I want to come home quickly and enjoy the IPL action up close: Yuvraj Singh

Yuvraj Singh, who will be back home on Monday, says that he is on the last bend of his journey to recovery and very soon he will be back on the field and join the action. “The carnival of cricket has started. I’m far away from India but I can feel the excitement and buzz. I want to come home quickly and enjoy the action up close,” Yuvraj writes in a column in The Times Of India.

“For the first four years, I’ve been part of this fiesta but this time I’ll experience it a little differently. I have to watch it from the fence and enjoy it like a fan. It’s disappointing to miss out on the action but that has been my story of late,” writes Yuvraj, adding his loyalties are with his franchise (Team Pune) and he wish them all the luck and success this season.

“Last year, we started on a good note but faltered in the middle. We were one of the new teams and couldn’t sustain the momentum. I am sure with time we have learnt our lessons and this year Pune will emerge better and stronger. It is a good side with a good mix of experience and youth; it’s just a matter of clicking as a unit now. Let’s hope we prove our mettle this time. I shall be shouting the loudest for them,” writes Yuvi in TOI.

Meanhwile an article in Hindustan Times says that you will never ask “what’s in a name” if you knew of the fetish Chennai cricketers have for changing or rearranging their names. It’s tough to guess how they would like to see their names on team sheets every season, giving nightmares to the scorers keeping track. The leading exponent of the trend has to be Srikkanth Anirudha, son of India’s chief selector K Srikkanth.

“The name he’s going by these days is at least the third variation of his name,” says a Chennai-based scorer. “Earlier, he has used S Anirudh and Aniruddha Srikkanth.” Well, as you might have already guessed, numerology appears to be the most rationale explanation for this experimentation.

With Lady Luck yet to smile on the lad, are we soon going to see him come up with another variant? We have our fingers crossed! And then, when they are not rearranging it, they are busy expanding it. Ganapathy Chandrasekar and Sridharan Sriram went by the monikers of C Ganapathy and S Sriram for a long time before taking the plunge. The preferred way of course is to use an initial for the first name, as in M Vijay, R Ashwin.

Paddy Upton, who was instrumental in helping Indian players cope up with the pressure before the 2011 World Cup reveals that he encouraged the players to embrace the pressure, look for pressure and talk about pressure, so that it became their friend, according to a report in Hindustan Times.
“It was 13 months before the World Cup that we started strategising. We changed our language and always spoke about when we play the final in Mumbai on April 2…. At all games, at all trainings, everything we did was to prepare for the final. We never focused on winning or losing. We never reacted with too much happiness when we won, never expressed too much disappointment when we lost,” the former South African firstclass player, who was then coach Gary Kirsten’s trusted lieutenant, added.

Meanwhile according to a report in Indian Express, the cricket ball which was famously hit for six sixes in an over by Sir Garfield Sobers is expected to fetch 25,000 pounds at an auction. Legendary West Indian all-rounder Sobers was the first one to do so in cricketing history when he played for Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan at St Helen's in Swansea on August 31, 1968 in a first-class cricket match.