Two Men

2 cricket stories have dominated the last few days' news. And they couldn't be more more different from each other. One is Graeme Smith's courageous batting to try and save the 3rd Test against Australia, in what was technically a dead rubber. Says something about the character of the man and his hunger to win, that he would go out to bat with a broken left hand and tennis elbow of the right one. And almost pull it off. We don't have enough of that going around these days. Real. Actual. Courage. Of course, I could play Devil's advocate and say its lot easier to play Hero when you've already won the series and made history. But even so, it requires guts and gritting of teeth. And he did it. Awesome. Almost as awesome as Kumble's heroics in 2002.

The other one, which unfolded with all the drama of a Bollywood potboiler was the more unsavory English cricket crisis. Which culminated in the sacking of the Coach, and the captain being forced to resign. KP's behaviour has been Blago-like just for sheer brazenness. The man has an ego the size of China. And I pity poor Andy Strauss. What a terrible time and reason to be chosen as captain. Because the ex-captain was a self-serving egomaniac who believed HE was KING! On the other hand, expectations will probably be so low that he'd do have fail pretty spectacularly (read behave worse than KP. I don't think the cricket even matters at this point!) to be held accountable. On the other hand, he inherits a team fractured by internal politics, a star player with a chip on his shoulder and extremely dissatisfied backroom staff. Who wants to be king of that world? I was listening to the BBC podcast on this topic. They seem almost amazed that KP could show such poor judgement and believe he had the full backing of his team...when clearly he didn't. Its like his giant, inflated ego just took over the sane part of his brain.

Two very different men.