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This bowl out in Twenty20 is so stupid and childish! Wonder who got that stupid idea and suggested and wonder how other people accepted it ?! First of all, by run rate/ number of wickets fallen, ( Duckworth-Lewis or something like that ) easily a side could be declared winner.

But understanding that you want to make it thrilling in the last minute and all, even then this bowl out looks so disgraceful to cricket. It is not equivalent to penalty shoot out in football/hockey, it is roughly equal to kicking at the goal post without the goal keeper.

Why is it being reduced to only bowling accuracy ? Kicking a goal and defending was what they did it all the time in a football game but in cricket it is more than that. Why not consider batting accuracy and let the batsman hit a ball by tossing it himself in the air ?

Also it is quite simple to bowl at the stumps. Just bowl plain dead slow ball ! I am sure just after few tie-breakers, one will see all the bowls hitting the stumps, then what ?! I think they will be asked to bowl at single stump ?! When that also does not break a tie, they should do it with eyes closed. Wah !

If a tie breaker had to be played, then an extra over each team of normal cricket is most perfect. ( And again, not in an empty field without fielders! ).

Solving Sudoku, a Japanese mind game / puzzle, has been one of my routine activities. It is a 9 x 9 matrix where some of the positions are filled. One has to fill in the remaining positions so that there are 1-9 digits in each row, coloumn and in each 9 non-overlapping matrices.
The simplicity of rules makes this puzzle attractive and complication of solving makes this addictive. The best part I feel, it does not require pre-knowledge like in the case of crosswords. There would be an uniquesolution to every game. 10 minutes of interest is guaranteed everyday. I usually fill it in the hotel during the breakfast inspite of the disappointment of the waiter, who thinks I take longer to finish. If it is unfinished, it would be finished in bus and the moment I lift my head from the paper, it would be my alighting stop.

It is being carried by most of the daily newspapers. Nowadays, as the filled positions are more, it has become too simple and can be solved without guessing at any instant of time. I think for this case a program can be written easily to solve the puzzle. But for certain puzzles, a guess was required and if the guess was wrong, there was no way to now immediately. Infact once, just when very few positions were left I realised a guess (that was made in the very beginning) was incorrect and whole puzzle has to be reworked on the line of other guess. For such cases, I feel, it would be challenging to write a program to solve it.

Rahul Dravid. Anil Kumble. Vishwanathan Anand. Pankaj Advani. Narain Karthikeyan. Sania Mirza.

Indian Sports is shining….!!!