Shane Bond ruled out of Centurion test
Shane Bond, who tormented Brian Lara recently, has been ruled out of the first test against South Africa starting today, after suffering a knee injury earlier on the tour.
This is obviously the kind of news Stephen Fleming could have done without on the occasion of his 100th test. In fact Jacques Kallis and Shaun Pollock will be playing their 100th test as well. I can only remember one previous instance where two cricketers played their 100th test in the same match - Atherton and Stewart at Old Trafford against West Indies in 2000. But three cricketers playing their 100th test in the same game is surely nothing that has happened so far.
Bond is no stranger to injury. Stress fractures of the back have meant that he has only featured in 14 tests since his debut in November 2001 against Australia, even though New Zealand have played 38 tests in that period.
64 wickets in 14 tests at an average of 21.5 are an indication of how seriously good he really is. But if he continues to be as brittle as he is right now, chances are that at the end of his career, he may be a classic case of what might have been rather than be counted among the greats of the game.
He doesn't have too much time left. He's already 30 and being a genuine quick, may only be able to play for 2-3 more years. I can't see him reducing his pace over a period of time like Shaun Pollock did early on and settle on being a line & length bowler.
Maybe he should stop playing one-dayers, given the imbalance in favour of batsmen.
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@ Jag,
excuse this on your comments, but wanted to know if you knew of a url which shows the actual timings of each of the matches in the world cup 2007.
Thanks.
rj: The stadiums could barely be ready when the tournament starts. I don't [right now!] expect the organizing committee to have a detailed list of _timings_ of each match :)
By 
Jagadish (17 Apr 2006, 12:37:00 pm)
I hunted high and low for this info.
I found it surprising that not even ICC have this info in place. They should at least know if its a morning start for a day match or an afternoon start for a D/N match.
A year is long time, i guess!!! :-)
Sorry to go on a different track from the topic here in question.
RJ: Did you try the official site? I doubt if it has that information though. I reckon that there will be a mix of morning starts and day-nighters. Morning WI time is around. As for the timings, this is what I figured out. If the start is a 9 am start (WI local time), then it is approx. between 8 am and 11 am in various parts of the US, 1 pm in the UK, 4 pm in the Middle East, between 6 pm and 7 pm in South Asia and between 9 pm and midnight in Australia-New Zealand. For day-nighters, assuming they start at 2 pm WI local time, US timings would be between 1 pm and 2 pm, UK around 6 pm, Middle East 9 pm, South Asia between 11 pm and midnight and AU-NZ 2 am to 5 am.
I guess, given the constraints imposed by television programming, most of the games could end up being day games since that'd mean audiences in South Asia and AU-NZ would be able to catch a fair part of the action, which they wouldn't be if the games started at/past midnight their time. This is a similar situation to the 2003 WC too where there were very few D/N games.
By Jagadish (18 Apr 2006, 1:29:00 pm)
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