Danny Byrne
Dear Friends, I am in Calcutta for the India vs South Africa Test Series. I have a few issues with technology at the moment as I bought a new laptop a few days ago at the duty-free shop at Panama Airport and the settings for Windows 11 were exclusively in Spanish. Some wonderful friends in the Beehive pub in South London have helped to get a new version installed in English but the keys on the computer are a mess and do not correspond to the symbols displayed in front of me. I cannot find the apostrophe or the question mark and several other useful keys.
Getting tickets for Test matches in India has always been a challenge and as the years go by and the technology improves, unfortunately the process for travelling fans does not get any easier. Andy was able to purchase tickets for the first two days of the Calcutta Test on-line. He was given a short time period in which to turn up at a particular location to convert the electronic tickets into paper versions. There was so much chaos at this location when he arrived that he simply abandoned the idea of “purchasing” the tickets he had already paid for and subsequently paid an additional 1,000 Rupees a ticket to an enterprising person outside the ground who had a large wad of “unofficial” tickets in her possession. At least we should be able to enter the ground before the start of play tomorrow morning.
A few years ago Calcutta had the best Box Office of all the Indian Cricket Stadiums and tickets could easily be bought in advance without anyone feeling they were being exploited or ripped off. It is really sad that this is no longer possible and fans have to go through this pathetic nonsense of buying tickets electronically that have to be converted into paper tickets in a mass uncontrolled scrummage afterwards.
It is hard to predict the teams likely to take the field tomorrow with some commentators suggesting the conditions may favour the fast bowlers, with reverse swing coming into play and others predicting a dry dusty track that will suit the spinners. With all three of the India slow bowlers accomplished batsmen in their own right, they could select as many as six bowlers and still have a strong batting line up. The starting line-up could be as follows,
Yashasvi Jaiswal
KL Rahul
Shubman Gill
Dhruv Jurel
Rishab Pant
Ravindra Jadeja
Washington Sundar
Axar Patel
Akash Deep
Jasprit Bumrah
Mohammed Siraj
Alternatively, Akash Deep could be omitted to strengthen the batting with either Sai Sudharsan or Devdutt Padikkal preferred.
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The South Africans could also employ three spinners with Simon Harmer, Keshav Maharaj and Senuran Muthusamy in the squad. With David Bedingham left, supposedly due to the conditions being unsuitable for his style of batting, the door is open for Dewald Brevis to liven up the middle order with the likes of Wiaan Mulder and Tristan Stubbs also in contention. The possible starting eleven could read as …
Aiden Markram
Ryan Rickelton
Temba Bavuma
Tristran Stubbs
Wiaan Mulder
Dewald Brevis
Kyle Verreynne
Senuran Muthusamy
Simon Harmer
Kagiso Rabada
Keshav Maharaj
Alternatively Stubbs could be left out in order to include another bowling all rounder in either Corbin Bosch or Marco Jansen.
