I truly believe that players who tell you they don’t feel the pressure of international cricket, of being away from home for months at a time, are lying to everyone and themselves.
What I’d really like to give a try is cricket, because I grew up playing American baseball.
I have some goals I’m looking to achieve, and one thing is to help the team win and move back up the ladder. This is vitally important to the team overall and to the supporters of West Indies cricket.
When I first started playing international cricket, people around me started telling me what was being said. And you’re never as good as anybody says you are. I try to stay quite logical about things.
Any spinner can change the game. It’s been proven in T20 cricket.
After accepting the captaincy at the beginning of the 1998 season, I immediately set high but attainable goals for the West Indies cricket team and myself.
You just need to go into matches with a clear plan in T20 cricket. If you go half-half, it’s going to be really hard to come back.
Everyone knows I’ve got a pretty passionate outlook on my cricket – and sometimes it does get the better of me.
As a test cricket lover, and as a cricket lover, I like all forms of the game.
I played cricket at primary school but hardly at all at high school. I was more of a footballer.
This is Test cricket. Being positive is not far away from being reckless. For all that the sport has become more fast-flowing and entertaining, you still need batsmen whose first instinct is to be patient.
The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.
It feels great that my performances in domestic cricket have been recognised.
I’m completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I’ll be a happy man.
I was given a talent to play cricket. I don’t know why I was given it. But I was. I owe it to all those who wish it had been them to give of my best, every day.
T20 is the vehicle to make cricket a truly global game.
Playing cricket has given me an excellent opportunity to get fit and healthy, meet people of similar interests, integrate with people of different backgrounds and see the world.
I’ll never forget Cricket Australia telling me I was too soft and I’d been too soft with the team… I kind of didn’t know what they wanted.
If cricket can be so glamorous and lucrative, I don’t see why wrestling should lag behind.
Many Continentals think life is a game; the English think cricket is a game.
My point of view is that when I am playing cricket I cannot think that this game is less or more important.
When there is time to think about cricket, I think but when there is time to be with family, I try to do justice to that aspect of my life as well.
If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I’ll be a happy man.
I used to play cricket every day till Class X but lost touch with it ever since.
I’ve spent most of my life watching fast bowlers – initially as a kid on TV and later in the flesh when I started playing top-level cricket.
I lost my captaincy after winning the series 2-0, and also getting a Test match 100. I never captained India after that. I couldn’t play one-day cricket in spite of being the best ODI player in the world at that time.
I’m aware how special an achievement 100 caps is because of the players that have come before me and the amount they’ve given to English cricket.
For reasons that baffle me still, my high school sports coaches put me in the first division of the rugby, cricket, and soccer teams.
Twenty20 is cricket on speed. In an era of hectic lifestyles and falling attention spans, it gives spectators more drama and intensity in three hours that they would get from a whole-day match. And even though it is a heady cocktail of money, entertainment and media, at its core it is cricket.
T20 is fast-paced and a wonderful vehicle to attract wider audience. On a technical level, it probably has impacted Test cricket.
My dad talks about the times when we’d play backyard cricket: If I got bowled out, I’d just refuse to let go of the bat and swing it at anyone who tried to take it away from me. I like to think that’s been tempered a bit over the years.
I am here to play cricket. No preferences at all. T20, ODI, Test – I just want to perform on every stage and prove my worth as a good bowler.
I wish I was a great cricket player, but I am not.
I know everyone wants to see India winning on home soil, be it in hockey or cricket. But sometimes with expectations come pressure, which can affect our performance.
I don’t like discussing cricket off the field.
In India, kids need someone to look up to. They’ve got it in cricket: they have Tendulkar and others.
Ultimately we’re playing cricket and we want guys who will score runs and take catches to help England win.
I feel proud when a player from Jammu and Kashmir plays for India. This shows cricket has reached all corners of the country.
Try and understand: cricket was played by Commonwealth countries only; now it has started in other countries as well, and I am proud of that.
Though I was born in a cricketing family and played Under 16 and Under 19 cricket for Delhi, my heart was always in cinema. Even while I was playing cricket, I was day dreaming about how it would be to stand on a film set saying lines.
I delayed my father’s funeral because of cricket.
Once I failed in cricket, I joined a law course, but when it also did not work out, it was another setback. When you get back-to-back failures, you automatically start to work harder in life.
I think a lot when I’m on my own – and much of it is about cricket.
Baseball grew rapidly in favor; the field was ripe. America needed a live outdoor sport, and this game exactly suited the national temperament. It required all the manly qualities of activity, endurance, pluck, and skill peculiar to cricket, and was immeasurably superior to that game in exciting features.
When you sit down and focus on the matches and series that took place during the 12 month period it strikes you just how broad the talent pool is in international cricket is today.
Australia always play their cricket really hard.
The beauty of Test cricket is all about playing an opponent in their backyard or defending home turf under challenging conditions over five days – dominating each session, dominating each day, picking 20 wickets to win a contest. That’s historically been cricket’s most fascinating gift.
Cricket, the whole thing, playing, watching, being part of the Gaieties, has been a central feature of my life.
Call me traditional, but Test cricket is the most important thing.
Malinga has been a legend for Sri Lankan cricket, and he has done great in international cricket in all formats.
As part of the England women’s cricket team, we had our own rickety period at the end of 2005 through to the beginning of 2007. Learning from our mistakes, by 2009 we were the best team in the world.
I half knew what to expect when I saw the cricket ground in the morning. It was when I started to talk to people working out there, I began to find what I was looking for.
My dream is to play Test cricket.
Village cricket spread fast through the land.
I was playing cricket first and my cricket coach was the one that introduced me to track and field.
When kids are 15 or 16, they should be playing more sports. I played football, basketball, cricket… Name any sport, and I played it.
I played rugby in the winter, cricket in the summer, and for a brief period was on the books at Cardiff City. Athletics was only sports day for me. In fact, I never really liked it. I was never too keen on a sport that didn’t have a ball at your feet.
I’ve always said it’s just a game of cricket. The only pressure I get is when I feel I’ve let the team down.
When you go into cricket you have to be streetwise.
I was a child who was interested in sports, and represented my school in football, cricket, badminton and table tennis.
I have nothing against the Indian people, and I have always enjoyed going to India, as the people there appreciate and support good cricket and players.
When I came to America in 1978, I was a huge sports fan – the problem was, my sport was cricket. Shockingly enough, no one wanted to talk cricket with me!
I played with Graham Thorpe and Alec Stewart; if anything off the field affected Graham his cricket life was not important and you had to give him a break. But if Alec had issues at home you would never know about it; he would turn up and think: ‘This is my job, I can do it.’
Treat cricket like a sport.
I want to improve cricket at the district level because lot of hardworking players come from districts. We have produced so many great players, but now we don’t have players in the Indian team. My intention is to work hard for the game of cricket.
I used to play tennis ball cricket quite a lot before playing serious cricket. Over there, you bowl yorkers. That could be the reason I bowl yorkers.
If we broaden the audience for cricket, more people will be interested in all forms, then TV rights and sponsors and crowds will follow.
When I came to Under-19, I played a lot of cricket and got a lot of experience. Then India A as well, and Ranji Trophy – it just keeps going on.
