Best 161 quotes in «cricket quotes» category

For once cricket has claimed you, it never lets you go

He has played some outstanding innings in the past, and I've got no [sic] confidence whatsoever that he'll come back and play very well in the near future.

Hell! His beard grows fast as blazes, like a damp wicket in springtime sun, green, and Rachel's skin is so fine, his bristles can score her red the way a new ball marks a bat, English alum on English unbleached willow, finest quality, special selection, Rachel-grade. Zach, my man, you have cricket on the brain! Thomas has asked him to play on Sunday. Bring Rachel, he said. Thomas 'All Souls' Aubry, gentleman, corinthian at heart, and half French yet more English than a true-born.

He looked at me with a smile that I still remember and ran a finger along his impeccably trimmed mustache. “Cricket is about a lot more than playing by the rules, Mistry. It’s a gentleman’s game. Don’t you ever forget that.

He glances down and notices that I'm still wearing a certain blue something, and, this time, it's HIS index finger that wraps underneath MY rubber band. I shiver wonderfully. "I'm never taking it off." Cricket brushes the delicate skin of my wrist. "It'll fall off." "I'll ask you for another one." "I'll give you another one." He smiles and touches his nose to mine.

Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can't play it here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Culler broke a window in the Kildare street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M'Carthy took the floor. Heatwave. Won't last. Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.

He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball.

If a cigarette butt in the bottom of a beer bottle had a voice it would be the voice of Phil Tufnell.

[I]f Modi is toast, it will in one sense be a tremendous pity. In his way, he represents a third generation in cricket's governance. For a hundred years and more, cricket was run by administrators, who essentially maintained the game without going out of their way to develop it. More recently it has been run by managers, with just an ounce or two of strategic thought. Modi was neither; he was instead a genuine entrepreneur. He has as much feeling for cricket as Madonna has for madrigals, but perhaps, because he came from outside cricket's traditional bureaucratic circles, he brought a vision and a common touch unexampled since Kerry Packer.

I felt that they are mentally retarded people. There is a mental problem with our players. They don't know how to wear their clothes and how to talk in a civilized manner.

I left home and tried to live the life of a hermit, but I was still fighting myself. I went to England and worked as a chainman on the road. It was better therapy than the shrinks. Building a two-mile road gave me internal peace.

Heroes in fact die with one's youth. They are pinned like butterflies to the setting board of early memories—the time when skies were always blue, the sun shone and the air was filled with the sounds and scents of grass being cut. I find myself still as desperate to read the Sussex score in the stop-press as ever I was; but I no longer worship heroes, beings for whom the ordinary scales of human values are inadequate. One learns that as one grows up, so do the gods grow down. It is in many ways a pity: for one had thought that heroes had no problems of their own. Now one knows different!

I made a deal with sharks. I don't swim near them and they don't play cricket.

If proof were needed that statistics alone are not enough in establishing value, then VT Trumper is that proof.

In an area so reliant on opinion there is also the matter of received opinion to consider. The old turkey of the innate beauty of left handers is probably a result of the rarer days for ‘cack-handers’ when Frank Woolley bestrode the shires on both sides of World War I. After a long gap, his mantle was languidly accepted in England by David Gower. But for every Woolley there was a Mead and for every Gower a Trescothick as if to balance the equation and bury the turkey.

In cricket- be fit, be alert and be Sachin.

Independence Day, July 4th, or as I know it: The end of the USA cricket league!

I'm not into caps with lots of diamonds on them, like KP.

In any game, the game itself is the prize, no matter who wins, ultimately both lose the game.

Indian cricket, and the youngsters themselves, are dealing with issues inconceivable a few summers ago. Riches and all the attendant temptations are thrown at them before they have started shaving regularly. It's not their fault. It's no one's fault. That is the marketplace. Inevitably, though, it can distract attention from the long struggle towards mastery. Cricket does not give itself away; it expects players to apply themselves, to think and study and seek. It plays tricks, too, pretends that sixes and slower balls and the other shortcuts matter. Cricket sets traps, flatters players and calls them kings when they are barely princes.

One down, fifteen to go.

Nearly 30 years since his only tour of Australia, mention of Tavaré still occasions winces and groans. Despite its continental lilt, his name translates into Australian as a very British brand of obduracy, that Trevor Baileyesque quality of making every ditch a last one.

Sachin plays not only to be remembered but also to be repeated.

One keeps looking out for innovation in IPL, but of late it hasn't been all that obvious. Lionel Richie as an opening act? Johnny Mathis must have been busy. Matthew Hayden's Mongoose? Looks a bit like Bob Willis' bat with the "flow-through holes"; Saint Peter batting mitts are surely overdue a revival. The only genuinely intriguing step this year, bringing the IPL to YouTube, was forced on Modi by the collapse of Setanta; otherwise what Modi presents as 'innovation' is merely expansion by another name, in the number of franchises and the number of games.

Rob Green needed to get the long barrier out, didn't he?

Sachin's pedal sweep confirmed that physical conditions and age cannot stop you from hitting boundaries.

Sambit Bal may be right that this is a scandal the IPL needed. It certainly brings fans face-to-face with the tangled reality of their amusement, based as it is on a self-seeking, self-perpetuating commercial oligarchy issued licenses to exploit cricket as they please. Whether the fans care is another matter: one of the reasons Indians have embraced economic liberalisation so fervently is a shoulder-shrugging resignation about the efficiency and integrity of their institutions. Given the choice between Lalit Modi, with his snappy suits and his soi-disant 'Indian People's League', and the BCCI, stuffed with grandstanding politicians and crony capitalists, where would your loyalties lie?

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Scores give better decision than judges.

I thought back to all the times I’d slept with a girl and not thought twice about it and my gut ached. If a girl doesn’t safeguard herself, who will? I’d always had the mentality that men will change when women change but I never thought about how safeguarding the girls around me was just as much my responsibility as it was theirs.

Sachin is passionate for cricket and fame is passionate for Sachin.

Sachin is a genius in the world of cricket leaving behind all those who are only talented and intelligent.

Sachin has infinite capacity for taking pains and still making runs.

Sachin's straight drive is like fired bullet from most efficient gun.

Since inception, the IPL has worn its brand value like a corroboration of inner virtue. On the eve of this tournament, under the headline 'Brand IPL touches the sky', the league's website reverberated with the announcement that Brand Finance, a branding consultancy, had valued the brand value of the IPL brand at $4.13 billion worth of brand—which is a lot of brand, brand-wise.

Since Modi's Mumbai sign-off, much commentary has been focused on the brand-dilution potential inherent in its scandals. MS Dhoni doesn't think we should worry: 'IPL as a brand can survive on its own.' Shilpa Shetty, 'brand ambassador' of the Rajasthan Royals, tweets that we should: 'Custodians of Cricket must not hamper d Brandvalue of this viable sport.' Hampering d Brandvalue, insists new IPL boss Chirayu Amin, is the furthest thing from his mind: 'IPL's brand image is strong and nobody can touch that.' Harsha Bhogle, however, frets for the nation: 'Within the cricket world, Brand India will take a hit.' Not much more than a week after Modi's first tell-all tweets, the media was anxiously consulting Brand Finance's managing director, Unni Krishnan. Had there been any brand dilution yet? It was, said the soothsayer gravely, 'too early to say'. He could, however, confirm the following: 'The wealth that can be created by the brand is going to be substantially significant for many stakeholders. A conducive ecosystem has to be created to move the brand to the next level… We have to build the requisite bandwidth to monetise these opportunities.' Er, yeah… what he said. Anyway, placing a value on the IPL brand has clearly been quite beneficial to Brand Finance's brand.

Sports leads the country to unity; politics leads the country to diversity.

Tavaré played 30 Tests for England between 1980 and 1984, adding a final cap five years later. He filled for much of that period the role of opening batsman, even though the bulk of his first-class career was spent at Nos. 3 and 4. He was, in that sense, a typical selection in a period of chronic English indecision and improvisation, filling a hole rather than commanding a place. But he tried—how he tried. Ranji once spoke of players who 'went grey in the service of the game'; Tavaré, slim, round-shouldered, with a feint moustache, looked careworn and world-weary from the moment he graduated to international cricket.

Thank you for helping my sister,” he says. I lean forward, mimicking his position. “I’m happy to.” Calliope leans out her window. “STOP FLIRTING AND GET BACK TO WORK.

The Aussies have spent so much time basking in the glory of the last generation that they have forgotten to plan for this one. It's just like the West Indies again; once their great names from the 1970s and 80s retired, the whole thing fell apart. The way things are going, the next Ashes series cannot come too quickly for England. What a shame that we have to wait until 2013 to play this lot again.

Some years ago I adjourned with a friend to a nearby schoolyard net for a recreational hit. On the way, we exchanged philosophies of cricket, and a few personal partialities. What, my friend asked, did I consider my favourite shot? 'Easy,' I replied ingenuously. 'Back-foot defensive stroke.' My friend did a double take and demanded a serious response. When I informed him he'd had one, he scoffed: 'You'll be telling me that Chris Tavaré's your favourite player next.' My guilty hesitation gave me away. 'You Poms!' he protested. 'You all stick together!

Thanks to technology, the future generation will be able to see Sachin's recorded innings and will accept that our generation was most lucky.

The assumption now is that the interests of the brand and of the game overlap to the degree that cricket need hardly be mentioned.

The IPL, involving the socialist principle of a salary cap and the protectionist mechanism of quotas, is not perhaps the best example of a market left flourishingly to its own devices and dynamics.

The minute you hesitate you are in trouble.

The captains of England and Australia can barely exchange pleasantries these days without a body-language expert immediately declaiming on the angle of their handshakes.

There's a lot of good things about England, but I don't want to tell you too many of them.

The risk is, as ever, that the hyperbole of IPL will simply smother the cricket; perhaps the members of the IPL's cheer squad should stop listening to each other and start listening to themselves.

The Top Spin would raise a glass to Rudi Koertzen, the popular veteran South African umpire who will stand in his 107th and final Test when Pakistan meet Australia at Headingley in July [2010]. But we're slightly worried about being misunderstood. A few years back, in a light-hearted series of profiles of the elite umpires for a newspaper supplement, we suggested Rudi was a 'sociable' character who enjoyed spending a no-more-than-inordinate amount of time at the '19th hole'. Cue a concerned phonecall from the ICC, who wanted to register Rudi's displeasure at the implication. Whoops. Presumably it will be orange juices all round when he finally hangs up the white coat.

Two examples of true love are love between mother and child and love between Sachin and cricket.