Aussie strategy for Bhajji?

Ricky Ponting, Australian cricket captain, recently said that Harbhajan Singh will be a dangerous bowler against Australia. Really? IMHO, this is a fine new strategy from Ponting to ensure that the ex-turbanator remains in the Indian cricket team.

These days, batsmen from opposing team are hardly threatened by his bowling. He cannot take wickets and he cannot give less than 4 runs a over in ODIs these days. His bowling is flat. He will not take risk of giving flight. There is no turn. Then what exactly is he doing in the team? Today, young Jadeja was bowling infinitely better than him. For the last several months the only thing that Bhajji has been achieving is preventing other spinners from getting into the Indian team. 

And all the selectors can do is show Dravid the door. I am sure if Dravid is needed to bowl, he will bowl exactly what his team needs. And that would be the difference between him and Bhajji.


P.S. - I guess Bhajji made up for his bad bowling by brilliant batting and courage in today's ODI. He can certainly do some transfer of courage to the bowler part in him.

Collective maturity of Indian cricketers

After yesterday's win against New Zealand, as expected, the Indian media went ga-ga over how this team is the mightiest team after that of General Eisenhower. Media simply chose to skip the part where our batting was showing signs of collapse until Raina and Dhoni saved the day.

Anyway, the win apart...following reactions from various players, on being the number 1 team, convinced me that someone in the management or team leadership is also thinking on managing media:

Dhoni's reaction - We want to play well. Good ranking follows good performance.
Yuvraj - We need to maintain it.
Nehra - South Africa is not playing now. That is why we are there. Once they play it will become competitive.

Very very well thought out. Various voices, same message. That is how organizations should operate, especially in PR matters. It was impressive media handling.

On the field, the team looked rusty to me. We won sure, but fielding was a problem. Bowlers were the saving grace. Dravid needs to get back to ODI mode quickly.

Miscellaneous and interesting

Interesting news clips I found today -

1) First news from USA where AT&T gets rid of a part of its message when routing call to the Voicemail. Now this is interesting because it reduces close to 5 seconds of call time for every call forwarded to voicemail. Towards customer delight...

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/att-relents-drops-paging-instructions-from-voicemail/


2) Next refer to Strategist section of this week's Business Standard on State Bank of India. The article tells a lot about how the current SBI chief, Mr. O P Bhatt, is strategizing the turnaround of SBI and within SBI.

I had written my experience some days ago. After reading the article, I wonder if SBI employees aligned to its goals? It does not seem so.

I agree the load in branches is massive but there has to be some operations strategy. For example, one thing to adopt is give the customer everything that is needed to keep him/her out of the branch like passbook, ATM card, online access, IVRS number etc. I can tell every customer has to visit at least 3-4 times to just get all this.

The article also has an interesting discussion on SBI Home Loan rates and possibility of a smaller version of subprime crisis.

Check out the article, very interesting read (a little long though).
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/are-you-being-served/369333/


3) Next - Nortel's fire sale - Nortel's Enterprise business goes under the hammer tomorrow.

http://www.allaboutnortel.com/2009/09/08/details-about-fridays-enterprise-auction/

4) Sports - Hurray to Vijender for ensuring that medal for India. And another hurray to Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi who have both reached finals of US Open. Whoever wins, we will be proud of both of them. Hurray to Pankaj Advani as well. It is heartening to see India perform well in such competitions.