No clear favourites in Sri Lanka-Pakistan series: Hafeez

Newly appointed Pakistan T20 and ODI captain Mohammed Hafeez feels that the series against Sri Lanka will be a close contest.

Speaking at the launch of the two-match T20, five-match ODI and three-match Test series, Hafeez said Sri Lanka would be a formidable side at home.

"No one can really predict the outcome. It will be a good tough series," Hafeez said.

"We have had success against them in the recent times but it will be really tough competition third time."

In the last series played in UAE, Pakistan won the Test series 1-O while the ODI series was won by them with a 4-1 margin. Pakistan won the sole T20 international too.

Pakistan coach Dav Whatmore who was twice Lanka's coach including when Sri Lanka won the World Cup in 1996 said his task would be to win the series and nothing less.

"My goal is to take Pakistan as high as possible in the rankings in all three forms of the game."

Mahela Jayawardene the home captain said he would focus in trying out new combination of players with the T20 World Cup coming up in Sri Lanka mid September in mind.

"We have only four T20 games, 2 against Pakistan and 2 against India before the world cup. So we need to try different combinations."

The Sri Lanka-Pakistan series gets underway at the Mahinda Rajapaksa Stadium in the southern port district of Hambantota on June 1.

Is IPL a 'crony league'?

The Indian Premier League's (IPL) ongoing fifth season has turned out to be the most closely fought one so far. But, off the field, it has also been the most controversial.A bunch of young IPL cricketers were suspended after they were stung by a news channel talking about alleged under-the-table transactions and spot fixing taking place in the league.An allegedly inebriated Bollywood superstar, who owns a league team had a dust-up with security officials at a Mumbai stadium when they stopped him from marching into the field with a group of children after his team won a match.Two cricketers were detained at a rave party in Mumbai, where many were suspected to be taking drugs. As if this was not enough, an Australian cricketer playing in the league was accused of molesting a woman and assaulting her male companion, prompting some uncharitable tweeting by the son of the owner of the team to which the cricketer belongs. (The woman has since withdrawn the complaint.)Has all this prompted historian Ramachandra Guha to launch a scathing critique of the league, one of the most thriving sporting events in the world today?Author of a magisterial book on the history of Indian cricket, Mr Guha is a devout follower of the great game. But in a piece in Friday's The Hindu newspaper, he skewers the league, saying it is bad for capitalism, democracy and cricket, in no particular order.Supporters of the league - and they, I suspect, are the majority - argue that how players conduct themselves off the field has little to do with the league.So what is wrong with the IPL, according to Mr Guha?Many things, clearly. Mr Guha has never been a fan of the Twenty20 format of the game and its crude aesthetic, and has written about it in the past. This time he goes beyond the format and "boorish celebrities", arguing why the league is bad news for India.'Bad name'He writes that player prices don't reflect their worth accurately, foreign players are paid a fraction of their Indian counterparts of comparable quality.He talks about the brazen cronyism: the chief of India's powerful and rich cricket board is the owner of a league team - imagine Alex Ferguson was the manager of Manchester United and the chief of the English Football Association - and the league commissioner is seen openly hobnobbing with some team owners.Many of India's top former cricketers have been hired on as consultants and commentators, who have nothing critical to say or offer any suggestions to make the league more transparent. Mr Guha believes IPL has actually given "capitalism and entrepreneurship a bad name".A lot of cricket lovers would agree with Mr Guha. IPL, they believe, is Indian cronyism at its shining and vulgar best, where cricket and Bollywood combine in a heady and, as many say, a toxic cocktail. 
More interestingly, Mr Guha makes the case that the IPL is bad for Indian democracy as well. He says it underlines the divide between rich and poor India. The names of the teams - "kings, royals, knights" - reveal a lack of imagination and a sloven admiration for colonial and aristocratic titles.He says the country's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, also a nursery of Indian cricket, has not even been awarded a franchise. Bihar, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh, which are among India's largest states, have also been left out. To call such an exclusionary league Indian is a folly, he suggests.Mr Guha is not the only cricket fan who appears to be fed up with the excesses and opacity of the league. Mukul Kesavan, historian and writer of a fine book on cricket, says IPL is "republican India's first public celebration of decadence".Argues Mr Kesavan sharply: "One characteristic feature of decadence is a contempt for convention and procedural scruple. Indians are familiar with this in everyday life, but the IPL is a departure in that the people involved with it legitimise and defend conflicts of interest explicitly and in full public view."It is difficult to disagree. Some of India's finest commentators are attached to the IPL, and no one says a thing about the conflict of interests, the open involvement of cricket board officials with the franchises and the complete lack of transparency.As long as the tamasha (spectacle in Hindi) of cricket as entertainment is pulling in the crowds, everything else is forgotten? Does it mean that an expensively-mounted cricket spectacle makes Indians forget all that is wrong with their country?http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-18202261

x

Hafeez ready for tough series

Pakistan's new Twenty20 captain Mohammad Hafeezhas said he expects a tough contest in all three formats against Sri Lanka.

"We all know that Sri Lanka is always good on their own soil and we are looking forward to a very tough series," Hafeez said at a media conference held a few hours after the team's arrival on Monday for a seven-week tour.

"We have experience playing them in the recent past and had good success against them," he said, referring to the Test and ODI series victories when the sides met in the UAE late last year. "I personally feel the boys have worked really hard in the last one and a half months. Although we were not playing any international cricket (recently) some of the guys were doing their own training and the PCB arranged some matches for us to get match practice."

The Pakistan coach Dav Whatmore was happy with the team's preparation for the series. "Although Pakistan is unable to play any international matches at home due to the security concerns in their country, they managed to practice together before coming to Sri Lanka," he said. "We had a pretty decent two weeks camp before we came here finishing up with some practices that were attended by conservatively 15,000 people who were starved of cricket and they just loved them.

"The advantage a country like Sri Lanka has, apart from IPL of course, is they are all centralised in one spot. In our case a lot of the boys are spread out. There are a lot of weeks of build-up before we come together for a camp. From that point of view you can't be in all the places at once taken in good faith that they are working and the boys have. But the two weeks was very good at the other end."

Whatmore served as head coach of the Sri Lanka team on two occasions and is best remembered for guiding them to win the World Cup in 1996 in his first attempt. "That was a long time ago when I finished with Sri Lanka and a lot of water has passed under the bridge. I maintain some friendships which are always good but the task here is to win. It will be nothing less than working 100% to achieve that. The longer goal is to take Pakistan high up in the rankings in all three formats. It's a simple statement but it requires a lot of work."

Sri Lanka captain Mahela Jayawardene said that it was a good challenge for his team to play Pakistan at home. "If you take their performances in the last six months they have performed well in all three formats. To play them in our conditions is a good challenge," Jayawardene said. "We must move forward from the series against England. One-day cricket is important to us and also the T20 because in another 3-4 months we have the World T20 so the T20 matches against Pakistan and the two we will play against India in July are extremely important to us."

Pakistan being their tour of Sri Lanka with two T20 Internationals at Hambantota on June 1 and 3 before moving into the five-match ODI series and the Tests.

<