Bowl it one last time Glenn !!!

I must apologize since this is not a new blog. Actually I used to blog on Yahoo 360 for quite some time however somehow the 360 concept never appealed to me. And since Google is almost taking over our life (GMail, GTalk, GoogleCalendar, Orkut, Blogger, ...) it is natural that I blog on Blogger. Somehow I find this Blogger website more easier to blog than a 360 or a Live Spaces. Ok, enough of yada yada yada....

Here is the Ctrl+C and Cntrl+V (copy and paste for non-geeks) of my old blog from 360. This was posted during the 2007 world cup and although its been a year, I am happy I put it before the 2011 world cup gets underway....

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Trying to stream a world-cup semifinal between Australia and South Africa was a tough task. However, considering the quality of giants squaring up in the arena, it was worth the effort....or so I thought.This was a less than rousing affair. The trouble with Australian professionalism is that it has become such a cliché that even watching it at its calibrated best can be numbing. Glory be flaws.

Yet, with a little filter of nostalgia even these hours of unremitting lopsided excellence are able to take on some warmth. To watch the chuntering maestro Glenn McGrath at work was to see an entire era of wicket-to-wicket back-of-length menace flash before the eyes, the eternal hypnotic torture of it. We will get to see it once more on Saturday. Once more only.

Few cricketers have been at once so level as McGrath and yet able to find another one. In an over, in a spell, in a day, in a series, in a season, he seems always to be operating at his peak. Still he is continually rising to occasions. Remember his ball to Sachin at the '99 World Cup? The one to Lara?

Admittedly Ashwell Prince played the stroke of a paralysed man and Jacques Kallis' foolishness brought the best out of a fine yorker. The touch of the master was in the Mark Boucher dismissal. It was the classic McGrath incision, Halal if you will. Off stump and just outside, a bit of wobble and bounce, caught first slip. Equally McGrathian was the impact: big semi-final, opening spell, six overs, 3 for 14, South Africa 27 for 5. The man is two months after 37. He looks it too. Australians were asking for him to be put to pasture before the World Cup. There you go.

With the departure of McGrath, shortly after Warne and shortly before Gilchrist, an epoch in cricket would be completed. Expertly, precisely and more humorously than given credit for, the job has been done. McGrath leaves Australian cricket in a better shape than he found it and whether Australia will make the most out of it - well, only time will tell ...