My Contribution to the web

Melbourne, June 29 (PTI): Cricket Australia has urged home fans to treat Muttiah Muralitharan with respect when the Sri Lankan off-spinner tours Down Under in his bid to become the highest wicket-taker in the longer version of the game.

Muralitharan, who needs 25 wickets to equal Aussie legend Shane Warne’s record of 708, will play two more Tests against Bangladesh before Sri Lanka’s tour of Australia.

The ace offie has become a victim of sustained abuse by crowds on previous tours. But, the troubled relationship between Muralitharan and the Aussie crowd was temporarily healed when he visited the country for a tsunami appeal game in 2005.

The CA hoped that this time around Muralitharan would be appreciated by the Australian fans.

“Last year we had Monty Panesar and we were really pleased that he became a cult figure. With Murali coming back, our ambition would be to achieve the same outcome,” a CA spokesman was quoted as saying by ‘The Age.’

“As Ricky Ponting said, any international cricketer visiting Australia has the right to be treated with respect and in the same manner as Australian players are treated. That is the bottom line,” the spokesman said, adding “our message to the public will be ‘please treat all visitors with the respect they deserve. If you don’t the consequences go through to the possibility of life bans from venues.”

The CA has toughened the conditions of entry and security adviser Sean Carroll will lead a police team to London this month to help improve venue security around the country.

A man who tried to bleach his hair to look like Sri Lanka’s “sexiest” cricket player, Lasith Malinga, has ended up in hospital with severe burns, the Daily Mirror said here Friday.

The 20-year-old man in the central town of Kandy was hospitalised after he used two types of acid to try to dye his hair, the report said.

The 23-year-old Malinga was named the sexiest cricketer of the World Cup by the Barbados Sunday Sun newspaper because of his “eye-catching, blonde-streaked curly hairdo, eyebrow ring and tattooed biceps.”

Many Sri Lankan men have been trying to copy Malinga’s unkempt style, although the stylist behind the hair said he took two days to create the distinctive bleached-blond corkscrews.

TREVOR Bayliss will fly to Colombo next week to interview for Tom Moody’s recently vacated post – but the impending arrival of the NSW coach was not the biggest development in Sri Lanka yesterday.

Instead, the emergence of former Sri Lankan captain Arjuna Ranatunga as a leading contender for India’s head coaching position had the cricketing world abuzz, particularly with India set to tour Australia next summer.

The nomination of Ranatunga, who has made an artform out of antagonising Australian players for over a decade, reflects India’s willingness to adopt an unorthodox and aggressive approach ahead of a 12-month period in which they will play Australia in eight Tests and about 20 one-day internationals.

With almost no coaching experience to speak of – most of his post-playing career has been spent in Sri Lankan politics, where he has held sporting and tourism portfolios – Ranatunga’s allure to the Indians lies in his headstrong leadership style, which he employed to great effect as captain throughout Sri Lanka’s triumphant 1996 World Cup campaign.

At this stage Ranatunga is ranked behind former South African coach Greg Ford in the race to succeed Greg Chappell as coach of India. But with a final round of interviews scheduled for this Saturday, the BCCI could yet call on Ranatunga to drag India out of their recent cricketing malaise and transform them into an aggressive force able to compete with Australia.

Ranatunga’s sudden emergence on the scene has prompted Indian officials to announce that Dav Whatmore, the former Australian batsman and coach of Bangladesh, was out of the race to succeed Chappell.

Whatmore, however, remains in contention for the Pakistan coaching position.

“I’m just deciding what the next move is,” said Whatmore, who has returned home to Melbourne after completing all his coaching duties with Bangladesh.

“When I know, you’ll know.”

News of Ranatunga’s candidacy for the Indian position coincided with confirmation that Bayliss, who has two years remaining on his contract with the Blues, will compete against Australian assistant coach Jamie Siddons and Queensland mentor Terry Oliver for the head coach’s job in Sri Lanka.

The Blues coach has already turned down an offer from the Australia Centre of Excellence and an approach from Bangladesh this off-season but will likely take the Sri Lankan job if it is offered to him.

He is due to be interviewed by Sri Lankan officials in Colombo on June 14.
“It’s a job with an international team, and one of the better international teams, so you’d be nuts not to hear them out,” Bayliss said. “And if something was offered, you’d be silly to knock it back.

“I spoke to Tom [Moody] about a week ago just to find out what I can expect in the interview. So now it’s just a case of going over and seeing what they have to say.”

Bayliss’s current employer, Cricket NSW, has confirmed it will not stop him taking up the coaching position in Sri Lanka if he is successful.

Chief executive Dave Gilbert added that Sri Lanka’s pursuit of Bayliss had prompted Blues officials to formulate contingency plans in the event their head coach departs.

“We won’t be standing in the way of Trevor,” Gilbert said. “If he wants to prove himself on the international stage, we will stand aside. We don’t want to lose him, but we realise he is very ambitious, and in the long term he wants to coach Australia.

“Coaching another international side would be a big step towards that goal. Just look at the way it catapulted Tom Moody to the upper echelons of world cricket.”

Meanwhile, Cricket Australia has contracted Chappell, Bruce Reid and John Wright as consultant coaches for next season.

Wright was CA’s first choice to succeed Tim Nielsen as head coach of the Centre of Excellence, but the former New Zealand batsman was apparently reluctant to relocate his family across the Tasman.

Source:http://www.smh.com.au/news/cricket/ranatunga-wants-indian-job-bayliss-aims-a-little-lower/2007/06/05/1180809522847.html?page=2

COLOMBO: Advance bookings for England’s winter cricket tour of Sri Lanka has been rising steadily even as fighting between troops and Tamil Tiger rebels escalates, officials said on Monday.

A tour organising official at Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) said at least 4,000 bookings by British cricket fans have been almost finalised and more were in the pipeline. “We are very happy with the response,” the SLC official said.

The cricket board is teaming up with the island’s tourism authority to have special counters at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports, and at Colombo airport here, to handle the ‘Barmy Army’, as English supporters are called.

England will tour Sri Lanka in two stages, with the one-day internationals being played in October and the three-Test series in December.

Sri Lanka’s tourism officials expect the tour to lift sagging arrival figures, which have suffered from the violence with nearly 5,000 people killed in the past 18 months.

The SLC official said British fans seemed undeterred.

“You must remember that England tour in 2001-02 attracted a huge contingent of fans despite the (rebel) attack on the airport just six months before the tour,” he said.

Arrivals from Britain, a major market for Sri Lanka tourism, had fallen 13.7 in April over the same month a year earlier, according to tourist board figures.

But the English tour could swell numbers if the current promotional work became a success, the SLC official said.

England will play the one-day leg mostly in the north-central town of Dambulla, which is a major cultural heritage site with the famous rock fortress of Sigiriya in the backdrop.

The Tests are to be played in Colombo, the southern sea port city of Galle and the popular hill resort of Kandy. “The Galle Test is likely to be well patronised by British tourists given the work of British charities there in the post-tsunami era,” the official said.

It will be the first Test match in Galle since the town was devastated by the December 2004 tsunami.

Source: http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1101132

fboogle: Feed burner aquired by Google. Another feather to the Google’s hat

Official Google Reader Blog: Oh Sam I Am, can I read it on the tram?
I am not a frequent flyer. But I am sure about I can go offline in any moment, due to bad weather, telephone line fault, just a bad line condition or simply the break down of my ISP, all these reason are not common in where I live (Sri Lanka). Thats why I feel greatful to Google for introducing this service.

Official Google Blog: Bigger attachments in Gmail
Recently Gmail has announced the support of larger email attachments (20MB). I think Gmail should have done that one or two years ago. Atleast limiting the number of big attachments a day. Even 20Mb is nothing much these days.
Anyways Thank you Gmail for cinsideration.

Google ask for access to our privacy for better and relevan results. Can we trust Google?

ANTIGUA – England batsman Kevin Pietersen believes Sri Lanka spinner Muttiah Muralitharan is the best bowler in the world and harder to face than Australian cricket great Shane Warne.

Pietersen, the world’s top ranked one-day batsman, will face off-spinner Muralitharan on Wednesday when England clash with Sri Lanka in a World Cup Super Eights match in Antigua.

“Muralitharan is the hardest bowler in the world to face,” Pietersen told reporters this morning. “Much harder (than Warne). He is a true great of the game.

“Murali spins the ball both ways whereas Warney you can sort of counteract.”

Warne, who retired after Australia’s 5-0 Ashes test whitewash over England in January, was known for his sledging but Pietersen said Muralitharan lets his bowling do the talking.

“Muralitharan just winds you up because he knows he is going to get you out. He just smiles and laughs. ‘Silent assassin’ I call him.

“He has so much talk with the cricket ball he doesn’t have to say much,” added Pietersen, who plays with Warne at English county side Hampshire and was good friends with him before a spat during the Ashes.

Warne holds the record for the most test wickets but Muralitharan, who has 674 victims, will easily surpass Warne’s total of 708.

Pietersen said England had to win against Sri Lanka or world champions Australia on Sunday to have a realistic chance of reaching the semi-finals.

They have two points following Friday’s win over Ireland and move on to Barbados for the rest of the Super Eights after the Australia clash.

“We haven’t reached top gear, Wednesday the World Cup starts for England,” the South-African born batsman said.

“It’s a huge week for us. We can’t leave Antigua on Monday with just two points. It’ll be a great batting line-up when it’s firing.”

What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me. (It didn’t mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP – kitchen police – as my highest duty.)

All my life I’ve been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I’m highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too. Actually, though, don’t such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests – people with intellectual bents similar to mine?

For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles – and he always fixed my car.

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.

Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: “Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?”

Indulgently, I lifted by right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, “Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them.” Then he said smugly, “I’ve been trying that on all my customers today.” “Did you catch many?” I asked. “Quite a few,” he said, “but I knew for sure I’d catch you.” “Why is that?” I asked. “Because you’re so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart.”

And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there.