Indian batting is too strong. They will batter anything Pakistan throws at them.
Pakistani batting is not up to facing greats like Zaheer Khan, Nehra, Agarkar, Kumble, Harbhajan (his finger operations permitting).
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Gupta: *
Indian batting is too strong. They will batter anything Pakistan throws at them.
Pakistani batting is not up to facing greats like Zaheer Khan, Nehra, Agarkar, Kumble, Harbhajan (his finger operations permitting).
[/QUOTE]
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllolllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Gupta: *
Indian batting is too strong. They will batter anything Pakistan throws at them.
Pakistani batting is not up to facing greats like Zaheer Khan, Nehra, Agarkar, Kumble, Harbhajan (his finger operations permitting).
[/QUOTE]
:D just remember Shoaib and Sami in your prayers.
*form bares no resemblance on how a team performs on the day on the PITCH!!!! weren't the aussies on form @ adelaide ranking up 550 runs in their 1st innings but dey were brought down, back to earth by dravid's brilliance. *
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Zero_one: *
This series is 2 months away and u ppl have already started ..... can't wait ..... to remind u both sides have important series to start or going on
[/QUOTE]
Maybe they should start discussing 2007 WC matches too ;)
for the first time in my life, I AM SPEECHLESS. 
Yes 3rd grade batsmen like Inzi , Yousuf , Younis and others are afraid of Indian bowling specially the guy whose name is in bold
Tum log abhi se shuru ho gaye?
Talk about kursi experts - don’t know the pitch, don’t know the weather conditions, don’t know the current player form and who won the toss, but they know their team will win!
The record b/w Pakistan and India, playing in the sub continent speaks for itself. I think Pakistan will win the series (they also know they have to walk out of the stadium alive). All we need is some strength in our batting, our speedsters will do the rest.
p.s. I know some farigh ppl will get pissed on the above prediction, dont start crying, its merely my prediction, you are welcome to state your own.
welll indian team confidence is at peak after beating australia ....but fact is indian team is betta in batting but pakis have advantage in bowling shoaib sami shabbir(bowling very well nowadays) danish r much better then indian own countries lion.......we cannot say who will win but we can say it will be the best series of 2004...good luck for paki team hope pakis will blow them out of the world...pak rulz
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by a1kashur: *
just remember Shoaib and Sami in your prayers.
[/QUOTE]
Just like New Zealand Batsmen :)
Did Shoaib play against New Zealand? 
May the better side win!
I remember some 6-7 years ago once while waiting for the bus to go home from school, i was standing next to a paan shop. Coupla guys at the shop were talking about how Pakistan beat India in one of the matches at the Sahara Cup that was going on in toronto those days.
"Yaar dunya may koee nahi haiy pakistan kay khilaaRio jaisa. India ki maa behn aik kardi"
Next day, same spot, same two guys. Only difference was that that morning Pakistan had lost to India.
"Yaar haraamkhor paisa khaatay hain raan din"
Talk about reasoning! As for media attention, its true we cannot be naive about the fact that Kaneria would be under added pressure by the public. By the way when is the series scheduled for?
^ Februray 2004
I think you are very right our people unfortunatly(spelled wrong) our people are hypocrytes, I mean dont get me wrong I will break some1s face if they ever said that to me, but i have a valid reason to say that. When ever pakistan win we treat our crickiters as kings and when they lose we call for their heads even though i do think they do take money some times. I live in US and it snows here a lot and i told my dad 1 day taht if it ever snowed this much in Pakistan everyone would stay home let the snow melt instead of going out and shoveling it. They would just say huqumat kuch nahi karti sirf paisa khatey hain or kursi pe bhete hain ( that is also true some gov officials are corrupt often). But I am still proud to be a Pakistani hypocrite or not!
Sadly I think that unless Shoaib has a special series and Sami also chips in we will lose to India. For the first time in my life (I been following cricket since 1982) India has a better test team than Pakistan overall...
The only chance for us to win is for Shoaib to destroy them with his express pace...if he plays we will win...if he is injured (again!) we will not.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Asif: *
Sadly I think that unless Shoaib has a special series and Sami also chips in we will lose to India. For the first time in my life (I been following cricket since 1982) India has a better test team than Pakistan overall...
The only chance for us to win is for Shoaib to destroy them with his express pace...if he plays we will win...if he is injured (again!) we will not.
[/QUOTE]
I agree.
^I dont. I do not think Shoaib's form will be as critical factor as Pakistan's batting. Pak's bowling (even without Akhtar) will be better than India's. If the Paki batsmen come good... it will be game, set and match for Pak.
This is very intresting Article.
http://www-usa.cricket.org/db/ARCHIVE/CRICKET_NEWS/2003/DEC/027077_WCM_22DEC2003.html
** India v Pakistan - A unique rivalry **
*
India and Pakistan have played only 47 Tests against each other in 51 years. As they prepare to re-engage in the Test arena Mukul Kesavan explores the background to this unique rivalry
*
This is a history of men taking sides. India and Pakistan have been playing cricket against each other for more than 50 years, 51 to be exact. The first Test was played at Delhi in October 1952. Half a century is a good round number, favoured by historians, but a deceptive one in this instance; for nearly half this time the two countries have pointedly not played cricket with each other.
After a decade of tense but mainly tedious Test matches (12 of which were drawn), India and Pakistan did not meet for 17 years between 1961 and 1978. Then, after 21 years of normal cricketing relations, India retired to its tent after the World Cup in 1999, refusing to do battle on the cricket pitch with a country that, they thought, covertly sponsored war and bloody militancy across the border in Kashmir. Since then the two countries have played no Tests and no one-day matches on home soil, though they have played each other at the shorter version of the game in the World Cup and there has recently been an announcement that the two countries will resume playing Tests against each other in the spring of 2004.
It is hard to find a parallel for this fraught on-off relationship within the world of cricket. The Australia-England rivalry does not have the same nationalistic edge. While cricketing encounters between Australia and New Zealand bear a family resemblance to the India-Pakistan matches, this is to mistake sibling rivalry for fratricidal rage.
The reason India-Pakistan matches are different is because they are fuelled by an old-fashioned dispute between sovereign nations over land. The whiff of grapeshot that attends these encounters has a 19th-century smell: blood debts, blood lust and revanchism. Serbia playing Bosnia or Croatia at football might raise feelings that parallel the India-Pakistan encounter. Perhaps one way of grasping the intensity of feeling that informs matches between India and Pakistan is to think of them as Balkan contests on a subcontinental scale. Partition pogroms (conservatively a million dead), wars and a vicious dispute over Kashmir make every match between the countries a way of settling other, bloodier scores.
The way India-Pakistan matches are followed and supported is interesting. No one under the age of 50 in India (and India’s cricket fans are mostly under 50) has first-hand memories of the first period of India-Pakistan cricket between 1952 and 1961. They were too young to have followed those tours and, when they were old enough, there were no India-Pakistan Tests to follow. The Indians and Pakistanis who gather round their television sets now might be familiar with the great names of that time – Kardar, Fazal Mahmood, Hanif Mohammad, Hazare, Manjrekar, Mankad – but those names stir no nostalgia, no childhood images of mornings spent queuing to watch these great men play. The fans who follow India-Pakistan cricket watch it in a state of frenzy, their partisanship unleavened by the affection that memory usually brings.
This is not to say that the early Tests between these countries were festivals of generous camaraderie. The reason 12 out of the first 15 Tests were drawn was not only that the teams were evenly matched; as important was the terror of losing to this intimate enemy. **Even before the first formal war between the two countries in 1965 playing Pakistan was a fraught business for an Indian, especially if that Indian was also a Muslim. Mihir Bose in his History of Indian Cricket recalls the blighted career of Abbas Ali Baig. Baig had first played for India against England in 1959. He scored a century in his first Test and was promptly hailed as Indian batting’s new hope. He even made the headlines when a girl kissed him out in the middle after he completed his second fifty of the Bombay Test against Australia the following year. In his next four innings he made 1, 13, 19 and 1. Given that he had made a century and two fifties in his first eight Tests, he might have survived this run of low scores in the normal course; but this was not the normal course, this was Pakistan and he was an Indian Muslim. According to Bose, “the fantastic allegation was made that Baig had failed deliberately to help his co-religionists from Pakistan. This was monstrously untrue but he received poison-pen letters, was dropped and played only two more Tests, six years later, against West Indies.”
Decades later Baig’s captain and friend, Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, asked Asif Iqbal, the Pakistan captain touring India, a wicked question before the television cameras. He asked Asif if he planned to switch countries again. Asif Iqbal had played first-class cricket for Hyderabad, Pataudi’s first-class team, before migrating to Pakistan. For someone like Pataudi, a Muslim, who like his father, Iftikhar Ali Khan Pataudi, had captained India, Asif’s move would have seemed at the time like a defection that bore out the bigots who claimed all Muslims in India were Pakistani fifth columnists at heart. Asif, ambushed by a question that he must have thought gratuitous, to his credit smiled and declared himself content with his Pakistani state.
**
Tense and difficult though these matches were for the players, the Indians and Pakistanis who watched them were cricket fans first and nationalists later. Cricket was a popular sport but not yet a mass market enterprise. To follow the game you had to buy relatively expensive tickets (they cost three or four times as much as a ticket to the cinema) and invest days of your time watching Test matches. The other alternative was to follow matches on the radio which required some imagination. The wars of 1965 and 1971, Pakistani bitterness about India’s hand in the creation of Bangladesh, Indian bitterness about Pakistan’s role in creating sedition and secessionism in Kashmir, the transformation of cricket into mass spectacle via television and limited-overs contests, all this still lay in the future. Cricket was popular but also oddly genteel. Ramachandra Guha in his marvellous history of Indian cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field, describes the almost courtly goodwill that characterised the early tours. Five years after partition Abdul Hafeez Kardar, the captain of Pakistan, a man ideologically committed to the concept of an Islamic state, could commend Indian spectators for their generosity and fairness after Pakistan’s first Test series in India, a series that his fledgling team lost two matches to one. When the Indians toured Pakistan in their turn, the president of the Indian board, the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram, reciprocated by praising the “clean good sport” that had characterised the series. So, while a proper sense of solidarity joined Indians and Pakistanis to their teams, the venomous hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s had to wait upon events and technology.
The matches India and Pakistan played from 1978 onwards, were, thanks to television, transformed into national spectacles. For the first time in the subcontinent’s cricket history millions of people with no interest in cricket but a vested interest in seeing the old enemy humbled by their champions were drawn into watching on black-and-white television sets.
Indians have always been susceptible to the broadcast word. An Indian radio commentator once set off arson and rioting in Calcutta’s Eden Gardens by suggesting on air that an Indian batsman had been unfairly given out. Now television’s growing reach and immediacy created huge national audiences that followed these contests squealing, yelping, exulting and mourning, ball-by-ball, in massive unison.
When in 1978-79 the Indian team led by Bishan Bedi was comfortably beaten 2–0 by Mushtaq Mohammad’s Pakistan, it could be properly described as a national humiliation because for the first time there was a nation watching. When Pakistan toured a year later, and Imran Khan did his hamstring early in the second Test, the Indian audience exhaled in relief. Thanks partly to Imran’s limited availability for the rest of the tour, the Indian team won the series and the nation was avenged. Years later during the Calcutta Test in 1998-99, when Tendulkar was run out at the bowler’s end after colliding with the bowler, Shoaib Akhtar, millions of Indians sulked alongside Tendulkar, then watched helplessly as Pakistan went on to win and take the series in front of an empty Eden Gardens, cleared of its rowdy, rioting crowd.