Personal Targets

Talking about Imran Khan not letting Miandad get a 300 after he got to 280. Look at Sachin's 194. I am sure the result would have been the same had he been allowed to get the 200. While in Miandad's case the time wa quite crucial.

I guess its not about personal targets afterall.

Pak vs India - First Test Results (April '04)

We deserve what happened to Pakistan in the 1st Test vs India. It was a poor performance all over. Poor bowling, poor batting, poor fielding, poor captaincy, poor team selection and poor planning.

Inzamam's laziness and Miandad's carefee (read careless) attitude are affecting the team. The game has become a lot more professional in nature in the recent (6/7) years. I know "professional" is a over/mis-used word but it simply means paying attention to detail and giving everything what it deserves. We are definitely not doing that. Indians are. Aussies have been and even Sri Lankans have been doing it for quite some time. English tried it but either they have lack of talent or something is grossly wrong with them. They have improved too tho.

Bad pitch? Get outta here. What does a pitch have to do with catching the ball? Again lack of concentration, will-power and mental attitude - in other workds professionalism.

It is not about losing one match. It is a way of things for Pakistan. And mind you we are not getting anywhere with this (if you think this is how we are and this is the way we are supposed to be). There has to be something right the SA and Aus and Indians have been doing recently that they are such a big success and something wrong with us that we are so unpredictable despite having such an awsome talent pool. At the very least we have a better team than Sri Lanka and NZ and WI but we have lost series in the past at their hands. I believe we have more talent than SA but the records dont indicate that. We failed to save the home series on the last SA tour when we failed to score 175 odd in the second innings. And we failed to save the rain-shortened 4 day test match when we went to SA later. These were two series that we should have won. Also numerous other games like the last WI series. The Aus series in Aus. This all shows lack of concentration, unprofessionalism and inconsistency. I think we are mentally a very weak team and the management does not help this at all.

OK you think all this talk is in the air without any base? Well lets get things straight. Lets pick up the very core issue of team selection. What is AbdulRazzaq's role in the test team? A batsman? Well sorry to say we have a better batsman in Misbah ul Haque than him. A bowler? I dont need to say much about this do I. Oh ok... An Allrounder? Well what good is an all-rounder when he fails to contribute meaningfully with the ball and his batting is also well limited. I mean the over he bowls in the middle do not accomplish anything except provide net practice to the batsmen, release the pressure (if any) and waste some time. Test match is about persistence. Persistent pressure and concentration. All 5 days. A loose session here and the match can change on its head. We are doing to our test team with AbdulRazzaq what we did to our One Day team thru Shahid Afridi. The middle order lost confidence because they did not know what stage of the match they have to bat. The team lost rhythm because the could not find a consistent pattern/strategy to work on and overall it was all mayhem... just like an Afridi innings. Lets take up the batting order issue. I find it very strange to have three very inexperienced batsman at the top order. I think there should be one senior player to provide the support and stability the top order needs. Looking at the score card seems so odd seeing the kids at the top.

The team spirit that used to be there is nowhere to be seen. Every player plays as an individual. We no more play as team that we used to in the days of Javed Mianadad and others e.g the 1992 World Cup. I guess this has change due the phases the team has gone through i.e match-fixing scandals, in-fighting among seniors, character assaults by those sitting out, throwing allegations, media hype, inconsistent/absence of good leadership, inspiration etc. While the Indians and Aussies play all for the team. Just look ar Dravid and Tendulkar shirk remarks about their personal achievements and alude to team effort. Of course the youngsters learn from them.

What hurts me deep inside is that we are not that bad a team at all as the results show. We have a lot of talent - more than most of the teams in world cricket. But we are unable to streamline and polish this into an ivincible, professional and consistent outfit. Only if we had more purpose to our cricket mission. More conviction and belief in ourselves. A more serious, thorough and professional approach to things - basic things really.

I dont see how the team is going to get up from this low deep. But miracles happen. Cricket history is full of them.

Dropped catches stats?

I wonder if there is any statistics on the most costly dropped catches in history. I am sure Sami's drop would be right up there. Also the one by Gibbs on the World Cup match before the Semi final vs Australia.

Pak vs India - First Test (April '04)

Well I would say the first day was a pathetic one for Pakistan and I know all of you would agree. Its all our fault.

- We have to hold on to catches to get them out. They wont go away to the pavillion themselves. We gotta catch them. No wonder Sehwag made 228. He should make 448 if we dont hold on to his catches. i mean a batsman gets out when we take the necessary steps to do that and catching is definitely one of them.

- POOR Team Management - I am sorry folks. I am the biggest fan of Javed Miandad and Inzamam ul Haque is the best batsman in the world. But the team management seems to be eating grass these days. They dont learn at all and maybe dont think either (or do so in the wrong way). Team selection was pathetic. I could not believe Danish Kaneria was not playing in this match. Come on man you have to have a leg spinner to attack the indian batting line up PACKED with Right-handers. How could you expect an off-spinner being more of a threat to right-handers than a leggie. Also I guess we could have played two spinner for that matter on such a dead track. So many fast bowlers! Are you nuts? Ok fast bowlers dont hurt but they are all the same type. Most of them bowl INSWING which is easy to defend and play for right-handers. Inswing is not big threat for batsmen like the Indians, at least in the tests. Yes they are good in cramping them up in the one-dayers but in tests you have to get them out by getting them to make mistakes. I hope you dont expect Shoaib or Sami to to break through the bats of Tendulkar etc? I mean Inswing is no threat at all man. This is the same phenomenon we faced in Australia in our last test series there. We weren't able to get them out!! Only coz except Wasim Akram all of them were basically inswing bowlers. And Aus and Indians are good enough batsmen to defend simple Inswing. Saqlain, although worked very hard, is quite predictable and surely out of rythm. Look at Shane Warne and Murli. They are having a great time in such conditions not so far from Multan. But we chose fast bowlers. Maybe we are too smart for me to get or something is wrong there. Also the field placing was mindboggling to say the least. We never attacked Sehwag throughout the match.

I feel the same poor team management led us to loose the fifth one-dayer as well. We CANNOT imagine chasing on a pitch like Lahore's. We had such a good outcome on the fourth match batting first. We had their backs to the almost. But still we wanted to expose our ugliest weakness i.e chasing in the last match.

I know its easy to speak sitting in your homes but it is as easy to think in the right way before the the match begins. Team mgmt needs real help. Bowlers need real coaching. Miandad does not help there. And there is no senior bowler in the team to guide the raw tearaways. Ppl are such big fans of Miandad (i am too) that they cant take facts. I have always said Pakistan needs a professional coach. At least a bowling coach. And someone who understands these tiny details which even the stupid newspaper reporters and commentators know about. We have to have a plan against each batsmen. It didn't show we had any against Sehwag other than dropping his catches and hoping he would go away himself. BASICS is the name of the game.


It will be very difficult for Pakistan not to loose by an innings at least.

Eclipse rant

I hate Eclipse (or maybe its the other way round). This was my reaction after my first interaction with the tool. I feel its just a fancy editor than a real IDE. I feel I am supposed to be productive the moment I install the IDE, not spend a day learning the IDE and half a day configuring it, finding plugins and resolving version issues with them. They say it is a platform for doing anything and nothing in particular. Well I feel it is not always good to be too general purpose. You have to focus on the needs of your users. The only good thing about Eclipse I find is that its lightweight and free.

Also look at its integration with tools. Talk about Ant. I feel the way Eclipse deals with Ant really sucks. Hello!! I am supposed to be using Ant not Eclipse!! I have already invested valuable time learning about Ant and do I now have to learn how Eclipse handles it? Look at NetBeans instead. It maps directly to the way we normally interact with Ant. Like creating targets, adding tasks, and running them. Thats it... its that simple. Talk about Version Control. Rather not, right? No support for anything other than CVS. And support for CVS is well over engineered I feel. CVS is supposed to be simple man. Look at the command line tooling CVS provides. Almost all the developers are used to using that functionality. But with Eclipse we have to learn a new technology called Team Synchronization. Fancy and cool but useless. On the other hand, Netbeans provides tools to map directly to the CVS command line tools and you are in much more control. You know where you are going. In fact it even shows you the commands that will be executed as a result of pressing some buttons.

On a broader scope of things lets look at the Mission of both tools. Eclipse is a barebones implementation which is there just to get people frustrated and force them to buy IBM WSAD. While NetBeans is a fully functional/complete IDE with all the features included for free. You dont have to spend a penny. I know it is supposed to feed Sun's ONE Studio but all the features included in the proprietry tool are also there in the open-source version, maybe better.

Plugins? Come on man. I am supposed to use the IDE not the other way round!! The IDE is the one which is supposed to provide me services and facilities not vice versa. And talking about Plugins I cant find reasonable plugins that are decent and work Out-of-the-box with my version of Eclipse. Even if they do they puke when I upgrade my version of Eclipse. Anything decent costs me money. Plugins are a bad idea from the beginning I feel. A user interface is supposed to be consistent. That is the key to usability. Plugins are not - useable or consistent. And most of them suck. Come one people its not a toy to put stickers on - its an IDE which is supposed to get work done. I am supposed to focus on the work I do rather than finding and configuring my plugins.

I dont mean NetBeans is the best IDE around but it is more usable than Eclipse for sure, once it starts up that is. NetBeans is a beast when it comes to resources. And its buggy as hell. Crashes are frequent and hangs a lot of the times.

If Netbeans is resource-hungry Eclipse is configuration-hungry. You even have to add jar files to the build path which are in the lib directory. Pick it up yourself for once!!

Yes Eclipse has some good features for editing at least but you really have to take a Eclipse 401 course to be able to use them. Its just like Linux. Linux is a great operating system and is surely very powerful. But you have to do a lot of learning up front to be ablt to harness it to its full potential. But as you must have noticed, Desktop really sucks on Linux. No two apps are alike and usability is nil. Even Linus Trovalds accepts this as I read somewhere recently that he said it will take 10 years for Linux to be able to deliver in the Desktop area. Eclipse is just like that, even worse coz I cant see how it could improve. Windows is bad and all but at least its usable out of the box, as long as it doesn't hang or crash, just like NetBeans.

Maybe I have had a bad experience with Eclipse and am too dumb/lazy to delve deeper into the Tool to discover its hidden treasures. But I am too fed up at this point. Anyone sees things improving in the IDE arena?

Reflections...

Better than sending tons of email to everyone right. Nothing formal tho and easy to use.

First

Hey just trying out this new thingy