, 16-year-old Nitish Kumar, a precocious talent according to Bagai and Davison. At the training today, Nitish was part of the first line of batsmen and later had an extended session of throw-downs against the new ball. "A bit of a shuffle is on the cards," Bagai admitted. "The first ten overs have been tough for us losing way too many wickets and it has been hard to recover. The top order needs to take responsibility." If Davison and Kumar do open, it would probably be the first occasion in a World Cup of the oldest and the youngest player walking in together.

The onus would be on Bagai to stay strong. He has been Canada's best batsmen in the recent past, averaging 60 in the last 13 ODIs. Another batsman known for his firepower is Rizwan Cheema. At the outset of this tournament, Cheema had said he would like to go big at every opportunity. A duck against Bangladesh did not tame his aggression as he unleashed a flurry of bit hits using raw power against England to help Canada recover from 28 for 5. His 93 runs from 71 balls gave England a mighty scare, but Canada fell short by 16 runs.

Still, if Chigumbura is not worried, it is because in Ray Price, Prosper Utseya and Graeme Cremer, he has three bowlers who could temper Canadian aggression. Against Australia last week in Ahmedabad, the trio had bowled in tandem and with discipline to limit the world champions to a modest total. "We are going to play to our strengths which is on the spinners side. On the bowling side it won't change much," Chigumbura said, indicating Zimbabwe were likely to stick to the same bowling line-up.

Incidentally, Zimbabwe suffer from the same problem that ails their opponent: their top three have been inconsistent. Both Brendan Taylor and Tatenda Taibu have played 100-plus ODIs but neither has managed to grown into a dependable batsmen. Charles Coventry has fallen apart after he equalled Saeed Anwar's then-record 194 against Bangladesh in 2009. He has since hit only one half-century.

Even though the match is likely to be played to empty stands - not such an uncommon experience for both teams - it will be far from a quiet contest with both sides having a lot to prove while there is also a lot to lose.

Injuries hamper South Africa training

It's not Delhi Belly but three of South Africa's squad are suffering ailments. Legspinner Imran Tahir, batsman JP Duminy and fast bowler Dale Steyn all missed South Africa's training session on Sunday at the Services Ground in Delhi.

"Imran has an upper respiratory tract infection and rested today as a precaution," team manager Mohammed Moosajee told ESPNcricinfo. "JP developed lower back stiffness after the last game and was also rested. Dale bruised his right side after a collision during today's warm-ups and was removed from the rest of the practice by the physiotherapist Brandon Jackson to undergo treatment. They will all be monitored going into Mohali."

Two of the three walking wounded are frontline bowlers but South Africa's assistant coach, Vincent Barnes, was not overly concerned. "I spoke to Dale on the bus and he said his side was a bit sore but he should be fine."

All indications are that South Africa will have their full complement to chose from in three days time when they take on Netherlands. Having played three spinners in their tournament opener against West Indies there is a feeling that winds of change are blowing through the South African attack, and Barnes is enjoying the breeze.

Tahir is the first attacking wristspinner that Barnes has had to work with and he finds him "a breath of fresh air" in the squad. "I hadn't seen a lot of him before but I got to spend time with him during the India series and he has been unbelievable in the set up."

Tahir was picked for South Africa immediately after he became eligible to represent the country on New Year's Day and was included in the squad for the five-match series against India. He did not play a game, instead being hidden as a secret weapon for the World Cup, a move that seems to have paid off.

His 4 for 41 on debut against West Indies was the fifth best performance by a South African in his maiden international match, something that may have surprised the world, but not the insiders. "I am not surprised by what he is capable of," Barnes said. "He is in the side as a strike bowler and he brings the run rate down because he takes wickets."

Together with Johan Botha and Robin Peterson, Tahir forms part of a core slower bowling competent which has helped take the pressure off the quicks according to Barnes. South African bowling has been synonymous with the quicks in the past but in conditions that demand different plans they are now part of a more rounded unit. Steyn, Morne Morkel and Jacques Kallis only bowled 18.3 against the West Indies with none of them completing their full allotment.

Barnes said the five seamers, which include left-armers Lonwabo Tsotsobe and Wayne Parnell, will still "play a big role in this tournament." One of the places they may do so is at their next stop, Mohali. "We expect more pace and more bounce," he said.

The next match comes a full week after their first game and is going to be played against an Associate team which could present South Africa with an occasion to give squad players an outing in the tournament. Barnes, though, believes it's dangerous to view any contest lightly.

"There are no smaller games," he said. "The match will present us with different challenges, it's a day game, so there will be no dew factor. We'll have a look on the day and decide the best XI."

West Indies must be wary of losing focus

The Big Picture

These two teams began their World Cup campaigns with contrasting defeats. Netherlands' loss against England can safely be bracketed in the 'heroic' category, but West Indies' insipid performance against South Africa was depressingly familiar. This contest may not be the mismatch that the two line-ups suggested it should be.

On the evidence of their opening game, West Indies are going to find themselves fighting it out for the fourth qualifying spot from Group B alongside England and Bangladesh. Therefore this match is one they can't afford to take lightly especially after Netherlands showed they have the ability to make the major sides stand up and take notice.

Netherlands will fancy making another mark because they'll face a thin West Indian attack stripped down even further by the absence of Dwayne Bravo. If Ryan ten Doeschate can lead a display of similar resilience as they showed against England, setting a decent target, or chasing one down, may not be out of reach for the Dutch.

However, like England's class with the bat eventually came through against Netherlands' weak bowling resources, the same should apply to West Indies. Even with the loss of Bravo snr there is considerable batting power available led by Chris Gayle followed by the hugely talented Darren Bravo. But the tournament hasn't had an upset yet and West Indies will have to be careful they don't become the first victims.