Schumi, whats cooking?

So he just won another race this weekend. Now Micheal Schumacher has 89 wins to his credit. Another 11 to go for that illusive century. Should he continue the way he(and his team + car) is performing now, he should get at least two more wins from the remaining six races of this season. That means another 9 wins to go. Knowing his killer instincts and attitude on field, he would take another two seasons max to complete 100 wins.

Do you think he can do that? His contract ends with Ferrari this season. Where is he heading? Will he stay with Ferrari? Or does he want to end his career with Renault, the team with which he started winning races? What is baffling is Why Renault had to make so many changes in their car in the middle of the season, that to when Fernando Alonso was winning comfortably? Is there anything cooking inside? Is Renault into a deal with Schumacher? We let you win championship this season, you join us next season?

Why Cricket

I know the title of the post is enough to pull crowds (at least the south east asians) towards the post. But my intention is to trigger a line of thought process (title conveys it well) in you, let alone initiate a discussion on it.

You have always enjoyed watching, gosipping and reading Cricket, be it the Test cricket, One-day cricket or more recently the Twenty20 cricket. Whenever there is a match, a couple of days +/- the match days have gone in that. I dont argue if/when we should do it or not. But have you ever wondered ‘why’ the country (india obviously) has been so mad for this sport?

You can provide many arguments for it. We have produced legends in this sport? I guess no, there are countries like West Indies, England and Australia who have produced more legends than anyone else. But they are not as mad on Cricket as we are. They have world class teams in other sports like Soccer, Football etc and they do even better in solo/individual sports. So why madness in cricket in india?

I guess it is more to do with our lifestyle and the environment where we grow up. A typical indian child grows up in a family tied pretty firm with a society. Which means the child gets a lot of friends and spends the evenings and sundays with them. Once a group is formed, the only viability for a sport is a ‘team’ sport. One that can keep all of them occupied so that none feels left alone. There are quite a few team sports to choose from but only cricket fits into their bill. Because it needs minimum accessories and its very cheap. You dont even need to buy anything to start playing the game.

I dont deny, there is a class of people who prefer to stay away from the mass. Their child grows in a virtually isolated enviroment which only gets worse as s/he steps into adulthood. So they incline towards one man games (solo). Some of them do excel in those games and you can find a few national heroes in those category too. However, this lifestyle being prominent in western countries you see world class players in solo sports from those countries. Thats probably the primary reason why games like Golf and PC based games are so hit there.

What do you think? And before i leave you there another point to think about – with our growing population we are only going to get short of space and land. In such a case how long do you think we can “be mad” about cricket and continue following it, for a game which demands more space than most other games.