Sri Lanka will be looking for the elusive test match and series win when they tour India for a Three Test, five ODI and Two T20 match series from November to December 2009. The team arrive in India on November 8th for the 55-day tour.
When he became the first
batsman to score 50 hundreds in international cricket, Sachin Tendulkar
established himself as the greatest of all Indian cricketers. Recognised
by Sir Donald Bradman as his modern incarnation, Tendulkar has a skill
- a genius - which only a handful have possessed. It was not a skill
that he was simply born with, but one which was developed by his intelligence
and an infinite capacity for taking pains. If there is a secret, it
is that Tendulkar has the keenest of cricket minds. At times in a Test
series he looks mortal. But he learns every lesson, picks up every cue,
dominates the opposing attack sooner or later, and nearly always makes
a hundred. His bravery was proved after he was hit on the head on his
Test debut in Pakistan, when he was only 16; and his commitment to the
Indian cause has never been in doubt. If captaincy - or rather the off-field
management of men less skilled than himself - was beyond him at his
first attempt, his reading of the game, and his manifold varieties of
bowling, have shown the same acute intelligence. His cricket has been
played in the right way too, always attacking, and because he knew that
was the right way rather than because he was a child of the one-day
age, as he himself modestly said. The awe of opponents was as great
as that of crowds. But the finest compliment must be that bookmakers
would not fix the odds - or a game - until Tendulkar was out.
The 2009 ICC World Twenty20 is a Twenty20 cricket tournament scheduled to take place in England in June of 2009. It will be the second World Twenty20 and will consist of 12 teams, contested by all Test-playing nations plus qualifiers (Ireland, Netherlands and Scotland)
The Champions Twenty20 League, formed with the official sanction of ICC will kick off in October 2008. Eight domestic teams from four nations will participate. Cricket Australia will partner the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and Cricket South Africa (CSA). The champion team in the Champions Twenty20 league will get US $5 million, which is the highest ever prize money for a cricket event.